Recruitment - What is a bad hire?

[A bad hire is] someone who is a chronic complainer, who is not happy, who blames others, who doesn’t take responsibility, who’s not honest, who doesn’t trust other people. A bad hire would be someone who needs specific direction and waits to be told what to do. A poor hire would be someone who wasn’t flexible and who says, “It’s not my job.”

"Reinventing organization"
F. Laloux

HR topics - Corporate culture

How to change the corporate culture 

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting


Lear corporation faced the challange of changing the company culture. Harvard Business Review has collected their experience and the way they did.
Interesting reading for HR people and top managers who face the same need.

Read more on HBR

University EMBA lessons

MIP-TONGJI University EMBA
HR & Organizational behaviors class

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting



Today I started my EMBA class at MIP-Tongji University in Shanghai.

The lessons are about HR & Organizational behaviors. The EMBA students are all Chinese entrepreneurs and top managers in the industries of Design, Urban planning, Engineering, Real Estate.

During this first 4 days we spoke about Engagement and Performance, HR Business Partnership, Staffing, Performance management, Learning, Succession planning & talent management, Compensation & benefit.

Here below the Syllabus:

Leaders in different industries, organizational levels and business growth stages may encounter similar but not identical challenges in terms of people and organization, but they will have the same objective: improving performance and engagement within their organization. Taking the perspective of organizational leaders, we are going to discuss the main organizational challenges and to provide approaches, knowledge, theory and best practices to improve the effectiveness of organizations and people.

The course is structured in 2 main parts:

1)      Human Resources Management

2)      Organizational behaviour

The “Human Resources Management” part focuses on the most important processes and approaches finalized to improve performance and engagement in the organization. Human Resources can be managed having a business partnership approach and playing several integrated roles: Strategist, Change agent, Employee Champion, in addition to the most traditional Administrative expert role. We will discuss about Leaders and HR function responsibilities on people and organization. Through examples and best practices, we see how the recruitment process can be optimized in order to bring the right talents in the organization. We focus on long term plans for talent identification and development in harmony with the company business strategy. Competencies, learning, performance management, compensation and benefit are the other HR aspects the course is focusing on. 

We study how to set up the structure and manage the development of an organization, manage effectively the change, leverage the corporate culture asset and communicate internally and externally having in mind an employer branding approach.

The “Organizational Behaviour part could be defined as the “study of people’s behaviour within organisations and relative dynamics”, in other words how people and teams influence and view the organisation, in order to reach their objectives, as a group or as an individual, and therefore achieve the success of the organisation.

Lessons focus on individuals, team and organization, they show how to manage group dynamics and each person’s personal contribution, in the most positive way.

We see the value and challenges of individual diversity, and aspects linked to self- awareness and management, personality, emotional intelligence, career anchors and values, stress management, cognitive styles and cultural diversity.

We therefore cover topics related to the team: group dynamics, stages in team development, the roles in a team, the potential dysfunctions of a team and how to overcome them.

During the course there is also a session focused on Coaching theory and practice for leaders. Coaching is a very powerful approach that is more and more used by leaders and external coaches to develop talents or people who have to improve their performance in the organization. Coaching can be used to address behavioural change, lack of performance, career management, cross-cultural or communication challenges. Coaching is a perfect topic to close our course: it is both an HR practice and a managerial skill for  organizational behaviours improvement .

Some of the materials and examples discussed in class focus on situations specific to China and organization operating in “knowledge intensive” service industries; others represent global best practices and knowledge and thought not directly linked to your current environment can provide ideas and approaches that you can use to improve the effectiveness of your organization.



Leadership - Difficult conversations

How to have a performance conversation with an employee

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

Having a honest and candid conversation with your team member is never easy especially when you have to address a poor performance. How to make it professionally without risking to lower your staff engagement? 

On HRBartender Sharlyn Lauby gives useful tips - read more on HRbartender

2013 Luxury HR report - China

Which are the main HRM challenges in Luxury retail industry in China?

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

Based on an interesting research made by  财富品质研究院 & 上海东浩人力资源有限公司 here below what Staff, Managers and HR think are the main HRM challenges faced by the Retail luxury industry in 2013

Main HRM challanges

Staff    Managers        HR High Turnover rate                           27%        20%         42%    Management of 80s and 90s              16%        25%        17% Shaping/sharing company culture        33%       24%        16% Recruiting/performance review            12%        20%        15% Others                                           12%        11%        10%

New trends HR - gamification

Performance management can be gamified?




By Giorgia Madonno - Marco Polo Consulting

Health care system in US are thinking about it.
The team at AMPT Health have create a new SaaS solution that allow gamified peer-to-peer evaluation. 
Read more on Forbes

Onboarding

How to improve employees 
engagement 
from day 1



By Giorgia Madonno - Marco Polo Consulting

Onboarding is a key process to ensure employees engagement, but in many companies it is managed poorly.

