Leading Change? Make Waves!

When our friends do neat things, we like to share them with you.  Patti Johnson is the founder and leader of PeopleResults,  Her book, “Make Waves: Be the One to Start Change at Work and in Life” was released earlier this month.

Following are thoughts from Patti related to leading change and developing Wave Makers in your organization.

If You Want Change & Innovation You’ll Need Wave Makers

You have a change to lead, a transformation in the works, and a need for more innovation. Is the committed circle too small? You, as well as any leader, can’t have all of the answers.

Your change becomes a reality when others – in every part of the organization -look for how they can contribute. They see their role in the change – their wave. They may start small at first, but they start a ripple that grows. Change starts because individuals decide to act and be part of it.
You need what I call Wave Makers™. They know they have a role to play. They ask “what if?’, ‘what can I do?’, and ‘how can I help?’ They spark innovation, drive up performance, accelerate development and shake up the status quo.

Wave Makers don’t just appear, but they can be developed with the right experiences, encouragement and environment. It starts with you and how you develop talent in your organization from the day they join.
Here are four actions you can take to develop more Wave Makers in your organization:

Ask Questions that Challenge Conventional Wisdom

Waves develop not because one person was a creative genius, but often because of taking the time to ask insightful questions and being open to the answer. These questioners have a habit of exploring and being curious about why and how.

You may think that some people are just naturally creative or innovative and others aren’t, but that isn’t really true, according to researchers Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen in their book Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disrupting Innovators.

Dyer andGregersen share, “You learn to see what isn’t there today by habitually asking the right questions: “Why?” “Why must it be that way?” “What if?” “What’s the alternative?”

So what do we learn from (Steve) Jobs’s ability to think differently? Well, first we see that his innovative ideas didn’t spring fully formed from his head, as if they were a gift from the Idea Fairy. When we examine the origins of these ideas, we typically find that the catalyst was:

• a question that challenged the status quo
• an observation of a technology, company or customer
• an experience or experiment where he was trying out something new
• a conversation with someone who alerted him to an important piece of knowledge or opportunity. “

Even though Jobs’ waves were much grander and more transformational than ours, we can learn from how they started. Jobs’s questions and observation skills caused his perspective to change, as well as those around him. This natural curiosity and openness to new information began the formation of new ideas. I found that most Wave Makers I studied relied on this curiosity in exploring opportunities and problems. And, they were able to connect what even seemed like an unrelated concept from another situation or industry to their world.

Give White Space Assignments

White space is my way of describing work that isn’t fully defined or where more clarity is needed. There is no precedent or clear road map. A new design is needed. The objective or value is defined, but that is all. And the exact outcome may not even be known yet-just the problem.

It’s up to the individuals involved to create what doesn’t exist today using research, insights, and instinct. Of course, waves meet that criteria, but so does a new role that didn’t exist before, a position in a newly formed company or environment, or a dramatic change that renders the old rules obsolete. One of my “go-to” questions when I want to understand the ability of an individual to design and create is, “How effective is he with a blank piece of paper?” It’s another way of asking if that person can thrive in the “white space”-the undefined and the unseen with no obvious path forward.

Put People out of Their Zone

We all have these zones that fit our expertise, where we are most comfortable and confident. Have you ever noticed that when an outsider comes in he will have an observation or insight that those working there for months missed? A fresh perspective can see what others can’t. It’s not that he is wiser; he just doesn’t have the blinders that come after looking at something too long.

You can develop future Wave Makers by proactively looking for stretch roles and assignments. It’s not setting up someone up to fail, but asking her to take on a new role, opportunity, or project that is a big step beyond her comfort zone. This experience helps expand horizons and see the world in a new way. And, it develops a confidence and comfort in stretching, learning and taking on something very new.

Develop Enterprise-wide Thinking

In bigger organizations, it’s easy to slip into roles and teams that are isolated from the others and to define success very narrowly. Silos are one of the most common business problems today, and they serve as invisible roadblocks to innovation and collaboration. Leaders need organizational groups to deliver on their promises and commitments, but not when the group becomes more important than the larger goal. They need to think in panorama for the enterprise – much wider than one role or one group.

Ask individuals to lead a project that is broader than their role and function. It will naturally expand their thinking. It also develops an understanding of needs outside of their own area through firsthand exposure and experience. As a result, they learn to see the business and market more holistically.

To develop more Wave Makers, first, the environment has to be ready for experimentation and new ideas. Knock down reward and recognition obstacles that not only don’t reward waves, but penalize creativity, change and developing a new way. Then, start developing the Wave Makers you’ll need as it will take the ideas from many to make your own waves a reality. You can’t do it alone.

