The Ex-Factor!- HR Practices

Key learnings:

Corporate alumni programmes help organisations re-recruit employees with much greater ease

In case of sales-driven organisations these boomerang programmes offer the recruiting advantage and also give a major boost to the business by providing competitive intelligence

The economic recession is exerting pressure on organisations from all sides. Managers and leaders cannot stretch even an inch and therefore layoffs and indiscriminate delayering of the staff is rampant. As a result of layoffs and corporate delayering there has been a significant talent exodus into the corporate talent pool. There is enough talent floating around in the market and therefore, today may be the best time for organisations seeking to recruit employees.

Unfortunately not many are in a position to recruit. For preserving floating talent and keeping it in the active sourcing loop organisations are considering increasingly formal corporate alumni programmes. These programmes help maintain mutually beneficial relationship with ex-employees and others in the market.

The "boomerang programme" as it is called underscores the need to stay in touch with employees. They could spring back into the organisational fold with much greater ease. Also it saves the organisation and the employee a lot of effort and time. Re-recruiting people under the boomerang programme is much simpler as compared to starting afresh with the entire recruiting process. Besides recruiting benefits of the corporate alumni programme, there are other more business-oriented advantages. For instance, in case of sales- related jobs, re-recruiting sales people would not only save the organisation recruiting efforts but would also provide the added advantage that comes by virtue of the number of contacts that the sales executives would bring. Thus, corporate alumni programmes provide multi-dimensional benefits to organisations.

Back to the pavilion!

Employees are the best brand -builders for organisations. The "word of mouth" publicity that the staff give its employer is beyond the best marketing and brand positioning strategy. Hence, it is extremely important that organisations if not for humane reasons but for the sake of pure economics treat employees well and implement lay-offs amicably. This apart, there are other reasons that justify the need to pursue corporate alumni programmes. The reasons are both HR- related as well as business -related, and these include:

Reduction in recruiting costs Lowered employee change Greater employee satisfaction levels Better brand -building by re-recruiting ex-employees

In addition to the HR--oriented reasons for pursuing corporate alumni programmes, there are equally convincing economic justifications for the programmes. These include: Increase in the number of customer referrals

Enhancement of customer base by turning ex-employees into customers Leveraging competitive intelligence from employees

Inputs for product assessment

Thus, the aforementioned reasons make a rather convincing case for organisations to pursue formal corporate alumni programmes.

The mark of an effective boomerang

The following attributes make corporate alumni programme a success and represent the
worth of pursuing a corporate alumni programme:

A strategic business tool

HR leaders must build a strong business case around the alumni programme. Corporate stalwarts like Mc Kinsey Consulting, Booz Allen Hamilton and Ernst & Young have been known to position their alumni networking efforts more strategically thereby giving it a more serious feel. Leaders must shun the "HR fad" image of important initiatives like alumni networking to leverage its real benefits.

Prioritise alumni

Effective alumni programmes prioritise alumni on the basis of their performance record. This helps quicken the recruiting efforts of organisations and it enables managers to identify the right talent without wasting much time and effort

Tech -savvy

Effective alumni programmes use technological platforms to ease out the process. Unlike earlier when excel spreadsheets were used to maintain employee data base, today's technology is more advanced. The programmes use customer-relationship management software to accomplish the same job.

Leverage social networks

Alumni programmes must leverage public and private social networks to expand their scope. Social networks are by far the richest source of knowledge, information and contacts. Hence, leveraging this source can help boost the effectiveness of alumni programmes.

Use of an effective measurement tool

The efficacy of corporate alumni programmes needs to be adjudged at regular intervals. This would help the efforts stay in the right direction. Without an effective metrics system managers would fail to improvise the existing approach to alumni networking.

Incorporate alumni networking efforts in the onboarding programme

Organisations must familiarise employees about their alumni networking efforts right in the beginning . making this information a part of their onboarding exercise. Awareness about this programme would help employees feel more secure and enhance employee loyalty.

While the economic slump may have got depressing, probe deeper and you will see an opportunity. Making the most of this opportunity is a matter of choice, for those who leverage it, the possibilities are endless!

Ref: TheManageMentor

Rebalancing Gender

Women represent the majority of educated talent in today's knowledge economy. From Arkansas to Abu Dhabi, the majority of university graduates are women: 60 percent in the U.S. and Europe, 60 percent in Iran and 70 percent in the United Arab Emirates. Yet, many organizations still treat them as one minority among many, missing the opportunity to leverage women as a potent economic force.

Most companies recognize this. They launch diversity programs but readily acknowledge gender is their top priority. Women represent not just a significant percent of available talent; they make 80 percent of purchasing decisions about consumer goods. Research indicates companies with more women on the board and in key positions are more profitable, making talent, markets and performance three key drivers behind a renewed interest in gender.Companies often approach gender as an intractable problem. For many organizations and managers, it is an issue they have focused on for decades with relatively unsatisfactory results: too few women in senior positions, too few women on the board and too few women in law firm or consulting firm partnerships.