Several are the reasons: the process is not properly planned, managers are not focused enough, HR plays only an administrative role, onboarding results are not tracked. 

Let's see some good practices to manage day1. 

Read this interesting article from Le muse. More on Forbes

Social media and digital for HR

Which is the possible application of social media and digital in HR processes in China?

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

"Social and digital" are two trendy concepts in the business community today. They have a huge and world wide impact on marketing and sales, but how are they impacting a more traditional field like Human Resources management?

In China, where the usage of social media has exploded in the last years, they start to be used also to improve some of the most important HR processes and the more innovative companies are approaching it in a systematic way.

Our company, Marco Polo consulting, is more and more intrigued by the opportunities offered by digital and we are introducing them in our scope of HR consulting services .

Based on our experience in Asia, social media and digital are used mainly for employer branding and recruitment, for internal communication, knowledge sharing and learning. They may be integrated with gamification approach. Let's see them one by one.

Leadership competencies: performance management

End of the year: 
Time for performance review and objective setting

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

      We are almost there. The end of the year is coming.  Time for budget, performance review and objectives setting for the new year coming. 

Time to refresh some tips for evaluators, because we all know, performance management is important.

Do

·    Make it clear at the beginning of the year how you’ll evaluate your employees with individual performance planning sessions

·    Give your employees a copy of their appraisal before the meeting so they may have their initial emotional response in private

·    Deliver a positive message to your good performers by mainly concentrating on their strengths and achievements during the conversation

Don’t

·       Offer general feedback; be specific on behaviors you want your employee to stop, start, and continue

·    Talk about compensation during the review; 

·    Sugarcoat the review for your poor performers; use the face-to-face as an opportunity to demand improvement

Read more on Harvard Business Review

Capability building

Why companies in China need support for capability building

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

From the "attached" article by Mc Kinsey Insight I extrapolated some key points (in black) about the challanges that multinational companies face in building capability in China. It is exactly what our clients face when they ask us for support (in blue)

Challenges:

1) Perennial challenge for multinationals: the Chinese context and culture, which may require local tailoring of global approaches. Often an effective balance between centralization and decentralization is difficult to find and companies need an help to set up a proper discussion on the topic between global HQ and local subsidiaries

2) Chinese companies generally lack a systematic approach to nurturing employees moving up the organizational ladder. They misconstrue capability building as a classroom activity, missing the impact of linking it to actual business. And they are too inflexible either to fire underperformers or to reward and promote employees, including managers, who change their behavior and adopt the necessary mind-sets. Succession planning, talent development and performance management are processes that still need to be improved in many companies in China, for this reason we are asked to support companies to set up these new processes or to improve the current ones.

3) In many Chinese companies today, capability building remains synonymous with classroom training, partially thanks to the tradition of rote learning in schools When we audit the training system of companies in China very often we have to recommend and help them to develop integrated learning systems where the traditional classroom training is integrated with experience learning, coaching, e-learning, individual development plans, communities of sharing and gaming approaches to learning

4) Historically, many human-resource departments emphasized quantity over quality, placing priorities such as cross-functional collaboration and leadership skills on the back burner. Even today, many HR functions do no more than oversee salaries and benefits, relying largely on one-to-one training in local plants. The HR competence in China is quite young, HR teams, expecially in medium companies, need support to build their capabilities and learn a more sofisticated HR Business partnership approach. Co-design and co-implementation with external HR senior experts who coach them is often the best solutions,  these programs can last from a 6 months to 2 years of part-time on-site or off-site support.

5) Most of its leaders had transferred from technical positions into general-management ones, without sufficient training or coaching on how to manage that transition Coaching programs are very effective solutions to prepare individual contributors to become managers of others and build a broader skill-set

Here some practices companies have started:

1) The venture has now set up a “corporate university” to encourage cross-functional collaboration among a range of functions—notably, engineering, finance, manufacturing, purchasing, quality, and sales—as well as better communication with global headquarters to ensure a successful launch Cross-functional collaboration is a very big challange in China, we work with teams (expecially executive teams) to enhance the trust among team members, to improve the ability to manage conflict, and to set team objectives that canalize the energies of the team on a common target instead of individual targets, this is a true silos buster.

2) Developing Chinese teaching materials to help solve problems, building day-to-day business problems around products that participants would find in the Chinese market, and localizing global training materials through culturally appropriate metaphors and examples. Cross-cultural knowledge is key for every practice in China, the biggest mistake is to assume that what works in our culture works and make sense also in another. Cross-cultural programs can help to increase cross-cultural awarness

Read more on mckinsey insight

Exapts or local managers in emerging countries? see the third option

Beyond expats: Better managers for emerging markets

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

The CEO of Manpower, in an interview published by Mckinsey Quaterly, proposes "revers expatriation" approach - rotate local managers through some of the company’s more mature operations instead of sending expat to emerging markets.

