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(Editor’s note: This is the sixth installment in Dr. Sullivan’s series. Here are Part 1, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.)

No matter how enthusiastic your employees are about participating in an internal movement program, they are bound to be somewhat frustrated if there aren’t a wide variety of assignments available for them to choose from. Even if you successfully excite your managers and other rotation program participants, you can’t automatically assume that they know how to identify or develop exciting assignments or rotations.

As a result, the rotation program manager needs to design a process and provide managers with a variety of suggestions and tips in order to make it easy for them to create internal movement projects, assignments, and rotations. This section highlights over 20 of the approaches that I have found to be effective in helping managers create more and better rotations. keep reading…

There is little argument that job rotations, stretch assignments, and other forms of internal movement are some of the most effective development and retention tools available. While world-class organizations aggressively manage deployment for development purposes regardless of the economic state, such programs become universally popular when economies turn sour.

When corporate revenues are down or stagnant, talent managers typically shift their focus away from volume hiring to developing and improving existing employees. Executives are always challenged to make the correct “buy or build” decision, but when hiring is frozen (the buy option), obviously the only remaining tool available to drive change in organizational capability and capacity is to “build” your current employees.

Such efforts increase the emphasis organizations must place on project deployment for skill building, mentoring, leadership development, and succession planning to ensure that the organization’s capability and capacity evolve — not deteriorate — during the downturn.

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Change is a difficult thing. Oftentimes we are comforted by routine, but when situations arise that call for a drastic change, they are frequently met with resistance. With cutbacks and structural changes due to the recession and other factors, many organizations have had to undergo huge changes. As a result, effective change management strategies are in higher demand than ever.

Riviera Advisors consultant and former ERE expo chairman, Jeremy Eskenazi, joined us at at the ERE Expo 2009 Spring to moderate a panel discussing the challenges and strategies of change management. The panel also included Rodney Moses of Research In Motion/Blackberry, Vicki Perry of the Avery Dennison Corporation, and Aziz Chowdhury of the Baker Hughes Corporation.

Throughout the course of the session, the panel discussed the various changes they have encountered over the years, as well as what has worked and what hasn’t. Rodney Moses brought up an excellent point about how issues can arise when the focus is placed on why the change must happen rather than how the change will happen. Moses emphasized that communication, role responsibility, and openness are crucial during the process.

Another major change that many encounter in their organizations is the change from a decentralized business model to a centralized one. Vicki Perry addressed some of the challenges and resistance faced, especially regarding role responsibilities. Perry found the “myth of the month” strategy to be especially effective, helping to dispel rumors about the new system.

Aziz Chowdhury spoke on the same subject, discussing some of the mistakes that were made and things that were overlooked during the change. He also stressed the importance of communication and dispelling rumors during the process.

The panelists were all in unison regarding the importance of communication during the process, as much of the discord is a result of false expectations. Watch these highlights from the presentation for more!
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DETROIT — General Motors Corporation Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner will step down immediately at the request of the White House. –Comcast.net Finance

I always liked Rick Wagoner. He is the quintessential Boy Scout. Probably makes a great neighbor and a wonderful friend, so I take no glee in his departure. On the other hand, he was not the right person for the job and hasn’t been for endless years. GM made cars few wanted and it hemorrhaged cash. (This should bother you just a tad, as it is your cash they are currently hemorrhaging.)

As an example, rumor has it that when GM unveiled the Aztek in 2001, there was only a gasp and then dead silence; an unspeakably ugly car instantly hated by one and all. (John Sullivan’s Aztec is for sale by way; e-mail him on pricing.) How, in all that is holy, could Wagoner allow a car like this to see the light of day? He should have laid his body in front of it sooner then having it hit the press.

As you can see, poor leadership devastates us all. But wait: put down that latte and read on. I am not at the good part yet. keep reading…

Most corporate executives and HR professionals might think that the impending swine flu pandemic is strictly a public health issue, but if you are thinking that way, you would be wrong.

It turns out that the impending swine flu pandemic is also a major corporate issue that needs to be addressed with decisive plans and clear communications. Fear surrounding the illness is already affecting employee productivity and attendance, as parents in regions impacted are being forced to find child care or stay home as schools close for weeks at a time.