Patti Johnson Bio Information:
Patti Johnson is the CEO of PeopleResults, a change and human capital consulting firm she founded in 2004. She and her team advise clients such as PepsiCo, Microsoft, 7-Eleven, Accenture, Frito-Lay, Cognizant, BNSF, McKesson and many others on creating positive change in their leaders and organizations. Previously, Johnson was a Senior Executive at Accenture and held numerous global leadership positions.

Patti is an instructor on Leading Change for SMU Executive Education and for the Bush Women’s Initiative Fellowship program and a frequent speaker on change, leadership and creating successful organizations. She has been featured as an expert in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, MONEY Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, Entrepreneur, and many more. She was selected as an ongoing expert contributor for SUCCESS Magazine.

Why you need to know Rougned Odor!

Many of you do not consider yourselves baseball fans… and yet, it is essential that you know Rougned Odor.

Odor is widely regarded as the number one prospect in the Texas Rangers minor league system.  He is a 20 year old Venezuelan (read: global talent) second baseman who is projected to hit, run, and field at above average levels when he arrives in the major leagues.  Today Odor plays with the Frisco Roughriders in the AA Texas League.

Why should you care?

At the start of Spring Training, Jurickson Profar, a 21 year old from Curacao (read: global talent) and the former number one prospect in all of professional baseball, was the presumed starter for the Rangers at second base.  Following an injury, Profar will be out of action until mid-season.  The Rangers are now manning second base with players who would not normally land starter positions, and continued strong performance by Odor could see him in the major leagues sooner than anyone anticipated — especially if Profar falters upon his return to action.

Perhaps more interesting, from a talent management perspective, is that the combination of Profar and Odor allowed the Rangers to confidently trade Ian Kinsler, a former All-Star, in a move that hopefully strengthens the entire team.

Could YOUR organization lose a key starting talent (“executive”) like Kinsler and have a ready replacement in the form of Profar?  Beyond that, how many organizations have a credible talent pipeline with players like Rougned Odor ready to step into unexpected gaps?

Consider these questions:

Is your Human Resources team positioned to influence the identification, acquisition, and development of talent across your organization?

Do you have performance management and succession programs and systems in place that really count?

Do you even know who your “Odors and Profars” are?

Do you trust the leaders of your HR / Talent Management team to deliver in the clutch?

If not, talk with us.  We regularly interact with and place CHRO’s (Chief Human Resource Officers) and Talent Management leaders who understand how to win through talent!

Which Markets Do You Serve?

We are often asked questions related to our market footprint.  In response, we share that Leapfrog completes retained searches for HR leaders.  With our corporate location in the DFW area, Dallas / Fort Worth, and the Southwestern United States are certainly important markets.  That said, we have executed searches in a wide variety of locations, including Chicago, Seattle, Georgia, N. Dakota and Tennessee.  These domestic roles often have a significant global scope.

Our year is off to a great start, and we hope that this insight provides you with a measure of how we might be of service relative to your future executive talent needs.

’13, 13, 13!

It is always hard to believe that another year has flown by and that we will soon be leaving 2013 (’13) behind.

13 is an interesting number.  Some people find it to be “unique” or “cool”; it is often their favorite number.  Others prefer another number.

We are excited about 13!  You see, as Leapfrog Executive Search leaves ’13 and enters 2014, it marks the beginning of our 13th year!  We are grateful for the opportunity to have built long-term relationships with so many of you and to have served so many terrific organizations, those large and small and across all industries.  We remain committed to providing outstanding retained search services focused exclusively on HR leadership roles.  It is what we have done for one dozen years, and we enthusiastically look forward to #13!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Talent Tales – Clayton Gammill of EY

We recently spoke with Clayton Gammill, a Principal in the Dallas offices of EY, to capture his insights on ways that senior HR leaders can best impact the financial bottom-line at their organizations.

Q: Can you describe for us your role at EY?
Sure. We take a more integrated approach to HR solutions than is industry norm.  As a principal in the Tax practice, I have the benefit of looking at HR opportunities for improvement in a multi-dimensional fashion. So in looking at cost optimization, for example, we are able to look holistically at everything from global payroll and global mobility to benefits actuarial services, along with sophisticated workforce need assessment and modeling. This enables us to help the senior HR officer identify which opportunities can have the most material impact on their organization’s revenue plan. At the end of the day, many potential HR initiatives come with primarily intangible benefits, so we add value by helping quantify hard-dollar impacts up front. From there, many projects sell themselves through a compelling financial case while still bringing significant intangible or strategic benefit.

Q: What do you see as a common barrier to the success of value-creation efforts generated from within the HR organization ?
Often HR struggles to execute on transactional responsibilities, due to technologies that haven’t historically supported the business, as well as non-standardized processes. I think HR organizations have gotten a lot accomplished with good old-fashioned sweat equity.  As a result, leaders can struggle to make the business case for change, reducing the senior HR officer’s leverage to get a mission-critical project proper internal resourcing, and putting the overall change effort at risk.