Diversity leaders often repeat and amplify approaches that have had a limited impact in the past. Typically, companies that want to launch initiatives to improve gender balance in management and leadership benchmark to see what peer organizations have done. But no company has really cracked this issue. Only a hard-to-find handful in a few geographies actually has women at the top and a well-stocked pipeline of female talent.

Companies follow others' best practices even when proof of efficacy is not present. They organize women's conferences, create women's networks, offer women leadership training and coaching, get them to work extra hard - usually in their spare time - to prepare recommendations on how to improve the situation. It's Gender 101 in most American companies, and the class is increasingly being exported internationally. In this fix-the-women approach, the underlying - if unexpressed - assumption is women are not making it to the top of the corporate world because they can't, don't have what it takes or don't want to.

Consider a quote from Olivier Marchal, managing director of Bain & Co. in France: "In improving gender balance women may hold the keys, but men still control the locks." Men have been uninvolved in the gender conversation for too long. Without them, progress on rebalancing gender will be stalled for many more years.

Where We're Going: 'Fix the Managers'

To impact gender balance, diversity leaders must ask the right people, the right questions. Rather than ask women why they are not being promoted, ask the people doing the promoting. Rather than get women to devise strategies to improve gender balance, why not get both genders involved in the analysis and implementation of action plans?

Rather than expect women to adopt the current pyramidal business model to move up, why not question the relevance of the model in today's business landscape and get women to help redesign it for a 21st-century world? That requires starting at the top, usually by spending a day with the executive committee.

Most executive committees are neither convinced nor aligned around a business case for gender balance. They are largely unaware of the impressive statistics on women's economic power as employees and customers. And when they are aware, these numbers are not always presented in a convincing way - despite the different degrees of potential impact on the bottom line - or they have been part of more global briefings on diversity that drowns the message.

The (usually male) executive committee members rarely have been asked to debate or analyze the issue, and unless there is some form of experiential buy-in at this level, little progress will be made. Spend a half or a full day with these teams in sessions that can then be rolled out to their direct reports and key executive and managerial populations. Only companies willing to invest in building gender bilingualism among their leaders are in a realistic position to implement the change-management mentality around gender as a business issue that is required to make real, sustainable progress.

The CEO should be involved and challenge group members to air their views honestly. Political correctness can be the death of the gender dialogue. They will chew through the numbers, review their internal realities and debate the issue and its strategic relevance for their organizations. They should get expert input into gender differences and how to manage them. Then craft the action plan, complete with defined objectives, timetables and accountability, and commit to it. If they don't have the time, or decide it's not a priority, don't bother. Nonstrategic gender initiatives do as much harm as good.

Sessions can include men and women but currently are dominated by men in most corporate leadership positions. The gender mix brings added depth to the debate but is not essential to reach the key objective: to get today's leaders to understand the gender issue and to define how significant a priority it is for their businesses. These sessions have three major objectives:

Objective No. 1:

Find out who cares. In most companies, the CEO reaching out for help achieving gender balance is personally convinced of the need to move forward and create impact at the top. The CEO usually is convinced his executive committee team is aligned behind him. But the gender issue often is either mired in political correctness or seen as a minor HR issue, so the real pros and cons of rebalancing gender rarely have been debated at this level. Dissent has never been aired, and alignment among the leadership team often is simply assumed.

Alignment is rarely evident. Wanting to believe everyone agrees on gender balance is a significant barrier to actually implementing the required changes. So the first exercise is to conduct a quick, confidential vote. Ask each executive committee member to write on a Post-It the priority level they would give to the gender issue as a business issue for their company in the next five years on a scale of one to 10. The numbers usually range across the board. Within two minutes of starting, diversity leaders can establish the key reason a company has made little progress on this issue: Its leaders don't agree that it should.

Objective No. 2:

Look at the data. Review the statistics. Do the external ones first: the reality of a shifting talent pool, customer profiles, demographic pressures and differentiated academic achievements. Then do internal ones: Contrast the significant, sometimes revolutionary, external evolutions with a company's internal statistics and progress over time.

Data will tell its own story. The tale is not that of the oft-cited glass ceiling, with its assumption that women make it up through the ranks until a sudden blockage at a senior level. The reality in today's corporate world is the percentage of women drops off at almost every grade level.The glass ceiling metaphor has blinded diversity leaders to a more pervasive problem - what we call "gender asbestos." Behind the metaphors, the reality is companies have not yet adapted their cultures, career paths, processes and promotions to the reality of 21st-century talent and markets. They still are not identifying, retaining and promoting female talent, despite decades spent trying. Most of the members of the executive committee likely have never looked at this data in detail or been asked whether it would impact their business.

So ask them. A simple SWOT exercise is enough. Ask the team to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of their company in rebalancing gender in leadership. They are likely all familiar with the process. They've just never applied it to gender. And when they do, the experiential part of the learning comes into play.The learning comes not only from the debate among themselves about the data's significance and whether they should care about it. The real learning comes when the mostly male members of the team hear their colleagues' positions on the topic. In a half-hour exercise, it becomes intensely clear and unavoidably visible what each individual thinks of gender, how comfortable they are discussing the issue - let alone leading on it - and which of three typical segments they fall into: progressive, patient or plodding.

