WHITE PAPERS FEATURED:

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1 VOLUME 5 BUSINESS INSIGHTS FROM UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT WHITE PAPERS FEATURED: Developing Leaders in a VUCA Environment Got Game? The Use of Gaming in Learning and Development Building A Resilient Organizational Culture The Big Data Talent Gap BONUS SECTION! Reprinted from the best selling book One Page Talent Management

2 A message from the President of Executive Development at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Greetings again from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We have had a productive year in executive development, and I am excited to share with you that our efforts were reflected in the annual Financial Times ranking of executive education providers. UNC Kenan-Flagler was ranked 8 th in the world for custom executive education and 4 th among U.S. institutions. We also ranked highly in many individual categories, notably 2 nd in the world for value, 1 st among our U.S.-based competitors. We are very pleased to be recognized by our partners for the value we bring to their organizations through their talent development efforts. In addition to this news, I am also happy to share with you the latest volume of ideas@work, our white paper journal dedicated to exploring critical issues and best practices in talent management. Two of our papers focus on today s volatile and constantly changing business environment. Developing Leaders in a VUCA Environment provides talent managers with ideas, guidance, and examples on how to address the shift needed in leadership development to adapt to the new normal, while Building a Resilient Organizational Culture focuses on how to cultivate and nurture a culture of resilience at all levels of the organization. This volume also features a chapter from what s been called the talent management bible - Marc Effron s and Miriam Ort s One Page Talent Management. This practical, sciencebased guide to accelerating talent growth has become a best seller in talent management circles, and the chapter we ve included outlines the barriers to building talent and the philosophy for successful talent development based on simplicity, accountability, and transparency. The other two white papers included in this volume examine new trends in talent development. Got Game? The Use of Gaming in Learning and Development takes a serious look at how gaming technology can be used to develop organizational talent. The Big Data Talent Gap explores the talent implications of the big data revolution. I hope that this journal provides value to you and that you find some useful, actionable ideas within it that you can apply in your own organization. All of our white papers, research projects, and webinars are available in the resource library on our website ( As always, thank you for your support of UNC Executive Development. Susan Cates [email protected] Consistently ranked one of the world s best business schools, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School is known for experiential learning and teamwork, superior teaching, innovative research, and a collaborative culture. Our commitment to developing socially responsible, results-driven leaders distinguishes our programs. We educate people at every stage of their careers and prepare them to lead successfully in the global business environment. At UNC Executive Development, we are committed to providing new, impactful learning experiences to help our partners successfully manage and develop their employee talent. 2 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

3 Inside this issue V C U A Developing Leaders in a VUCA Environment page 4 Got Game? The Use of Gaming in Learning and Development page 14 Building A Resilient Organizational Culture page 22 The Big Data Talent Gap page 32 One Page Talent Management page 42 (Note: The information or conclusions expressed in the following white papers are the authors review of findings expressed by the organizations. All brand representations are registered trademarks owned by the respective companies or organizations.) 3

4 Developing Leaders in a VUCA Environment Kirk Lawrence Program Director UNC Executive Development Introduction In The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman notes that the rate of change today is much different than in the past. Whenever civilization has gone through one of these disruptive, dislocating technical revolutions like Gutenberg s introduction of the printing press the whole world has changed in profound ways, he writes. But there is something different about the flattening of the world that is going to be qualitatively different from other such profound changes: the speed and breadth with which it is taking hold.this flattening process is happening at warp speed and directly or indirectly touching a lot more people on the planet at once. The faster and broader this transition to a new era, the more likely is the potential of disruption. To put it another way, the experiences of high-tech companies in the last few decades who failed to navigate the rapid changes brought about in their marketplace by these types of forces may be a warning to all the businesses, institutions and nation states that are now facing these inevitable, even predictable, changes but lack the leadership, flexibility and imagination to adapt not because they are not smart or aware, but because the speed of change is simply overwhelming them. This rapid flattening, as Friedman calls it, is creating a new environment that strategic business leaders are increasingly calling a VUCA environment. Coined in the late 1990 s, the military-derived acronym stands for the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity terms that reflect an increasingly unstable and rapidly changing business world. This new VUCA environment will require HR and talent management professionals to change the focus and methods of leadership development. Promise This white paper: Discusses the history of VUCA and how it applies to business strategy and development. Explores how VUCA is relevant to leadership development. Discusses the VUCA Prime, which flips the acronym to focus on vision, understanding, clarity, and agility. Offers suggestions on what HR and talent managers must do to change their leadership development approach to foster leadership vision, understanding, clarity, and agility. 4 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

5 DEVELOPING LEADERS IN A VUCA ENVIRONMENT The Origins of VUCA The notion of VUCA was introduced by the U.S. Army War College to describe the more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, multilateral world which resulted from the end of the Cold War (Kinsinger & Walch, 2012). The acronym itself was not created until the late 1990s, and it was not until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that notion and acronym really took hold. VUCA was subsequently adopted by strategic business leaders to describe the chaotic, turbulent, and rapidly changing business environment that has become the new normal. By all accounts, the chaotic new normal in business is real. The financial crisis of , for example, rendered many business models obsolete, as organizations throughout the world were plunged into turbulent environments similar to those faced by the military. At the same time, rapid changes marched forward as technological developments like social media exploded, the world s population continued to simultaneously grow and age, and global disasters disrupted lives, economies, and businesses. 5

6 VUCA and Leadership Development This new VUCA environment, as Friedman notes, is taxing even the most able of leaders who may find their skills growing obsolete as quickly as their organizations change in this volatile, unpredictable landscape. Leadership agility and adaptability are now required skills if organizations are to succeed in this VUCA world. As Horney, Pasmore, and O Shea, authors of Leadership Agility: A Business Imperative for a VUCA World note, to succeed, leaders must make continuous shifts in people, process, technology, and structure. This requires flexibility and quickness in decision making. (Horney, Pasmore, O Shea, 2010). (For additional insights on a new approach for developing leadership agility, refer to the UNC Executive Development white paper: Leadership Agility: Using Improv to Build Critical Skills.) The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) concurs. A recent BCG study concluded that organizations today must shift their business models and their leadership skills to become adaptive firms. Adaptive firms can adjust and learn better, faster, and more economically than their peers, giving them an adaptive advantage. Adaptive firms, the study notes, include Apple, Google, 3M, Target, and Amazon. A report by the Center for Creative Leadership (Petrie, 2011) also notes that today s VUCA business environment requires leaders to possess more complex and adaptive thinking abilities. It also notes that the methods used to develop these new skill requirements (like on-the-job training, coaching, and mentoring) have not changed much, and as a result, leaders are not developing fast enough or in the right ways to keep up with the new normal for business. HR and talent management professionals must position their organizations to succeed in today s turbulent business environment by developing agile leaders. Applying the VUCA model as a framework to re-tool leadership development models may enable HR and talent management professionals to identify and foster the leaders their organizations need now and in the future. Example: Unilever In 2010, Unilever, one of the world s largest consumer goods companies, pledged to double the size of their business in the next 10 years while reducing its environmental footprint and increasing its social impact. Sustainability became a central component of their new business model, one based on VUCA principles. When asked by Forbes contributor Avi Dan why they changed their business model, Keith Weed, chief marketing and communication officer for Unilever, responded: We look at the world through a lens, which we call VUCA, which stands for Volatile, Unstable, Complex, and Ambiguous. So you can say, It s a very tough world, or you can say, It s a world that s changing fast, and we can help consumers navigate through it. Two-and-a-half billion more people will be added to the planet between now and 2050, of which 2 billion will be added in developing countries. The digital revolution, the shift in consumer spending, all this suggests that companies have to reinvent the way they do business. (Dan, 2012.) To meet that VUCA challenge, Unilever has also changed its leadership development model. Source: Sullivan, 2012 January. 6 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