For sure the localization of leaders is a trend and the proposed approach can help to develop leadership skills and build bridges across the company locations.

However, based on my consultancy experience on this topic, this has to be done wisely and with a medium-term perspective:

1) recognizing the gaps that local leaders still have (for some key and complex positions balancing with foreigners' expertise and managerial approach is still needed)
2) having very well structured programs for "reverse expatriation", involving both the host and the sending organization in preparing it
3) ensure a strong "buy in" of the host organization. Too often local managers sent to mature market operations are "abandoned" and no-one take charge of their learning path
4) consider to assign a organizational position to the "revers exapt" while abroad in order to challange him/her with responsibilities that can faster the learning pace
5) providing cross cultural coaching and support before, during and after the expereince, in order to capitalize it

And for foreign expats, which is the professional perspective? The number of opportunities for foreigners in emerging markets is decreasing and we assist more and more to a localization of contracts for foreigners (Local contract + benefits).

In the medium term the point is to see if signals for a tird approach, that usually follow the localization trend, will emerge: globalization for diversity improvement.
The sequence is often the following:
1) Expatriation from Corporate for internalization of the company
2) Localization for the adaptation to the market
3) Globalization for diversity improvement and global competition

When companies succed to localize the management they start to feel a need of diversification of leaders in order to better compete in a globalized market and they may start to rotate people across markets to build diverse management teams. So in the future it may happen to have a bright Chinese leader sent to Europe, a Brasilian talent to China, an European to US and so on.
Let's wait to see.

Read more on mckinsey quaterly

HR I-Tech

I-tech for HR: just a fashionable tendency or a real opportunity for improvment?

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consultancy


Every where we find articles, events, books saying i-tech is the new fronteer for HR.

What do you think, is it just a fast "burned" trend or a real and sustanable change of paradigm for HR? 

Read more on the topic:

• Continue on Forbes
• Continue on hrtecheurope.com
• Continue on Forbes about gamification

and tell us your opinion: Go to survey (very short - just 1 question)

 

Understanding better your self means better career choices and development

A useful (Free of charges) personality test

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

You can find here below a link that you can use to make a test and understand better your personality. It gives you useful insights to better plan your career or develop your soft-skills. Continue on Findingpotential.com

The importance of employee engagement

Weekend reading for Leaders: 2 articles on the art of recognition and motivation

5 Ways Leaders Rock Employee Recognition
 
By Meghan M. Biro | Forbes

We are all aware that employee recognition is a successful practice to engage and retain employees, but we also know how difficult it is. We forget, we do too late, we seem half-hearted . Let’s read some suggestions from Forbes on how we can improve. Continue on Forbes


What managers need to know about motivating employees

By Darren Tracey | Staffmotivationmatters

In this article we can refresh the meaning of motivation, the importance of recognition and the role of managers in driving it. Nothing especially new but, let’s refocus, sometimes it is just a matter of attention.  Continue on staffmotivationmatters

The organizational challenges of the internazionalization

The challenging relation between foreign HQ and local Chinese subsidiary, the supporting role of HR

By Giorgia Madonno | “Il Quaderno” Italian Chamber of Commerce in China

A critical aspect that several foreign companies must face in managing a local branch or a production site in China is the challenging relationship between the Head Quarter and the local subsidiary. This challenge involves in particular the following aspects: 

• The Corporate vague perception of the local reality and the difficulty of building a trust relation between Corporate and local subsidiary. 

• The balance between decentralization and centralization in the organization and decision-making process.

• The communication processes between Headquarter and local branch.

Leadership & Career management books - recommended by us (1)

The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, James Noel



An updated and revised version of the bestselling The Leadership Pipeline - the critical resource for how companies can grow leaders from the inside. In business, leadership at every level is a requisite for company survival. Yet the leadership pipeline -the internal strategy to grow leaders - in many companies is dry or nonexistent. Drawing on their experiences at many Fortune 500 companies, the authors show how organizations can develop leadership at every level by identifying future leaders, assessing their corporate confidence, planning their development, and measuring their results. New to this edition is 65 pages of new material to update the model, share new stories and add new advice based on the ten more years of experience. The authors have also added a "Frequently Asked Questions" section to the end of each chapter.

The book describes very clearly which are the different requirements from each  Leadership career step in terms of skills, values, Time focus and suggest learning actions aimed to develop people for the next transition

Leadership career steps:

1) Individual Constributors
2) Manager of others
2) Manager of managers
3) Functional Manager
4) Business Manager
5) Group Manager
6) Enterprise manager