Q: Your emphasis on value-creation prompts us to ask: What is the current state of business process outsourcing (BPO), what trends are you seeing?
If you look to the macro trends, there has been a move away from comprehensive BPO over the last few years. In large part for the reason I just cited – the more comprehensive projects will tend to span multiple business lines within a client site, and so it is seldom clear how the HR officer can keep  it moving along at a satisfactory pace with that much risk of divided attention. In place of comprehensive BPO activity, what the market has shifted to is a more targeted approach to shared services: peeling off discrete pieces of the overall pie, representing more focused cost containment or value creation. For example, there is a compelling business case for uniform global payroll solutions, and that is immediate impact that can be run through to vendor selection by EY.

Another clear trend is in the cloud computing solutions that have rapidly gained acceptance in the marketplace. This is a significant technological development in that historically, HR systems have been plagued with obsolescence challenges.

This stems from HR systems often being the last internal priority for upgrades, and also due to the complexity introduced by in-house customization. Cloud solutions remove those two barriers in that upgrades are pushed out automatically.  Additionally, customization is intentionally limited, forcing the discipline of a standard solution set, which drives down overall costs of ownership, maintenance, and knowledge worker staffing.  As cloud solutions saturate the market and gain in acceptance, we may again see an uptick in outsourcing.  Certain outsourcing companies are currently building their entire platform on specific cloud providers which will enable them to ultimately leverage and scale in a way that was previously unattainable.

Q: Speaking of current trends, do you agree that Workforce Planning (WFP) represents a massive opportunity for HR to impact the bottom-line and shape the future?
Rapidly changing workforce dynamics, both domestically and worldwide absolutely represent the most compelling opportunity facing HR executives today. Everyone is looking for the workforce planning silver bullet. The catch is that HR has not made a compelling case for driving WFP in the past.  Through my discussions with business leaders, they attribute that to HR not knowing business needs well enough to truly understand and accurately forecast upcoming needs. Instead HR professionals are often still focused on blocking and tackling, forced to focus on process and data manipulation due to the inefficient and outdated internal systems we just discussed. HR can’t possibly own workforce planning fully, there are just too many interdependencies ; yet this is a key way HR can add transformational value to the businesses they support and ultimately reshape the future at their organization. By p utting in place systems to assess future workforce needs, factoring in attrition rates, hiring cycle times, and onboarding, HR will be positioned to be proactive instead of reactive, establishing a pipeline of talent to drive future growth.

Q: How is EY approaching this area?
WFP presents a number of challenges based on size and scope alone. At EY, we
take a methodical and structured approach to the dialog with clients from the onset. We start by mapping WFP competencies to the organizational revenue plan, in order to quantify potential revenue creation and cost containment. Assigning a valuation to each of the variables in our model up front is a key step in the process.

Next, we build a checklist, using a a multi-phased process born of best practice experience . Then we put together a plan and proposal for automating against that model.

For me personally, adding significant, quantifiable value to the client makes for the most rewarding work. So partnering on WFP is a passion of mine .  Since we have the discipline, tools, experience and know the right questions to ask we can more effectively support our clients in deploying successful workforce planning solutions . The difficulty is that most HR executives know what needs to happen, they just have too many competing priorities.  What the client gets by engaging us is that we can put our sole focus on the program, greatly increasing speed to market. When a client attempts to do this kind of sophisticated modeling for themselves, they do not always have the dedicated team to execute and because it is one of multiple projects running, the effort can drag out for years and lose momentum. When we engage to support our clients, it is a concerted effort. We’ve done it before, so we know what to look at first and are able to move quickly.

Q: What closing encouragements do you have for our readers?
There are few spaces as intellectually stimulating as human capital right now. When you consider the global complexity as well as the rapidly changing domestic workforce. Experienced HR executives who keep their education current are absolutely positioned to shape the future. The key is to be disciplined about automating and/or engaging outside resources on commodity functions, to reduce time spent on blocking and tackling, and increase time focused on creating strategic impact.

Talent Tales – Scott Smith of AT&T

Talent Tales is a quarterly resource that provides insights into talent acquisition, development and retention.  Key HR leaders, vendors, and other subject matter experts provide insights into the people strategies, processes, and tools that help highly successful organizations excel.

This quarter Scott Smith, an SVP of HR at AT&T, who leads staffing, HR generalists, and HR service delivery, talked with us about several aspects of the AT&T employee/employer relationship.

Q:  What attributes do you look for when determining who is a high-potential manager?   Do these attributes evolve over time?

A manager who displays key leadership potential and possesses high integrity, drives results, build relationships, motivates/inspires others, looks for alternative ways of getting things done, and communicates well.   Yes, these attributes can evolve and develop as one has the desire and motivation to hone their skills to make themselves better.  Through their desire to develop themselves, they in turn make those around them better which makes the team function better and leads to higher results.