7 DEVELOPING LEADERS IN A VUCA ENVIRONMENT VUCA Defined V The V in the VUCA acronym stands for volatility. It means the nature, speed, volume, and magnitude of change that is not in a predictable pattern (Sullivan, 2012 January 16). Volatility is turbulence, a phenomenon that is occurring more frequently than in the past. The BCG study found that half of the most turbulent financial quarters during the past 30 years have occurred since The study also concluded that financial turbulence has increased in intensity and persists longer than in the past. (Sullivan, 2012 October 22). Other drivers of turbulence in business today include digitization, connectivity, trade liberalization, global competition, and business model innovation (Reeves & Love, 2012). The U in the VUCA acronym stands for uncertainty, U or the lack of predictability in issues and events (Kinsinger & Walch, 2012). These volatile times make it difficult for leaders to use past issues and events as predictors of future outcomes, making forecasting extremely difficult and decision-making challenging (Sullivan, 2012 January 16). The C in VUCA stands for complexity. As HR C thought leader John Sullivan notes (2012 January 16), there are often numerous and difficult-to-understand causes and mitigating factors (both inside and outside the organization) involved in a problem. This layer of complexity, added to the turbulence of change and the absence of past predictors, adds to the difficulty of decision making. It also leads to confusion, which can cause ambiguity, the last letter in the acronym. A Ambiguity is the lack of clarity about the meaning of an event (Caron, 2009), or, as Sullivan writes, the causes and the who, what, where, how, and why behind the things that are happening (that) are unclear and hard to ascertain. (2012 January 16). Col. Eric G. Kail defines ambiguity in the VUCA model as the inability to accurately conceptualize threats and opportunities before they become lethal. (Kail, 2010 December 3). A symptom of organizational ambiguity, according to Kail, is the frustration that results when compartmentalized accomplishments fail to add up to a comprehensive or enduring success. 7

8 The VUCA Prime The VUCA model identifies the internal and external conditions affecting organizations today. The VUCA Prime was developed by Bob Johansen, distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future and the author of Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World. Johansen proposes that the best VUCA leaders are characterized by vision, understanding, clarity, and agility - the flips to the VUCA model. The VUCA Prime can be seen as the continuum of skills leaders can develop to help make sense of leading in a VUCA world. HR and talent management professionals can use the VUCA Prime as a skills and abilities blueprint when creating leadership development plans. In the VUCA Prime, volatility can be countered with vision because vision is even more vital in turbulent times. Leaders with a clear vision of where they want their organizations to be in three to five years can better weather volatile environmental changes such as economic downturns or new competition in their markets, for example, by making business decisions to counter the turbulence while keeping the organization s vision in mind. Uncertainty can be countered with understanding, the ability of a leader to stop, look, and listen. To be effective in a VUCA environment, leaders must learn to look and listen beyond their functional areas of expertise to make sense of the volatility and to lead with vision. This requires leaders to communicate with all levels of employees in their organization, and to develop and demonstrate teamwork and collaboration skills. Complexity can be countered with clarity, the deliberative process to make sense of the chaos. In a VUCA world, chaos comes swift and hard. Leaders, who can quickly and clearly tune into all of the minutiae associated with the chaos, can make better, more informed business decisions. Finally, ambiguity can be countered with the ability to communicate across the organization and to move quickly to apply solutions (Kinsinger and Walch, 2012). Vision, understanding, clarity, and agility are not mutually exclusive in the VUCA prime. Rather, they are intertwined elements that help managers become stronger VUCA leaders. VUCA leaders must have foresight to see where they are going but must also remain flexible about how they get there (Apollo Research Institute staff, 2012). They must be self-aware about their strengths and weaknesses as leaders, adaptable, open to change, and, according to the Center for Creative Leadership, knowledgeable about their organization beyond their function (Management Education Group staff, 2011). Finally, they must work collaboratively and be excellent communicators to thrive in a complex VUCA environment (Kail, 2010 December 3). Above all, VUCA learners must be able to learn fast because change is constant. These skills and abilities are a far cry from the more function-specific skills and abilities leaders needed in the past to succeed. HR and talent management professionals must refocus their leadership development efforts to hone these more strategic, complex critical-thinking skills. VUCA Prime V ision U nderstanding C larity A gility 8 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

9 DEVELOPING LEADERS IN A VUCA ENVIRONMENT Example: McDonald s Fast-food giant McDonald s was a frontrunner in adapting VUCA and VUCA Prime principles in its leadership development programs. In 2001, the company launched a new leadership development program for high-potential Regional Manager candidates. The company realized that there was a need for a specialized leadership development program for this position because the expectations and challenges for the role had changed significantly over the previous decade. These expectations and challenges included heightened competition, the increased challenge of a growing market share, increased job autonomy as the organization became more decentralized, and the increased expectation for regional managers to act strategically as well as tactically. The new leadership development program included the following goals: 1. To help participants take a critical look at themselves and their current management capabilities and to develop a personal learning plan that could help them increase the likelihood of success in a regional manager role. 2. To provide participants with action-learning assignments that would help them increase their understanding of the business while also contributing to the development of practical solutions to address significant business issues they worked on. 3. To give participants the opportunity to build relationships with peers from across the organization. 4. To demonstrate the power of action learning as a model to accelerate the development of leaders. The goals of this program acknowledge some key VUCA Prime skills and abilities, including self-awareness, knowledge of the business beyond the functional area, innovative and critical-thinking skills, collaboration, and the importance of rapid learning within the organization. Source: Intagliata & Small, Steps Talent Managers Can Take Nick Petrie, senior faculty member at the Center for Creative Leadership writes in a 2011 study, Future Trends in Leadership Development, that there is a growing belief among senior leaders that the more traditional leadership development methods such as on-the-job training, job assignments, coaching, and mentoring, are falling short in helping them develop the capabilities they need to succeed in a VUCA environment. These methods are often at odds with the leadership demands in a VUCA world, where knowledge across the organization and the speed of learning outpace these slower and more job-specific learning methods. HR and talent management professionals must reframe leadership development activities to accommodate the faster-paced VUCA world and to focus less on behavioral competencies and more on complex thinking abilities and mindsets. Leadership development should be focused on learning agility, self-awareness, comfort with ambiguity, and strategic thinking (Petrie, 2011). To do so, HR and talent managers may want to begin at the selection process. 9