The potential damage that this particular flu can cause corporations is further intensified by the fact that many corporate staffs are already incredibly lean, making it difficult to tolerate extended spikes in absenteeism. If your corporation hasn’t set aside some time to assess how this threat can negatively impact your business and your employees, the time to act is now. keep reading…

For a number of reasons, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers, is a good read for recruiters and managers, in fact, for anyone who wants to get ahead in life.

The basic premise is that circumstances are far more critical to ultimate success than any other factor. For example, he cites the fact that Gates, Jobs, and comparable computer all-stars were born in the mid-1950s as being a critical factor leading to their industry success. When the PC revolution started they were just the right age — old enough to participate, but not yet established on a career path that prevented them from taking risks.

For another example, Gladwell points out that most professional athletic stars are born in the first quarter of the year they were first allowed to participate in their sport. The idea here is that whether it’s youth hockey, baseball, or any sport for that matter, the best players at this early age are more mature since they’re 3-9 months older than their competition. This difference means a lot when you’re five or six. The chosen ones are then given more opportunities to be trained and play more often. Overall, the best of this group put in thousands of hours more honing their skills, in comparison to those of equal talent who didn’t make the team just because they were too young at the time.

Of course, opportunity is just one factor involved in success. Talent is still critical and essential, but according to Gladwell, not as important as hard work. This is where the extra thousands of hours of effort comes into play.

To become a master at any craft requires plenty of hard work, at least 10,000 hours, according to Gladwell. As an example, he cites Mozart who didn’t write any worthwhile music until he was in his mid-20s, after about 10,000 hours. The Beatles are another example cited, who worked 10 long years perfecting their craft at all-night clubs in Germany.

Now what does all of this have to do with recruiting and hiring top talent? The answer started back in 1978 when I first became a third-party recruiter.

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Over the past several years there have been a number of articles written about the role of a chief talent officer. Each of these articles has pointed out the need for someone to have responsibility for developing and implementing a comprehensive strategic approach to people.

The current economic situation just underlines the need for organizations to develop sustainable talent strategies to minimize the trauma of poor economies; maintain a top notch, committed and skilled workforce; and encourage the development of new skills among those already employed rather than the mass hiring of new workers.

It is more obvious now than ever before that the need for semi-skilled labor is ending and that most organizations will need a highly skilled workforce to be competitive. keep reading…

The first casualty when war comes is truth. - Sen. Hiram Johnson (R., CA), 1918

The looming passage of the Employee Free Choice Act has the business world in a frenzy. The EFCA, if you haven’t been paying attention, would make it easier for unions to organize and reduce employers’ leverage in contract negotiations.

Businesses act like sentries on the parapets of ancient castles, warning of the approach of barbarian hordes. Consultants, trade associations, and labor lawyers presage unions gaining strength and forcing onerous agreements, obliterating productivity and adding costs. All of this comes, of course, at the worst possible time from a business perspective. keep reading…

Ken Zeigler, who talks, writes, and speaks about stress and productivity, offers tips on managing your day better. It won’t take long. keep reading…

Past talent initiatives have generally not aimed at people, but at improving efficiency, managing work flows, and ensuring quality. Now, service, innovation, and relationships are seen as the enablers of increased profit as the spotlight moves away from manufacturing and production.

HR has the opportunity to shine or be replaced by some other function as it is asked to ensure the availability of and quality of talent. Recruiters are central to that effort and many changes are underfoot.

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Co-written by Shally, Maureen Sharib, and Glenn Gutmacher.

Have you noticed a slew of emails lately for free or cheap training? Is it tempting, when budgets are being cut back, to say that having everyone pick some of those and/or sending a handful of staffers to a conference and report back to the group, is how your team will fulfill its training goals this year? Exactly what goals will you fulfill that way?

Maureen Sharib

We in recruiting can learn something from sales training programs and organizations — a near-ubiquitous category. The good ones from major firms like Miller-Heiman to boutique firms like High Probability Selling (Jacques Werth), and tons of programs ranging from specific skills (negotiations, closing, communication) to entire approaches (customer-centric selling, target account selling) are promoted as means to help salespeople identify the right prospects and ultimately close more deals. The effect should be more revenue to the firm than the cost and time devoted to learning, justifying the training’s ROI.

