Auto manufacturing has to activate leadership talent supply chain
What comes to your mind when you hear `Supply Chain’ in the manufacturing context? Often people would refer to supply chain as the backbone of the entire organisation or the industry which ensures smooth flow of goods from the place it is manufactured to the place it is sold. The good news is that organisations invest millions to keep improving the way they manage the supply chain. They invest in building the transportation network, tools, supply chain management software and more. But the bad news is that organisations invest the least on the talent that runs this backbone.
While organisations have not invested in talent, there are a few other challenges the industry has faced over the years. Thanks to the high paying jobs in the new age industries like IT/ITES and now the Start-ups, there has been steady talent erosion from the engineering colleges. Almost for two decades the students who were the ‘A’ talent have picked industries other than their core specialisations. Not to mention the brain drain that has steadily happened to the US, Europe and Australia over the years. This has left the manufacturing sector with the ‘B’ talent and it has been forced to manage with that. Couple that with poor investment in talent development. The feedback has been that the middle layers of the organisations are looking weak and senior leaders are showing less confidence in the readiness of their talent. DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast has shown a downward trend in the leader readiness scores.
Another challenge is all the baby boomers, who have given their blood and sweat to the organisation, are on the verge of retirement. Most manufacturing organisations have one common problem; their heroes are going to retire. If you look closely at many auto companies, some senior leaders have already got extensions as there is no one below them to replace them.
To make the above challenges worse, senior leaders have been defensive. The number one complaint that all business leaders have is that if the leaders in manufacturing are assessed and their scores came out poor, they dismiss the data. They find ways and methods to mitigate those poor scores to promote the talent from within, not realising that, “Your organisation will be as strong as its weakest link.”
This is pushing companies to look for talent outside, without realising that even the other firms are in the same boat. Good talent is scarce and internal is not good enough. Sounds to me like a catch 22 situation. What should organisations do?
Here are a few things that organisations can start doing right now:
Make Leadership Talent Acceleration an imperative: All organisations have good intent to grow leaders within, but most of them have one common challenge, senior leaders are not investing time enough to make leadership acceleration a culture. If organisations want to get serious to build a talent supply chain, they need to add accelerating leadership talent as one of their strategic imperatives and review it very closely.
Aim for the right competencies: DDI’s High Resolution Leadership research that analysed assessment data of more than 15,000 leaders globally found that competencies like Entrepreneurship, Business Savvy, Driving Execution, Decision-Making and Leading Change have direct relation to the topline and bottom-line of the organisations. Unfortunately all organisations start developing leaders on these competencies only after they reach the middle of the corporate ladder. Our research found that it is too late to develop these. So catch
them young and start developing them.
The other common gap is organisations have good competency frameworks, but they are not linked to the strategic direction of the organisation and a right blend of cultural priorities. In the absence of that we are almost saying that performance is what counts and organisation’s context and culture are irrelevant.
Being organisational advocate of talent: Most leaders lack clarity on how to understand, interpret and identify high potential talent. You will find huge inconsistencies in the way leaders define potential. This happens in spite of the fact that many organisations have a common definition of potential. HR need not just educate but upskill leaders and help calibrate to make them more consistent. This will automatically promote organisational advocacy rather than departmental promotion.
Identify new upstream talent early-on and start grooming them to avoid talent shortage in future. While we can debate if this is a good approach as the GET’s are very young and have very little experience, moreover corporates might have a challenge to retain talent. So why invest? The reality is that if you do not develop talent it is a very risky proposition. Successful organisations worry early on to identify talent across levels and start developing them simultaneously.
Conducting a good diagnostics is very critical to provide robust development input for individuals and for the organisation. The key factor is to focus on data not for elimination but for development, since we have already done focused discussion for screening and identifying talent. Once the inputs are received, it is important to work with individuals and groups to craft a meaningful and actionable development plan. Equally critical is ensuring that the managers and business HRs are skilled adequately to conduct the development dialogue over the period of time.
Once diagnostics is done, working on right development experience is important. The common mistake is organisations putting overemphasis on training or projects. Good balance between formal and informal learning is must.
Planning for sustainability: This is the lifeline of sustained talent supply chain and it should not be run like an initiative. Define the lead and lag measures of success and the scorecard that needs to be reviewed with senior management.
Building a sustained talent supply chain has to be crafted as an organisational agenda and the highest level of leadership of the organisation should get involved actively in it. It cannot be just an HR agenda, it is time to rethink.