10 Step 1: Hire Agile Leaders. Horney, Pasmore, and O Shea (2011) recommend that HR and talent management professionals assess agility and complex thinking skills during the selection process by using a structured interview format designed to evoke from the examples of past agility on the job. Some sample questions they recommend include: Give an example of when you performed well in a work environment that featured rapid change and/or ambiguity. Did you enjoy this environment? What did you learn? Give an example of when your ability to be decisive was put to the test when you had to convey a sense of urgency in decision making. What was the situation, what factors did you consider when making the decision, and what was the outcome? How do you determine when you need to gather more information before making a decision versus making a decision based on the information you have at hand? Give recent examples of when you made a quick decision based on the information you had immediately available and a situation where you opted to collect more information before making a decision. Which decision-making style was more comfortable for you and why? Give an example of when you modified your personal style to achieve an important work objective. What was the situation, how did you change your approach, and what was the outcome? HR and talent management professionals can formulate other questions that can assess a candidate s strategic thinking skills, self-awareness, openness to change, ability to collaborate and communicate across functions, and other skills required in a VUCA environment. The key is to attract leaders into the organization who already have these skills and abilities. Step 2: Develop Existing Leaders to Be Agile Leaders. On-the-job training, job assignments, coaching, and mentoring will still have a place in the training and development of employees, but to develop VUCA leaders, HR and talent development professionals must focus on programs that help develop agility, adaptability, innovation, collaboration, communication, openness to change, and other, higher-order critical thinking skills. And they need to deliver those programs faster (via social media and other technology) to keep up with the pace of change. (For additional insights on using technology to deliver L&D programs, refer to the UNC Executive Development white paper: Wired to Learn: How New Technologies are Changing L&D Delivery.) Horney, Pasmore, and O Shea recommend that HR and talent management professionals engage in scenario planning about possible futures when developing leadership programs. Scenario planning about futures involves projecting possible situations and deciding how the organization would or would not react. Scenario planning can help identify the knowledge, skills, and 10 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

11 DEVELOPING LEADERS IN A VUCA ENVIRONMENT other attributes leaders may need in future business environments. Leadership development programs based on VUCA principles can also include scenario training where participants can anticipate possible future challenges and devise possible solutions. This can make leaders more confident when they actually encounter a new situation. Scenario training should be conducted frequently so that reactions become part of the leader s muscle memory. (Sullivan, 2012 January 16). Simulations are also powerful learning tools when developing VUCA leaders because they give participants a chance to practice skills in a safe, non-threatening environment. Simulations can range from classroom role plays, to day-in-the-life assessment centers, to virtual simulations. Simulations can also help leaders assess their strengths and weaknesses, making them more aware of their own skills and gaps (Lanik & Eurick, 2012). Simulations are appealing across generations, but they have particular appeal to younger high potentials. This generation has learned many of the desired VUCA leadership skills by playing video games. To develop collaboration and to encourage thinking outside the box, HR and talent managers should also consider the use of job rotation to help leaders think beyond their functional areas. HR and talent development professionals who can foster adaptability, innovation, and agility in their leaders will realize tangible rewards. The Adaptive Advantage Index developed by BCG measures how well organizations adapt to turbulence. They calculated the adaptability scores for 2,500 companies in the United States over a 30-year period and found that the ability to adapt creates value over the short and long-term (Reeves & Love, 2012). Example: Procter & Gamble In 2010, Supply Chain Quarterly staff reported that consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble (P&G) was revising its supply chain to reflect changes it expects in a VUCA world. Global Product Supply Officer R. Keith Harrison reported on the steps the company was taking to ensure that the company s supply chain could accommodate the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of today s business worlds. VUCA is the reality for the foreseeable future, and it affects how we think about supply chains and design, he told attendees at the 2010 Supply Chain and Logistics conference (Supply Chain Quarterly staff, 2010). P&G has applied the VUCA concept beyond its supply chain. During a visit with students at Vanderbilt University s Owen Graduate School of Management, P&G CEO Bob McDonald discussed values-based leadership in an increasingly VUCA world. During the speech, he shared his ten rules of successful leadership, among them: Rule #7: Ineffective strategies, systems, and cultures are bigger barriers to achievement than the talents of people. Recruiting and training are top priorities. Rule # 9: Organizations must renew themselves. Only nine of the original Fortune 50 companies are still on the list today. The majority of successful companies don t realize that the world is changing around them. What differentiates those who succeed from those who don t is the ability to learn. Source: Knight,