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by Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett

For many in corporate staffing, contingent labor management is an unpleasant activity often relegated to the lowest-cost outsourced service provider the organization could find, mainly because no one internally wanted to deal with it.

The work is largely considered mundane, process-oriented, and as a necessary overhead cost that provides little or no value.

If you work now or have worked in an organization that views contingent labor management this way, you work or have worked in an organization that has no clue about the future of strategic talent management!

Contingent Labor Taking Over?

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It has been like shooting fish in a barrel. The HR profession has been under fire from all quarters lately for not being “strategic” or a “helpful partner” to organizations. Many comments have been made in the ERE forum that make this point. In response, I have to say, I think you’re passing the buck.

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The stuff’s just now beginning to hit the fan over the incendiary comments of Rutgers University academic Richard Beatty to a conference of CFOs Monday.

Under the title “Memo to CFOs: Don’t Trust HR” CFO magazine says the professor blasted the human resources profession for working without useful analytics, and contributing so little that, in the words of the article’s author, “typical human resources activities have no relevance to an organization’s success.”

Beatty dismissed efforts at employee engagement as having “no evidence” to show it produces a meaningful return. Training to improve low performers he all but called a waste of time saying “Low turnover isn’t necessarily a good thing. Think about where you might want to disinvest.” And efforts to become an employer of choice he called “silly.”

As you might expect, HR professionals were quick to take issue with the professor’s remarks.

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Yesterday, I read one of those “10 Tips for…” type of articles on how to manage the Millennial or Gen Y employee. They included recommendations such as:

• Provide leadership and guidance.
• Listen to the Millennial employee.
• Provide challenge and change.
• Provide structure (i.e. clear expectations, goals, assessment of progress, etc).

One of the website’s readers posted a point-by-point criticism of the article, concluding with: “The advice given is good for employees of all ages. Contending that it is uniquely applicable to a new generation is nonsense.”

While I agree with the rather prickly poster’s perspective that the author’s advice applies to all employees, I do think he missed the nuances the author was trying to convey.

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What’s hot in talent management changes quite often. Right now, there’s no hotter topic within the talent management community than workforce planning.

The reasons are simple: with the current economy driving revenues down dramatically, many senior executives are examining how to plan ahead in order to increase their firms’ capabilities, reduce costs, and survive the economic chaos likely to continue for some time.

Organizations need an effective talent management plan that will allow them to “explode out of the box” at the first sight of economic recovery, yet one that doesn’t threaten economic sustainability in the short term.

While most in talent management are continuing to react with stale cost containment approaches developed decades ago, strategic talent managers are stepping forward with robust workforce planning solutions and new work models that account for the significant changes in both how people work and live that have occurred in the last 20 years.

If you are interested in doing more than talking about being strategic, here are some recommended action steps to help improve your organization’s workforce planning.

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You can’t read a newspaper these days without reading about organizations that are implementing employee furloughs in order to save money and to avoid layoffs. They might seem like a good idea but they might end up not saving money at all and could cause more turmoil than they are worth.

This article will cover the many problems associated with putting employees on furlough, or a temporary leave of absence or temporary layoff and a “lower-impact” alternative to permanent layoffs.

Under furlough programs, employees are asked or forced to take days off without pay. The net effect is a reduction of an employee’s annual income. Furloughs are being used in a variety of industries from healthcare and education to transportation and high technology.

Firms that have deployed them recently include newspaper giant Gannett, network appliance superstar Cisco, computer chip maker Intel, the state of California, Arizona State University, and the #1 car maker in the world Toyota.

While the tool may be popular and widely used, that doesn’t make it effective or the best choice.

Managers Lack Courage to Make Tough Decisions

Firms use furloughs instead of layoffs because they lack the courage to look individual employees in the eye and terminate them.

The key to any effective salary-savings program is to target the individuals who add little value compared to their salary. The process of selecting low-performers can cause turmoil among employees, so managers take the easy way out by cutting a portion of the salary of every employee.

In my view, managers get paid to make tough decisions, not to avoid them.

This “peanut butter” approach where you spread the pain evenly might seem like a good socialist type idea, but if your goal is to maintain a high level of organizational performance, furloughs can cause more problems than they solve.