Nothing is more impactful for the progressives in the room than to hear a group of plodding colleagues use arguments they thought had disappeared a generation ago. It usually is a strong wake up call for the CEO and goes a long way to explain lack of progress and the reality of the challenge that lies ahead.

Objective No. 3:

Make a plan. The day usually concludes with some form of action planning. The usual reaction is to hand gender-balance initiatives over to the company's most senior woman to lead. But in organizations in which the leadership is dominated by men, it is more effective to appoint a male leader to this topic. After all, the issue moving forward along this approach is to convince men they are part of the change-management process in rebalancing gender.

Once the executive committee has been through this kind of workshop, it likely will agree it needs to be rolled out to executives and managers. The feedback - a combination of awareness building, strategic planning and pragmatic proposals for action - is a potent case for progress.

Rebalancing gender in leadership does not require a decades-long investment in training and coaching women to adopt behaviors more acceptable to the dominant norm. Instead, it invites the dominant norm to better understand why its interests lie in optimizing the talents and opportunities of women and how to manage more "bilingually" across genders. That when real progress can begin.

21st-Century Approaches to Achieve Gender Balance

a) Start by getting the executive committee and CEO to understand the issue.

b) Position it a business issue, not a women's issue.

c) Get top management to design/approve an action plan.

d) Appoint a high-profile senior man to run the gender initiative.

e) Position gender outside of diversity, preferably outside of HR.

f) Think of women as a majority.

g) Train men (and women) how to manage "bilingually" across genders.

Traditional Approaches

a) Position gender as a part of wider diversity initiatives.

b) Call gender initiatives "Women in Leadership," clearly positioning it as women's issue, not a business issue.

c) Think of women as a minority.

d) Appoint a woman to run the gender issue.

e) Create a women's network as the key initiative.

f) Ask women for proposals to improve gender balance.

g) Promote women, as long as they behave as much like men as possible

[About the Author: Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is CEO of 20-first, a European gender consultancy and co-author of Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of Our Next Economic Revolution.]

Leadership Vs Management

Management and leadership are different but complementary, and that in a changing world, one cannot function without the other. Managers promote stability while leaders press for change, and only organizations that embrace both sides of that contradiction can thrive in turbulent times.

As per John Kotter- Leaders don't make plans; they don't solve problems; they don't even organize people. What leaders really do is prepare organizations for change and help them cope as they struggle through it

Leadership isn't mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having "charisma" or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it. Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment.

Most corporations today are over managed or under led. They need to develop their capacity to exercise leadership. Successful corporations don’t wait for leaders to come along. They actively seek out people with leadership potential and expose them to career experiences designed to develop that

With careful selection, nurturing, and encouragement, dozens of people can play important leadership roles in a business organization. But while improving leadership ability to lead, companies should remember that strong leadership with weak management is no better, and is sometimes actually worse, than the reverse. The real challenge is to combine strong leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other.

Of course, not everyone can be good at both leading and managing. Some people have the capacity to become excellent managers but not strong leaders. Others have great leadership potential but, for a variety of reasons, have great difficulty becoming strong managers. Smart companies value both kinds of people and work hard to make them a part of the team.

But when it comes to preparing people for executive jobs, such companies rightly ignore the recent literature that says people cannot manage and lead. They try to develop leader-managers. Once companies understand the difference between leadership and management, they can begin to groom their top people to provide both The Difference between Management and Leadership Management is about coping with complexity. Its practices and procedures are largely a response to one of the most significant developments of the twentieth century: the emergence of large organizations. Without good management, complex enterprises tend to become chaotic in ways that threaten their very existence. Management is about coping with Complexity. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change.

These two different functions–coping with complexity and coping with change, shape the characteristic activities of management and leadership. Each system of action involves deciding what needs to be done, creating networks of people and relationships that can accomplish an agenda, and then trying to ensure that those people actually do the job. But each accomplishes these three tasks in different ways.

Companies manage complexity first by planning and budgeting-settmg targets or goals for the future (typically for the next month or year), establishing detailed steps for achieving those targets, and then allocating resources to accomplish those plans. By contrast, leading an organization to constructive change begins by setting a direction, developing a vision of the future (often the distant future) along with strategies for producing the changes needed to achieve that vision. Management develops the capacity to achieve its plan by organizing and-creating an organizational structure and set of jobs for accomplishing plan requirements, staffing the jobs with qualified individuals, communicating the plan to those people, delegating responsibility for carrying out the plan, and devising systems to monitor implementation. The equivalent leadership activity, however, is aligning people. This means communicating the new direction to those who can create coalitions that understand the vision and are committed to its achievement. Finally, management ensures plan accomplishment by controlling and problem solving, monitoring results versus the plan in some detail, both formally and informally, by means of reports, meetings, and other tools; identifying deviations; and then planning and organizing to solve the problems. But for leadership, achieving a vision requires motivating and inspiring-keeping people moving in the right direction, despite major obstacles to change, by appealing to basic but often untapped human needs, values, and emotions.

A closer examination of each of these activities will help clarify the skills leaders need.

*John Kotter