12 Step 3: Foster an Organizational Culture that Rewards VUCA Prime Behaviors and Retains Agile Employees. To survive in a VUCA world, organizations must do more than hire and develop agile leaders; they must create an organizational culture that rewards the desired behavior. HR and talent management professionals can play an integral role in developing a VUCA culture by rewarding innovation, agile behavior, and calculated risk-taking. Performance management systems should reflect VUCA Prime values and attributes. Rewards for desired behaviors could include different incentives including job perks, additional compensation, promotions, and preferred work assignments. A key to the best rewards systems in a VUCA environment is to not be rigid and to offer successful leaders rewards that appeal to them the most in other words, be adaptable and agile. The organizational culture that promotes and rewards agile leaders will begin to perpetuate itself and attract and retain the type of innovative and agile talent that businesses today are seeking. It will also provide businesses a competitive advantage in our ever-changing global marketplace which is the ultimate VUCA environment. Conclusion The volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity inherent in today s business world is the new normal, and it is profoundly changing not only how organizations do business, but how business leaders lead. The skills and abilities leaders once needed to help their organizations thrive are no longer sufficient. Today, more strategic, V C U A complex critical-thinking skills are required of business leaders. HR and talent management professionals can help their organizations succeed in today s VUCA environment by developing leaders who can counter volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity with vision, understanding, clarity, and agility. Apollo Research Institute staff (2012 March). The VUCA world: From building for strength to building for resiliency. Apollo Research Institute. Retrieved from apolloresearchinstitute.com/sites/ default/ files/future-of-work-report-the-vuca-world. pdf. Caron, D. (2009 February 08). It s a VUCA world. CIPS. Retrieved from slideshare.net/dcaron/its-a-vuca-world-cipscio-march draft. Dan, A. (2012 October 14). In a VUCA world, Unilever bets on sustainable living as a transformative business model. Forbes. Retrieved from sites/avidan/2012/10/14/in-a-vuca-worldunilever-bets-on-sustainable-living-as-atransformative-business-model/. Forum staff (2010). Speed in a VUCA world: How leaders of the future will execute strategy. Forum. Retrieved from forum.com/downloads/transcripts/vucainterview-2010-final.pdf. Horney, N., Pasmore, B. & O Shea, T. (2010). Leadership agility: A business imperative for a VUCA world. People & Strategy, 33, 4. Intagliata, J. & Small, D. (2005). McDonald s Corporation: A Customized Leadership Development Program Targeted to Prepare Future Regional Managers. Best Practice Champions in Organization Development and Change (Eds. Lou Carter, Dave Ulrich, Marshall Goldsmith and Jim Bolt), Jossey Bass. Kingsinger, P. & Walch, K. (2012 July 9). Living and leading in a VUCA world. Thunderbird University. Retrieved from research/2012/07/09/kinsinger-walch-vuca/. Kail, E. (2010 December 3). Leading effectively in a VUCA environment: C is for complexity. HBR Blog Network. Retrieved from Kail, E. (2011 January 6). Leading effectively in a VUCA environment: A is for ambiguity. HBR Blog Network. Retrieved from blogs.hbr.org/frontline-leadership/2011/01/ leading-effectively-in-a-vuca-1.html. Kavanaugh, S. & Strecker, G. (2012 September 20). Leading learning in VUCA times: How does a volatile uncertain complex ambiguous context impact strategy? Chief Learning Officer. Retrieved from slideshare.net/humancapitalmedia/920-cloarielgroupfinalslidesv2. Knight, B. (2011 September 7). P&G CEO Bob McDonald on values-based leadership. Owenbloggers.com. Retrieved from pg-ceo-bob-mcdonald-on-value-basedleadership/. Lanik, M. & Eurich, T. (2012 June 28). Simulate leadership for success. Chief Learning Officer. Retrieved from clomedia.com/articles/view/simulateleadership-for-success/print:1. Management Education Group staff (2011 November 1). It s a VUCA World. Management Education Groups, Inc. Retrieved from managementeducationgroup.com/2011/11/ its-a-vuca-world/. Petrie, N. (2011 December). Future Trends in Leadership Development. Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership. Reeves, M. & Love, C. (2012 August 21). The most adaptive companies Bcg. perspectives. Retrieved from bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/ corporate_strategy_portfolio_ management_ future_of_strategy_most_adaptive_ companies_2012/. Sullivan, J. (2012 January 16). VUCA: The new normal for talent management and workforce planning. Ere.net. Retrieved from Sullivan, J. (2012 October 22). Talent strategies for a turbulent VUCA world shifting to an adaptive approach. Ere. net. Retrieved from net/2012/10/22/talent-strategies-for-aturbulent-vuca-world-shifting-to-an-adaptiveapproach. Supply Chain Quarterly staff (2010 December 20). P&G readies its supply chain for a VUCA world. Supply Chain Quarterly. Retrieved from supplychainquarterly.com/news/ procter_and_gamble_revises_supply_chain/. WisdomatWork staff (n.d.). Navigation skills for thriving in VUCA times. Wisdom at Work. Retrieved from wisdomatwork.com/about/thriving-in-vucatimes/. 12 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

13 If you re ready to take the next step in your career, make a quick trip back to the classroom first. EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTE At UNC s Executive Development Institute, you ll gain the core knowledge of an MBA program without the long-term time commitment. You ll also learn how to view the business world from a senior executive s perspective. And you ll develop the key leadership characteristics that lead to effective strategic performance. The result? In two weeks, you ll be fully prepared for that next step. UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT The Power of Experience. To learn more, visit 13

14 Got Game? The Use of Gaming in Learning and Development Kip Kelly Director UNC Executive Development 14 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

15 GAMING IN LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT Introduction The first patented video game, the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, is celebrating its 65th birthday this year (Gettler, n.d.). This may come as a surprise to many, because people usually place the birth of video games in the 1970s or 1980s, when coin-operated video games became a mainstay in arcades, and the first game consoles appeared in American homes. Video games and the people who play them have changed dramatically since Generations of gamers have grown up and entered the workplace, and video games have made the same transition, extending their influence into companies around the globe. Many organizations are increasingly using gaming technology in their learning and development programs to help build the next generation of business leaders. Promise This white paper: Explores the popularity of video games and the characteristics of the people who play them. Reviews different types of games and defines some video game terminology. Discusses how serious games can be used to develop organizational talent. Provides examples of companies using serious games to develop skills and behaviors. Examines the future of serious games in learning and development. Games Are Big Business Video games today are ubiquitous. Just about every electronic device with a screen TVs, PCs, tablets, and smart phones have games installed and ready to play, and people are taking advantage of their accessibility. A recent study by the NPD Group, a market tracking Gaming Terms Defined Game: A competitive activity that involves skill, chance, or endurance. Video game: A game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a television screen or display. Simulation game: A game that attempts to represent real or hypothetical processes, mechanisms, or systems. Serious game: Computer or video games designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment; often designed for the purpose of education and/or solving a problem. Alternate reality game: An interactive game that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media to tell a story. MMORPGs: Massively multi-player online roleplaying games. firm, found that million or two-thirds of Americans play video games (Boorstin, 2012). Americans aren t just playing the free, preloaded games; they are buying them in droves. According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), consumers spent $24.75 billion on video games in 2011 (ESA staff, 2012). Puzzle games, board games, trivia, and card games are the most commonly played games (42 percent), but 25 percent of gamers also play action, sports, strategy, and role-playing games. The ESA also found that 62 percent of gamers play with others, either in-person or online, and most do so for at least an hour a week. Online simulation (sim) games have also grown in popularity, thanks in large part to the explosion of social media. Facebook, for example, boasts more than 100 sim games, among them Farmville 2, Airport City, and FrontierVille. These popular sim games were designed to entertain but have 15

