Managing Talent

by Marion Devine

  This is a fundamental rule of thumb for aspiring senior managers even when it is not appreciated by the organisation. The one thing that marked out the managers interviewed for this book with a successful track record of career success was their willingness to be opportunistic and take risks.

  Rain Newton-Smith, head of emerging markets at Oxford Economics and in 2012 named as one of the World Economic Forum’s “Young Global Leaders”, took full advantage of the potentially risky opportunities she was presented with. First, she accepted a role as economic adviser to Sir Richard Lambert when he was one of the nine members of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, which sets UK interest rates. Second, she accepted a secondment to the IMF because she wanted to focus her career on analysing emerging economies. In both cases, the decisions brought risks. As she explains:

  When I went to the job as adviser to Richard Lambert, that was seen as a risky move because I had the potential to follow the very traditional Bank of England route of taking internal jobs and working my way up the hierarchy. I chose instead a job where I wouldn’t have the same support structure but had the potential for a hugely rewarding role.

  It did really pay off and then the opportunity for the secondment to the IMF came up when I had only been in the job as an adviser for a year. You are visible in those roles and setting up the roles of external advisers had created tensions between the internal and the external members of the Monetary Policy Committee.

  There was still a bit of a fall-out from that. But I went into it saying this is ridiculous, we were all working essentially towards the same goal and this is the way I am going to tackle this. I think that straightforward approach worked. Also it was a job I really enjoyed. Jobs you enjoy, you do well.

  Newton-Smith’s philosophy is that you should grab opportunities when they come your way:

  What people really value is individuals who have worked in different places. If you don’t take these opportunities, you never know what might happen to you further down the line. For me, the role of adviser was brilliant and I had a fantastic time. That role gave me a lot of confidence and gave me a very good skill set – and in terms of my Bank of England career, was very good. In terms of the secondment to the IMF, it might have been a bit of a trade-off in terms of if you stay at the Bank, you might get promoted internally a little bit quicker than if you go out.

  In fact, many managers interviewed for this book stressed that people should not be constrained by over-rigid career plans, whether prescribed by the organisation they are working for or of their own making.

  Ian Pearman, chief executive of Abbott Mead Vickers, observes:

  I think it helps not having a long-term plan about your career. That kind of plan can create behaviours that are counter-productive, particularly for future managers and leaders. You end up trying to be pulled up rather than pushed up.

  If you are focused on the next job, then by definition you have to focus on being the very best in your current job. That kind of relatively focused ambition probably leads to behaviours that will be more admired and respected in the long term.

  I have seen people who, because they are so intent on getting up the ladder as soon as possible, have only looked upwards and have done anything possible to be pulled up. So they have been much more concerned about managing their boss than managing their peers or managing their subordinates.

  This is a sustainable strategy up to a certain point but the point when you run out of road is the point where everybody you need hates you because they are below you and you have never looked after them. You need to understand that your success is completely conditional on the respect and the trust you develop in those that work for you and around you.

  Developing a support network

  Another characteristic that marks out successful managers is their ability to build and maintain a support network, both inside and outside their organisation. As Pearman observes:

  I was very lucky to have some very good mentors – they were not imposed on me. They were people that I sought out on how to navigate the challenges – people who could “course-correct” me.

  The biggest factor was “not knowing what you don’t know”. It’s about the combination of knowing what is the right question that you should be asking and how you get over the inevitable hump of not knowing what you don’t know. My mentors served that purpose of taking me from unknown unknowns to known unknowns.

  I use that phrase all the time in creating change management analogies when we are going into new markets and new disciplines. Finding people who can accelerate our learning and therefore reduce the risk of heinous mistakes is critical.

  Newton-Smith also found her own hand-picked mentors an important source of advice in making crucial career decisions:

  An organisation like the Bank of England is very traditional and conservative. In these circumstances, having the chance to talk to someone who is more senior to you and who has had the chance to experience different things when they are not your line manager can be hugely beneficial. People who are successful do build up a network of people they can turn to and with whom they bounce off ideas.

  One of the male colleagues I started working with in my first job at the Bank was someone who believed in me right from the start. He’s someone I have gone to in order to discuss career moves. And he has talked to me about his career moves.

  One of my female managers was brilliant and very supportive, not only in saying that I was great but also in saying where I needed to improve. She would say “look I think you are very good at presentations but I find in this situation, you are not as good as you could be – here is someone I know who can provide you with training on this”.