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Why is unemployment higher than it has been for decades and massive layoffs announced daily? Is something going on that is deeper than a recession? In past recessions the general reason for layoffs is twofold. The first reason is to use the recession as an excuse to remove the less-productive employees. Every organization has employees who perform marginally, but are not bad enough to discharge outright in normal times. The second reason is because customer demand for the products or services has declined and there is no need for workers who have nothing to do. The underlying assumption is that at some point customers will return and the workers will be re-employed as before. That’s the reason unemployment insurance (in the United States) is limited to a few weeks. The expectation is that workers will be brought back or rehired elsewhere in a short time.

On the other hand, recruiters and hiring managers still report that it is exceedingly difficult to find workers for certain key jobs which include computer-security experts, computer engineers, pharmacists, health workers, and even senior-level executives. The time it takes to fill open positions seems to have increased, and hiring managers frequently complain that they have to settle for “second best.”

Is there something we don’t understand going on?

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When I supported the contract side of recruitment, it was sometimes necessary to share with temporary employees feedback from clients. It was more likely the case I would need to coach the direct supervisor to improve their communication with the temporary contractor and often this had the effect of improving their communication with the rest of their employees in turn. As we all know, there are lots of passive-aggressive department managers out there!

I’ve had a lot of experience writing performance appraisals for employees and reviewing performance appraisals written by other managers for their employees. I’ve spent a lot of time coaching managers on how to give constructive performance appraisals. So, I’m not surprised that many managers don’t use performance appraisals appropriately as a tool to give feedback to their employees. Often, I’ve heard managers vent about employees who aren’t meeting their expectations. In nearly all instances, I found performance appraisals were either not given to the employee or were written in such a manner as to be counterproductive. Even the administering of an otherwise ‘OK’ written appraisal can be detrimental to changing lacking behaviors by how the manager gives the appraisal.

There are ground rules to giving an effective performance appraisal.

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To most people, the Super Bowl is a fun event to watch. However, because the game is highly competitive and because only the very best teams make it to the event, there are some critical lessons that corporate managers and recruiters can learn from competitive sports and the Super Bowl:

Lesson #1 -“Minor colleges” produce some of the best players on Super Bowl teams.

It’s clear from examining the player rosters that most Super Bowl players don’t come from powerhouse football colleges. Some examples include:

• The Star Players. The four most notable star players in the game all come from non-football powers. For Arizona, star quarterback Kurt Warner came from Northern Iowa - Burlington and star wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald came from the University of Pittsburgh. For Pittsburgh, starting quarterback Ben Rothlisberger came from Miami of Ohio and running back Willie Parker came from North Carolina. Not a single one of these players former university teams made it into the Associated Press Top 25 rankings this year.
• The Remaining Players. Of the 112 active players on the final rosters of the combined teams, only four came from this year’s top college teams that are perennial powerhouses (i.e. Florida, Oklahoma, and USC).
• The Arizona Cardinals roster successfully recruited players from non-powerhouse teams like Louisiana-Lafayette, Kansas State, Richmond, Northern Iowa, Hawaii, Brown, Delaware, Fresno State, Tennessee State, Trinity University, UC Davis, Northern Iowa, and of course, Clarion!
• The world champion Pittsburgh Steelers roster includes players from such non-powerhouse university teams like Hofstra, Clemson, Kent State, Marshall, Tulane, Southern Mississippi, TCU, Northern Colorado, Syracuse, Rutgers, Indiana (of Pa.), La.-Lafayette, and perennial powerhouse…Tiffin.

Lesson #2 –“Experience” isn’t required to become a Super Bowl head coach.

At least this year, previous experience as a successful head coach isn’t a requirement for getting your team to the Super Bowl.

The best head coaches aren’t always the most experienced. You can’t say the coaches of either team this year are experienced, veteran head coaches. Neither has been a head coach at a Super Bowl before. Both would have to be considered as “inexperienced” head coaches (both are only in their second year of being a head coach anywhere in the NFL), and both are relatively young.

Mike Tomlin of Pittsburgh, the NFL Coach of the year, is only 36 years old (the youngest Super Bowl coach ever) and Arizona’s Ken Whisenhunt is only 44.

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