16 an educational component and are sometimes called edutainment games. In Farmville 2, for example, players create and manage their own farms; in Airport City, gamers manage a busy city airport; and in FrontierVille, players tame the wilderness and build a town. Who s Playing As video games grow in popularity and sophistication, an increasing number of organizations and government agencies have embraced them to support learning and development efforts. A recent ESA study found that 70 percent of major U.S. employers use interactive software and games for L&D purposes, and nearly eight out of 10 U.S. employers plan on doing so in 2013 (Steinberg, 2012). 37% 31% 32% Who Plays Video Games? Video games have changed and matured over the years, and so have users. The average game player today is 30 years old. Sixty-eight percent of gamers are 18 years of age or older, and 37 percent are over the age of 35. Just over half of gamers are men, according to the ESA, but women gamers are gaining fast. Forty-seven percent of all players are women, and women over the age of 18 are one of the industry s fastest growing demographics. In fact, women now represent a significantly larger portion of the game-playing population (30 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (18 percent). Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of gamers is that the average adult gamer has been playing video games for 14 years. That s a lot of game time. What s in a Game? There are three types of video games: casual games, advergames, and serious games. Casual games are intended for entertainment purposes and can include everything from the solitaire game that comes pre-loaded on most computers to complex multi-player games like Uncharted, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and Battlefield 3. These games are available in a number of formats, including PC, game console, and mobile. Although learning can occur when playing casual games, it is not an intended outcome (Derryberry, 2007). Less than 18 years of age years of age 36 years of age and older Source: Entertainment Software Association (2012). Advergames are games designed to advertise a product, organization, or cause (Derryberry, 2007). There are several types of advergames, but the goal is to promote a brand or organization while providing fun and entertainment. Serious games are video games designed to improve learning, and players engage in serious games with that understanding (Derryberry, 2007). Also known as immersive learning simulations, digital game-based learning, and gaming simulations, serious games are developed with specific learning outcomes in mind that will result in measurable, sustained changes in performance or behavior. Serious games have been used in emergency services training, military training, and health care settings to positive effect (Derryberry, 2007). According to Sue Bohle, executive director of the Serious Games Association, industry estimates range from $2-10 billion in revenue for serious games, depending on how much simulations and virtual worlds are included in the calculation (Maurer, 2012). 16 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

17 GAMING IN LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT Serious Games in Learning and Development Serious games can allow players to apply what they have learned in an L&D experience and apply it in a safe, simulated environment. For example, health care professionals can practice a new medical procedure using a serious sim game before introducing it in the workplace. There is also evidence that serious games can develop soft skills like emotional intelligence, communication management, and critical problem solving and collaboration skills (Marinho, 2012). Some L&D professionals argue that video games can help develop the leadership skills that organizations will need in the future. Tomorrow s workplace will be global, fasterpaced, competitive, and more virtual than ever before. Online games, specifically massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), offer a glimpse at how leaders develop and operate in environments that are highly distributed, global, hyper-competitive, and virtual. (IBM & Seriosity staff, 2007). There have been several studies conducted on learning and serious games, and results are encouraging. A recent study by the Office of Naval Research found that video game players performed percent better in perceptual and cognitive ability than non-game players, and that video games helped adults process information faster (Steinberg, 2012). Another study by the Federation of American Scientists found that students remembered only 10 percent of what they read; 20 percent of what they heard; 30 percent if they used visuals related to what they heard; and 50 percent if they watched someone performing a task while explaining it. Students remembered 90 percent of what they learned, however, if they did the task themselves, even if it was as a simulation (IBM staff, n.d.). A recent study reported in Personnel Psychology (Sitzmann, 2011) found that trainees using serious simulation games had improved post-training efficacy (20 percent), higher declarative knowledge (11 percent), improved procedural knowledge (14 percent), and better retention (9 percent) than trainees in a non-simulation comparison group. The study also found that trainees in the simulation control group learned more when the game was used as a supplement to other instructional methods, rather than as stand-alone instruction. In contrast, a study by Adams, Mayer, MacNamara, Koenig, and Wainess (2012) found that narrative educational games resulted in poorer learning and took longer to complete than simply showing content on a slide. Ruth Clarke, an instructional design and technical training consultant, gave a possible explanation in a recent American Society for Training & Development article exploring the results of the study. Clarke speculates that the reason for this lack of learning may be because some game features are at odds with the game s learning objectives. For example, many games time players, requiring them to complete tasks within a certain timeframe. Gamification Explained Gamification is the use of gaming techniques, game thinking, and game mechanics to enhance nongame contexts. Gaming techniques like questing, badging, and leader boards have been incorporated into workplace practices such as the onboarding process, career development, and performance evaluations. It should be noted that gamification techniques do not have to be rooted in technology. For example, leader boards can be visual aids posted in a department to motivate and inform workers about departmental goal achievement (such as sales). Gamification practices are particularly appealing to the Millennial generation who have grown up playing games that send them on quests, award them with badges, and post their achievements on leader boards, but the fundamental human need for recognition spans generations. Gamification can help fill that need and increase employee morale, retention, and job satisfaction. Source: Pitt,

18 For learning outcomes that are based on critical thinking skills, Clarke argues, timed games that reinforce speed are not a good match (Clarke, 2012). She recommends that HR and talent development professionals stick to serious games that emphasize drill and practice exercises for tasks that require immediate and accurate responses. The Federation of American Scientists, however, believes that serious games can have a broader L&D application and can teach higher-order thinking skills such as strategic thinking, interpretive analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and the ability to adapt to rapid change skills U.S. employers increasingly look for in workers and new workforce entrants (Steinberg, 2012). A Harvard Business Review study concurs. The study, which focused on the leadership skills taught through the immensely popular video game, World of Warcraft, concluded that the game gave participants a sneak peek into tomorrow s workplace. The game s environment features fluid workforces, self-organized and collaborative work activities, and decentralized, nonhierarchical leadership; all features that will be prevalent in tomorrow s business world. The game also allows for risk-taking and teaches participants how to work quickly and efficiently (Marinho, 2012). MMORPGs can also help develop other desirable leadership skills. MMORPGs can closely match actual work environments and can be developed in such a way that the skills required to succeed in the game are similar to leadership skills employers want to see developed. These games can bring together millions of gamers who play the game through the use of avatars. Players interact with each other, form relationships, and join guilds (or teams) to collaboratively resolve missions (Melchor, 2012). MMORPGs mirror the business context more than you would assume, says Byron Reeve, Ph.D., professor at Stanford University and faculty director of the Stanford Media X Partners Program. They presage one possible future for business one that is open, virtual, knowledgedriven, and comprised of a largely volunteer or at least transient workforce. (IBM & Seriosity staff, 2007). MMORPGs require cooperation and collaboration among many players to achieve a mission, and as such, can help teach such business skills as recruiting, organizing, and motivating and directing others to accomplish a shared goal in a safe environment where risk-taking, critical thinking, and creative problem solving is encouraged (Melchor, 2012). Innovation Games Innovation Games creates online and in-person games to help organizations solve problems across the enterprise in sales, corporate strategy, product development, and marketing by using collaborative play to tap into new innovation. They offer games designed to help organizations gain a better understanding of their key stakeholders inside and outside the organization. Source: Innovation Games, n.d. Organizations Are Serious About Games Serious games are increasingly being used by large U.S. employers to recruit, improve communication among managers and their staffs, and to train employees and new hires at all levels in their organizations (Derryberry, 2007). The U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, Nortel, Cold Stone Creamery, McKinsey & Co., SAS Institute, and Digital Equipment are just a few organizations using serious games in their workplaces (Derryberry, 2007; Maurer, 2012; Steinberg, 2012). 18 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