  When I was working with the UK Monetary Policy Committee, Diane Julius, the chief economist at British Airways before she came to the Bank of England, was also a great support. Diane was brilliant at trying to encourage young women and used to meet with female economists for lunchtime networking events.

  Job rotation and mobility

  As earlier chapters have said, the heart of any talent development strategy is making sure that potential high-flyers get experience of:

  different specialist functions – finance, strategy, operations, human resources, marketing, etc;

  leading projects and teams that cut across and encompass different functions and businesses;

  different businesses within the organisation’s portfolio;

  different geographical locations – and thus different cultures – within the organisation’s portfolio;

  general management tasks and posts.

  Doug Baillie, chief human resources officer at Unilever, for example, describes his company’s talent management strategy thus:

  Unilever is a company that encourages people to get both breadth and depth. Over 60% of the top 100 leaders have worked in at least two geographies. Breadth is important because if you think about the world today, which is really very volatile, complex and ambiguous, we really need agile leaders who have breadth and wisdom to handle the amount of change that is taking place.

  The likelihood is that if an organisation is large and diverse and employees are seeking advancement and promotion, they should expect to be moved around on a regular basis. Baillie is a typical example. He describes his career at Unilever:

  Take my own career. I started in South Africa as a sales and marketing graduate. I worked there for about seven years, starting at the bottom carrying a briefcase and finding out what it was like working at the coalface. I went to Australia on a customs secondment, came back to South Africa working with a sales director, then I was sent to the central headquarters to learn how the organisation works. I was an internal marketing consultant going around the geography helping to instil new brands and innovation.

  I ran operations and projects in Africa and the Middle East, central and eastern Europe, Russia and Turkey. I then went back and ran the South African business, ran Africa and the Middle East and
then I was sent to India – a radical change from working in Africa. I wound up running the South Asian region, which was a huge cultural challenge for me and tested whether I had the breadth to run a much bigger region and cluster. From there I ended up running Europe and then to my surprise I wound up in HR.

  Clearly, job rotation on this scale has big implications for a person’s family and personal life – particularly in terms of bringing up children and the care of elderly relatives. In certain circumstances, this can be overcome by traditional expatriate packages involving spouses. But in an age in which each spouse is pursuing their own career, the decision to change schools (particularly during secondary education) can have a big impact on a child’s progress; and if the care of elderly relatives is involved, the traditional approach is often no longer appropriate.

  This may require transparent and frank negotiation with the organisation about when employees are happy to be mobile and when they need to stay put – with all the personal and professional trade-offs this may involve.

  Research for this book suggests the more valued an employee is, the more accommodating the organisation may be. As Chapter 4 demonstrated, the best companies are adopting a more personal approach to career planning. PepsiCo and Unilever, for example, are attempting to plan the progression of their top people up to ten years ahead, in line with their personal and family needs.

  MBA considerations

  People who are seriously considering a career in business management sooner or later should decide whether to study for an MBA or a related masters’ qualification.

  The craze for MBAs has lessened since it reached its peak in the 1990s, but the degree still provides a good foundation for three possible career avenues, not all mutually exclusive:

  a senior management career in a large corporation;

  a career as an associate and then possibly a partner in a management consultancy;

  founding, owning and running an enterprise.

  A full-time MBA requires a considerable commitment of time and money. It can take up to two years to complete, at a time when students may have significant family responsibilities and promotion prospects at work, and the total tuition and accommodation costs, at current rates, are anything between $50,000 and $80,000.

  Commitment to a part-time or modular MBA can, in some senses, be even greater, because studying will be combined with full-time work responsibilities and eat into family or leisure time in the evenings and at weekends.

  Studying for an MBA should provide:

  an opportunity to take time out to reflect on career options and consider changes in direction;

  the chance to take elective courses and internships that will allow these career options to be explored;

  the provision of general management skills to supplement and build on specialist expertise;

  exposure to the latest research and thinking in business management;

  the opportunity to build a diverse and international network of business contacts with people from different countries and professional backgrounds;

  the chance to augment salary if students sign up to a top management consultancy or apply for a general management position, thereby providing them with a financial return for their personal investment of time and money.

  The opportunity to take time out to consider career options is one of the most important by-products of studying for an MBA. As Sandra Schwarzer, director of careers services at INSEAD, comments:

  If you have someone who is returning to a similar position or a similar industry, for them the MBA often doesn’t accelerate their career. For career changers, it opens a whole new world.