Q: Are there challenges to advancing high-potential managers?

There are a limited number of promotional opportunities available and with a talented workforce like the one we have at AT&T that alone provides a challenge.  One way that we keep employees engaged is to encourage lateral movement.  Lateral movement allows employees to go horizontally and gain knowledge and exposure in different areas of the business which makes them more competitive when promotional opportunities become available.  The experience they gain broadens their skills set, deepens their knowledge about AT&T and allows them to see the bigger picture.  Through the experience they also increase their business acumen and enlarge their networking circle which are both valuable tools as the market and position themselves for the next opportunity.

Q:  What are several of the key tenets of the relationship between AT&T and its employees?

Trust, empowerment, caring and development are several key tenets of the relationship between AT&T and its employees.  Trust that leadership will do the right thing – every time.  Empowering employees to be innovative and take calculated, intelligent risks.  Showing that we care– through our benefits programs, our focus on diversity and inclusion, and our commitment to our communities.  Lastly, investing in and providing opportunities for development and growth through our coaching, mentoring and training programs.

Q:  What is AT&T doing to understand employee engagement levels and respond to feedback?

For several years, AT&T has confidentially surveyed our employees to get direct feedback about their job, what they need to be successful, their daily work life, working relationships, their leaders and more.  The feedback is provided to leaders, and it is the expectation from the Chairman and his direct report team that the results are reviewed at the leadership level, dialogue occurs between supervisors and their employees and the appropriate action plans are put in place.  We have had positive changes across our company as a result of the feedback received and the dialogue that’s occurred.
This year we added an Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) Survey.  It asked three key questions that centered around willingness and likelihood to recommend AT&T as an employer and AT&T products and services.
The eNPS Survey will be distributed several times this year and will be used to drive ongoing dialogue about continuously improving the customer experience.  Similarly to the Employee Engagement Survey Results, each supervisor is expected to have open dialogue with their employees and discover ways that the customer experience can be improved.

Q:  Given the large scale of the organization, how does communication with employees take place with respect to longer-term views of career development?

AT&T University is our corporate university and it offers resources and tools on Career Development, Communication Skills, Individual Effectiveness, and Mentoring just to name a few.  AT&T University resources are primarily designed for management employees. However, they do provide some resources to our non-management employees as well.  The Career Development module in the AT&T University curricula focuses on the areas of Career Exploration, Career Management and offers several self-assessments to assist employees in identifying their areas of strengths and opportunities for growth to ultimately find their best career path.

AT&T also leverages front-line management employees to emphasize the importance of career development.  Often times that front-line manager is the face of the company to our non-management employees and as such we equip him/her with the right tools and resources in order to effectively communicate that message.

Q:  What are leaders in the organization looking for with respect to the next wave of innovation and business support from HR as you strive to have ready talent available to meet the challenges ahead?

AT&T leaders want HR to hire talented, dedicated, diverse, service-oriented employees that will help AT&T succeed.  Our Staffing organization is doing an excellent job of driving traffic to our att.com/jobs website, evidenced by the more than 3.5 million job seekers who visited the site in 2012.  We have gone mobile in our recruiting efforts and launched our Mobile Career Site as we are one of seven Fortune 500 companies that is considered a front runner in the area of mobile recruiting as identified by iMomentous.  Mobilizing recruiting allows us to reach more job seekers since they can engage with us from a mobile device.

AT&T leaders also want HR to be a strategic partner who understands their individual short-term and long-term business goals and objectives.  This places HR in a role to be more consultative which affords us the ability to predict hiring needs and identify skills that will be essential in contributing to the success of their overall business plan.

And our business is looking for HR to make sure we have the right person with the right skills in the right job at the right time.  Our company is going thru a skills transformation and is counting on HR to make sure that we both find external talent and train internal talent on skills that are becoming more important to us as we move to a fully wireless and IP technology company.

Innovation is our backbone from the legacy telegraph to cellular service to a fully automated home, our leaders are expecting that every organization, including HR, is innovating and helping to move our business forward.

Q:  Taking a longer term view, is there a single opportunity / challenge to be addressed relative to the development of leaders?

Through AT&T University and our Talent Management Team we have created several avenues for self-development and made developing our employees a priority.   One of the challenges that we may experience in the future is how to engage a workforce that spans four generations and has unique characteristics and thoughts about what makes a good leader and how they desire to be communicated with.  As we develop our future leaders, it is critical that we teach them how to see situations through a generational lens.  We must continue to emphasize that good leaders build relationships and know how to effectively communicate.  In the mobile and social media world that we now live in, they must not lose sight of the human factor of collaborating, teaming, partnering, speaking and delivering an effortless customer service constantly.