19 GAMING IN LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT IBM and Farmers Insurance have used the IBM-developed serious game, INNOV8, to teach the effect of business decisions on their organizations ecosystems. INNOV8 is a sim-style serious game where players manipulate their business models to make their cities less congested, their supply chains more effective, and their customers happier (IBM staff, n.d.). Northrop Grumman has also developed several serious games for use in development and recruitment. The award-winning Quality Tycoon game teaches players the effect that quality and ethical integrity have on business opportunities. Northrop Grumman s Virtual Jet Works introduces students to engineering concepts and is demonstrated at college recruitment fairs (Serious Games Market staff, 2011). Cisco s The Cisco Mind Share Game facilitates network certification. Ultimate Team Play is used by the Hilton Garden Inn to teach employees customer service skills (Steinberg, 2012). And Dublin-based Front Square teamed with Serious Games International to develop Teddy s Chocco Shop, a game that teaches employees the basics of lean manufacturing (Marinho, 2012). The U.S. Army was an early adopter of serious games. In fact, they are credited with coining the term serious game. The Army first released America s Army in 2002 and updates the game every three to four months. Game versions include America s Army: Special Forces and America s Army: Overmatch. The Army also gained recognition from the Serious Games Market with First Person Cultural Trainer (FPCT), a 3-D cultural training simulation. The game places players in an unfamiliar community where they don t know how members of the community feel about them or who the community leaders are. The game s goals are to have players move through the community, learn social structures and issues, and then work with the community to affect missions. FPCT challenges the Army s junior leaders to understand the consequences, good and bad, of their speech, body language, posture, temperament, and action, says Ben Jordan, director of TRISA s Operational Environment Lab, the Army s lead for the project. It even replicates physical micro-expressions, which users learn to identify as possible cues for threatening or non-threatening behaviors. (Roth, 2011). Generating New Insights and Solving Problems Serious games can be an effective method to develop talent in an organization. They can also serve as a valuable information source for employers. Serious games can yield insights that organizations can use to assess performance, identify patterns, and predict behaviors in situations that may occur in the real world. L&D development professionals can use these insights to gain a better understanding of individual and organizational capabilities and to identify potential gaps. Serious games can also serve as a source for new ideas, helping organizations become more innovative. Organizations are using serious games to tap into the knowledge and experience of the entire organization, and in some cases, beyond the organization to crowd-source new ideas. According to information technology research firm, Gartner, Inc., more than half of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes by Organizations can also use serious games to analyze the abundance of data (such as operational, customer, and sales data) that organizations collect from various sources. Serious games can give employees access to real-world, real-time Big Data to make decisions and experiment in virtual environments without the risks and consequences that they would face in the real world. As players engage and interact in the virtual environment, both the players and the game become more sophisticated. In other words, the system gets smarter while the constant stream of new, real-time data continues to change the dynamics of the game. Many organizations are already using serious games to gain new insights and solve real business challenges - and there are some who believe serious games have the potential to solve some of the world s biggest problems. There are already games designed to fight AIDS, global poverty, water scarcity, and climate change. Many of these games are available online from anywhere in the world, empowering people from all over to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems. 19

20 FoldIt Foldit, an online puzzle video game developed by the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington in collaboration with the University s Department of Biochemistry, encourages players to try to solve one of the hardest computational problems in biology, protein folding. Players try random combinations for folding proteins into different shapes. In 2011, players were credited with helping discover an enzyme involved in the reproduction of AIDS, opening the potential for development of new drugs to fight the disease. Scientists had previously pursued the creation of this enzyme for years but failed to find the right protein structure through other techniques, such as computer simulations. Guided by intuition and reasoning that computers can t match, the players successfully configured the structure of the enzyme in 10 days. Source: FoldIt staff, n.d. Conclusion Video games have been around for years, growing in popularity and sophistication. Most of today s workers grew up playing these games, so it comes as no surprise that organizations have started to use gaming technology in new and exciting ways including talent development. Well-crafted serious games are used to develop and reinforce skills and competencies. They can be used to safely practice tasks that require rapid and accurate responses, but their potential applications are much broader. Serious games can closely approximate actual working environments, while allowing players an opportunity to safely take risks, develop teamwork skills, creatively problem solve and collaborate, and to experiment and innovate. Boinodiris, P. (2011 December 14). Let s play! Turning serious business issues into games. Forbes. Retrieved from com/sites/ciocentral/2011/12/14/lets-playturning-serious-business-issues-into-games/. Boorstin, J. (2012 September 5). Fewer people now playing videogames. CNBC. Retrieved from id/ /fewer_people_now_playing_ Videogames. BusinessWire staff (2012 August 23). Spend on serious games growing steadily. Now a multi-billion dollar industry. BusinessWire. Retrieved from com/news/home/ /en/ spend-games-growing-steadily-multi-billiondollar-industry. Clarke, R. (2012 April 30). Why games don t teach. American Society for Training and Development. Retrieved from D-Blog/2012/04/why-games-dont-teach. aspx?goback=%2edge_102144_ member_ Derryberry, A. (2007). Serious games: Online games for learning. Adobe. Retrieved from pdfs/serious_games_wp_11-7.pdf. ESA staff (2012). Essential facts about the computer and video game industry. Entertainment Software Association. Retrieved from pdfs/esa_ef_2012.pdf. Farrington, J. (2011 July 11). From the research: Myths worth dispelling: Seriously, the game is up. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 24, 2, Foldit staff (n.d.). The science behind Foldit. foldit. Retrieved from info/about. Gale, M.T. (2011 May 9). Gameplay in higher education: The use of serious games vs. traditional instructional methods in learning. Auburn University. Retrieved from auburn.edu/etd/bitstream/handle/10415/ Mark%20Gale%20Dissertation. pdf?sequence=2. Gettler, J. (n.d.). The first video game? Brookhaven National Laboratory. Retrieved from higinbotham4.asp. Heidingsfelder, A. (2012 September 23). Increase salesforce productivity with Bunchball gamification. Examiner. Retrieved from increase-sales-productivity-with-bunchballgamification. IBM and Seriousity staff (2007). Virtual worlds real leaders: Online games put the future of business leadership on display. Global Innovation Outlook. Retrieved from ibm_gio_gaming_report.pdf. IBM staff (n.d.). Serious games for smarter skills: The future of learning. IBM. Retrieved from solutions/soa/newsletter/oct09/article_ seriousgames.html. Innovation Games staff (n.d.). The seriously fun way to do work seriously!. Innovation Games. Retrieved from innovationgames.com/. Marinho, N. (2012 June 23). Corporations look to serious games for organizational development. e27. Retrieved from Maurer, A. (2012 October 10). Serious games invade the military, medical and corporate worlds. Tech Journal. Retrieved from Melchor, A. (2012 July 03). Computer games for leadership development. Slideshare. Retrieved from slideshare.net/budmelchor/computergaming-for-leadership-development. Pitts, R. (2012 September 18). Using gamification to motivate Millennials. SHRM Online. Retrieved from HRdisciplines/diversity/articles/pages/usinggamification-to-motivate-millennials.aspx. Roth, M. (2011 December 8). TRADOCsponsored simulation wins Serious Games Challenge. U.S. Army. Retrieved from Serious Games Market staff (2011 December 26). Zooming in on 2011 Serious Games Showcase and Challenge. Serious Games Market. Retrieved from seriousgamesmarket.blogspot.com/2012/12/ zooming-in-on serious-games.html. Sitzmann, T. (2011 May 27). A meta-analytic examination of the instructional effectiveness of computer-based simulation games. Personnel Psychology, 64, 2, Steinberg, S. (2012 March 13). Video games are tomorrow s answer to executive training. Fast Company. Retrieved from fastcompany.com/ /video-games-aretomorrows-answer-executive-training. 20 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