  What we try to tell people who opt to change careers is that you have to demonstrate the strength of your learning curve because you are starting at zero. We offer life-long career services to our alumni.

  One of the things people often do is come back to us for coaching throughout their careers. Half of these people change their jobs within three to four years after graduating and move somewhere else.

  What we try to do in the year that they are with us is to teach them how to manage their career effectively, how to be self-aware. The professors give them not only the hard skills but the communication skills (for example, when a union leader comes in and threatens a strike how do you respond to that?) and we make them aware of the fact that if you are in command of your career you need regular time to think about what is it that you want and how do you get it, how do you maintain your learning and how do you continue to develop yourself.

  Internships, secondments and sabbaticals

  As organisations have become flatter, there are more opportunities to make sideways moves to pursue specialist skills and knowledge or personal interests, or to explore new career options, either at the start of a career or in mid-life. Indeed, companies are increasingly offering such opportunities in an effort to attract and retain the most talented people (see Chapter 4).

  Internships

  Internships are a good way of exploring career options. An internship is a short-term placement within a company, designed to give the intern hands-on experience working within a particular industry. This can be used as a bridge between study and employment, to find out whether a particular industry or company is of interest, or to start a career move into a new area. Internships are offered mainly to undergraduates or MBA students as an integral part of their studies (and with the help of the university’s careers service), but they can be useful to people in mid-career as well.

  For example, CRCC Asia, a provider of internships in China, offers 1–3 month internships starting every month all year round, linked to Chinese language programmes, to allow students and young people wanting to pursue international careers to gain practical experience of working in China.

  Tingwei Tan, a student from Singapore studying at Leicester University in the UK, describes her experience of a one-month CRCC legal internship in Beijing:

  I came across an e-mail circulating in my university offering a summer internship programme in China. As I was always curious about the Chinese work environment and culture, I sent in my résumé without much hesitation, hoping to gain some invaluable experiences.

  Arriving three days before my internship, I was given ample time to settle down. CRCC’s staff settled me in by introducing me to the other interns and providing all of us with a welcome package, which included a detailed map of Beijing, a sim card with value, a Chinese translated pronunciation booklet, a detailed address of our service apartment and office, contacts for their staff and much more!

  On my first day of work, a CRCC staff member took me to my office and introduced me to my supervising solicitor and buddy. My buddy spent an hour of her precious time to share with me the firm’s core values, needs and goals, after which she took me for a tour around the office and introduced me to the other lawyers.

  In no time, I felt like I was part of the firm and not merely just an intern. I was kept busy on most days; I assisted my buddy with research, translation and drafting. One of the main deals that I assisted in was a mining investment in Zimbabwe. As most of the new rules and regulations set out by the governmental bodies in Zimbabwe were in English, I realised that the translated information that was made available for the Chinese lawyers and investors was not as comprehensive as the original documents.

  Secondments

  Further along the career path, there are opportunities to experience similar benefits through secondments, as Rain Newton-Smith did with the IMF, which proved invaluable in pursuit of her wish to become a specialist in emerging markets.

  Recognising that their best people value time out like this, a growing number of organisations are now building secondments into high-potential career plans. PepsiCo is one example, as Indra Nooyi, chairman and chief executive, explains:

  Offer them creative projects linked to the company’s future. It’s disruptive but try. Allow them to do non-traditional things. Young people like to get involved with p
rojects that make a difference to the world. We formed PepsiCorps, where we send high-potential people off for a month.

  We are allowing them to interact with us in non-traditional ways. That is as important as the financial linkage and we want to take pride and emotion home and bring it back the next day.

  PepsiCorps is a month-long “performance with purpose” leadership development programme. It aims to give employees on-the-ground insights into societal challenges and allows them to use their talents and business skills to make a positive impact. In 2012, for example, a team of eight employees went to the south-west United States, partnering with local communities and organisations to focus on health and nutrition and sustainable agriculture.

  Another team spent four weeks working on improving access to clean water in India, building on the clean-water work done by a pilot team in Ghana the year before. The pilot team also worked with local water boards to improve community access to clean water, developed a strategy to boost eco-tourism and taught hygiene in schools.

  Some larger organisations advertise secondment positions on internal notice boards or intranet systems. However, most secondments result from a direct approach from the seconding organisation to the host company or an individual.

  Catherine Armstrong, senior lecturer in American History at Manchester Metropolitan University, has published guidelines on how to manage secondments. She comments: