BEE Partner, South Africa Economy Watch

Investment No. 3: Spend resources to secure your leadership pipeline

Any South African firm today is really an emerging globaliser. Therefore, it has to ensure that it can develop great leaders and, indeed, a succession of them. There is always the temptation for a senior executive or an executive team to focus on building a legacy based on their own policies and achievements, rather than _establishing a pipeline of leaders. Establishing a leadership pipeline is a strategic activity built over the long term and is the result of a _cumulative process. This means that those in senior management positions need to develop their people in order to create depth of leadership talent in the organisation. To accomplish this, senior managers can give their staff special assignments with increasing levels of responsibility. Or they can develop a greater sense of real delegation with added responsibility for recommendations. The following case example illustrates how the world famous company, Caterpillar, addressed the issue of its leadership pipeline.

Investment No. 4: Expand good talent- management practices beyond leadership

For any South African company wishing to be a formidable competitor in the global environment, management needs to ensure that the right people, who possess the right capabilities, are deployed in the right positions. Most world-class organisations have reali_sed that this concept is no longer just a fundamental requirement, b_ut that it has become a core competency, the management of which may determine success or failure in the marketplace. The aim is to develop people from within the organisation who understand the company and its culture, and, of course, to develop their loyalty to the company. The emphasis should be on balancing the needs and aspirations of the individual employee with those of the organisation and, as far as possible, customising any people-moves in the organisation to be mutually beneficial. The following guidelines will assist managers in developing world-class talent-management practices:⁶

• Broaden the employee’s experience with a lateral shift. This has become established practice in many organisations, owing to the fact that in today’s global marketplace, organisations tend to be less hierarchical and therefore much flatter. Upward moves are not always possible. A sideways move may well provide the employee with variety and the chance to build on his or her experience, thereby becoming a greater asset to the company.
• Try to identify and develop groups of jobs, clustered by role, function and even level, so that generic skills can be developed. The idea is to develop pools of talent that are adaptable and capable of filling a number of roles. Each pool of talent needs to be larger than the number of jobs it covers to accommodate the development of longer-term succession planning, as well as short-term replacements.
• Develop a framework for technical and generic competencies, and align these with the skills required by the organisation or a specific department. Develop an assessment methodology within the framework that can be used to assess the suitability of individuals for a particular position.

• Ensure that the HR function is kept abreast of company strategy and where the company is going in the marketplace. There should be a close relationship between those who shape the company’s future and those responsible for ensuring that the right calibre and number of employees are available to help take the company into the future.
• Ensure that a sense of transparency and fairness exists in the talent-management process. Individual employees should be aware of how the company manages talent and, in particular, how succession planning is being implemented. This should include how the company selects people for specific roles, and the kinds of jobs available in the organisation. Selection procedures ought to be transparent, and the entire process should be made available to all interested parties.

Investment No. 5: Invest in company systems where necessary

Most company systems have been designed to benefit the organisation rather than the customer. Customers experience the service provided by a company through its employees. However, those employees have to work within the systems that have been established to assist the company to function. Strategists therefore need to consider the systems that are in place in the company, and management should be prepared to change those systems if it will assist the strategy to achieve its objectives. Because the creation of service superiority has a pivotal role to play in being globally competitive, strategists should ensure that company systems, whether th_ey be sales, administration, marketing, financial or whatever, are designed and functioning in a manner that will help the company to achieve service superiority.

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