21 Lead your HR organization into the future. BUSINESS AND HUMAN RESOURCES Now more than ever, senior HR leaders need the knowledge, skills, and experience to respond to emerging trends that are shaping the future of global business. Offered in partnership with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), UNC s Business and Human Resources program is designed to equip senior HR leaders with the most up-to-date business knowledge and skills needed to succeed in the rapidly changing business environment today - and tomorrow. Earn recertification hours Meets the HRCI strategic requirements for SPHR UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT The Power of Experience. To learn more, visit 21

22 Building a Resilient Organizational Culture Marion White Director UNC Executive Development 22 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

23 RESILIENCE IN THE WORKPLACE Introduction A 2012 Towers Watson study found that in most organizations, only 35 percent of employees said they were engaged. In other words, 65 percent of employees have mentally checked out, causing productivity, innovation, and creativity to plummet. The study also found that 38 percent of employees felt stress and anxiety about the future, and that less than half of the employees surveyed agreed that senior leaders had a sincere interest in their well-being. While this is never good news for employers, the timing could not be more critical as organizations across the globe continue to struggle to survive. An uncertain economic outlook, the rapid pace of change, and the need to continually adapt has made resilience the ability to bounce back in the face of a setback the new priority in leadership development. The good news is that resilience can be taught. Promise back after setbacks, are often stressful places to work, a situation in which far too many employers and employees are well versed. Stress lowers employee performance, productivity, morale, and strains workplace relationships. People experiencing excessive stress have difficulty managing emotions, focusing attention, making decisions, and thinking clearly (Spangler, Koesten, Fox and Radel, 2012). Stress is also associated with heart disease, cancer, pain, and depression (Spangler et al, 2012). Stressed employees feel overwhelmed, tired, and disengaged. Resilient employees, on the other hand, experience increased productivity, lower turnover, and have lower health care costs (Lee, 2008). A growing body of research shows that organizations that foster positive attitudes have employees who are more optimistic and creative (Kolski-Andreaco, 2012). Resilient employees are engaged, have improved communication, and are better team players. This white paper: Explores why resilience is more important than ever for organizations to cultivate. Explains the difference between wellness programs and building a resilience culture. Discusses why resilience should be cultivated, not just at the senior leadership level, but at all levels in an organization. How Engagement Affects Financial Results Same year operating margin: Study of 50 global companies 30% 25% 27.4 Offers steps HR and talent managers can take to develop resilient organizational cultures. Provides examples of organizations that have engaged in a resilience initiative and the benefits they realized as a result. 20% 15% 10% 5% Resilience Is Crucial Thought leaders are increasingly calling today s turbulent business world a VUCA environment one that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. To succeed in this environment, organizations must be more adaptive and agile than ever before they must be resilient. Organizations that lack resilience, that ability to bounce Low traditional engagement companies High traditional engagement companies High sustainable engagement companies Source: Towers Watson normative database

24 Resilience Requires a Culture Change To create a culture that fosters resilience, HR and talent management professionals must do more than offer stress management and yoga classes, although these can and do have a beneficial role. It requires the development of an organizational culture that encourages trust, accountability, and flexibility. Resilient organizational cultures give all employees from the CEO down permission to take care of their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs with the understanding that when these needs are tended to, resilience occurs, and the entire organization benefits through increased productivity, job performance, retention, engagement, and physical well-being. The Towers Watson study recommends that employers strive for sustainable engagement by creating policies and practices that make it possible for employees to better manage their stress, to live more balanced lives, and to have more autonomy over when and where they get their work done. Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project, agrees with the Towers Watson recommendations. The key factor is a work environment that more fully energizes employees by promoting their physical, emotional, and social well-being. I d add to that mental and spiritual well-being or more specifically, the added energy derived from the capacity for absorbed focus and a strong sense of purpose. Creating policies and practices that support employees ability to manage their energy across all four dimensions makes it possible for employees to better manage their stress, to live more balanced lives, and to have more autonomy over when and where they get their work done. For organizations, the challenge is to shift from their traditional focus on getting more out of people, to investing in meeting people s core needs so they re freed, fueled, and inspired to bring more of themselves to work, more sustainably, says Schwartz. According to Spangler et al, research has found that some people are more resilient than others. These people can bounce back from setbacks faster than others, are more adaptive, and demonstrate a secure emotional attachment to others. They have a good sense of humor, are more action-oriented, have a sense of personal competence, take time for personal replenishment, and can express needs and engage the support of others. Perhaps most importantly, the authors conclude, research finds that individual resilience is modifiable; it can be learned, giving HR and talent management professionals an opportunity to teach resilience at the individual and organizational levels. PHYSICAL MENTAL EMOTIONAL SPIRITUAL 24 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

25 RESILIENCE IN THE WORKPLACE About The Energy Project The Energy Project aims to energize people and transform companies by offering a detailed blueprint for fueling a fully engaged workforce. Drawing on the multidisciplinary science of high performance, The Energy Project has developed a set of simple principles and highly actionable practices for more effectively managing energy to drive higher levels of engagement, productivity, and innovation in people, leaders, and organizations. HR and talent management professionals can find out if they are currently managing their four sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual by taking The Energy Project s 20-question assessment, The Energy Audit. Results will be ed immediately and will include behaviors that should be addressed to improve performance, effectiveness, and satisfaction, on the job and off. The audit link and results can be shared with team members for comparison and team-building purposes. The Energy Project Steps HR Can Take to Introduce Resilience into Their Organizations Cultures 1. Obtain senior leadership support. Resilient cultures begin with leaders who understand and support building resilience at the individual and organizational level. To obtain senior leader buy-in, HR and talent management professionals can share research such as the Towers Watson Global Workforce Study and this white paper with top management. They can explain how resilient employees are happier, more productive, and more agile than their less resilient counterparts. Senior leadership support for an organization-wide resilience initiative may be easier to obtain if it is exposed to leadership development opportunities (such as stress management classes) that specifically target resilience-building. Developing resilient leaders will help them better grasp and support the benefits of building resilience at all organizational levels. 2. Build safe and secure work communities. The workplace is often strained, stressful, and overwhelming. Employees have been taught to check their feelings at the door to focus on their work to compartmentalize their personal and professional 25

26 selves. As human beings, that is simply an impossibility; employees cannot leave their emotions and personalities at home. By building work communities that are safe and secure, yet also encouraging and stimulating, HR and talent management professionals can also create teams that are more productive, satisfied, and high-performing. It is important to establish safe and secure communities and acknowledge, according to Schwartz, that the struggle to feel valued is one of the most insidious and least acknowledged issues in organizations. HR and talent management professionals can challenge the mentality that employees should check their feelings at the door and begin that vital shift of building a resilient organizational culture. One simple way to create that shift is to implement community meetings (Schwartz, 2013). Each time a community meets whether it is a team, a smaller working group or an entire division the community leader should open with a few simple questions: How are you feeling? What was the most important thing you learned last week? What are your goals for this week? Community leaders should not accept fine or good for an answer to the first question. Instead, they should encourage community members to answer on a scale of one to 10 emotionally and physically, one being completely exhausted or drained and 10 being completely energized and fueled. The idea is to encourage employees to be honest and open about how they are feeling physically and emotionally to get it on the table so it can be subsequently cleared. The next questions, What was the most important thing you learned last week, and What are your goals for this week, help employees focus and clear their minds. What are you most grateful for helps set a positive mood among individuals and eventually the entire group. If community leaders are afraid that asking all of these questions will take up too much time, they should be encouraged to stick with asking employees how they are feeling and what they are most grateful for. Asking these questions during community meetings not only give employees strength and focus, but builds team cohesiveness by delaying the need for immediate gratification in favor of choices that uphold shared values, serve the collective good, and generate long-term value. What are you most grateful for? Example: PricewaterhouseCoopers PricewaterhouseCoopers, a leader in the accounting industry, offers newly promoted senior associates a week-long leadership development program known as the PricewaterhouseCoopers Discover program. The program immerses participants in The Energy Project s peoplefuel program. The peoplefuel curriculum teaches employees how to more efficiently manage their four sources of energy; physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. As participants progress through four modules divided by energy source, they learn to recognize the costs of the behaviors that deplete their energy, reduce their emotional resilience, inhibit their focus, and weaken their motivation. This program has helped the company engage their rising stars in ways that promote sustainable growth in the organization, while also investing in employees who will, in turn, invest in the organization. The Energy Project ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

27 RESILIENCE IN THE WORKPLACE 3. Encourage all employees from the CEO down to embrace these tips to increase energy and productivity. Encourage employees to do the most important activity first thing in the morning for a designated time of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Silence all digital devices. Employees who can do this will find that they will get more accomplished in that time than most people do in an entire day. Encourage employees to keep a running list of everything that is on their minds so they can get it off their minds. Working memories have a limited capacity, so the more things on one s mind, the less likely that they will be remembered. Encourage employees to download everything the to do s, ideas, everyone who needs to be called or ed, issues that need to be addressed. By writing down everything as it arises, employees will literally clear space in their working memories, leaving room for what most deserves their attention. Ask employees to ask themselves Is this the best use of my time? every time they go online. Sometimes, of course, it will be. More often, though, it is something people do to avoid engaging in more difficult work. If the answer is no, ask What is? Then do it. Encourage employees to systematically train their attention. A simple way is to read more books, preferably good ones. Deeply focused, uninterrupted reading is an excellent way to train and sustain the brain s capacity for absorbed attention. Encourage employees to take a few minutes each day either just before they leave work or just before they go to sleep to identify and write down the two or three most important things they want to accomplish tomorrow, and when they intend to work on them. Encourage employees to monitor their moods. When demand exceeds capacity, one of the most common signs is increased negative emotions. The more employees move into fight or flight mode, the more reactive and impulsive they become, and the less reflective and responsive. If employees are feeling negative, encourage them to ask themselves Why am I feeling this way, and what can I do to make myself feel better? They may be hungry, tired, overwhelmed, or feel threatened in some way. Awareness is the first step. Employees can t change what they don t notice (Schwartz, various). 27

28 Example: Genentech Genentech has a rich history of medical breakthroughs and cuttingedge science. As the world s first biotechnology company, today Genentech develops and manufactures medicines to treat patients with serious or lifethreatening medical conditions. Despite numerous products on the market, a great brand and reputation, and strong HR practices, Genentech found itself in a challenging environment after a merger with the biotechnology company, Roche. In March 2011, Dave Dickey, director of leadership development, asked The Energy Project to run a program for his staff to address his team s high levels of burnout and emotional fatigue surrounding the merger. He recognized that it was not just an HR issue, but reflected the growing need for a solution to address people s capacity and an alternative way of working. In addition to stress and burnout, the company was dealing with unclear priorities, competing agendas, cost-cutting measures, and low levels of employee engagement typical after a merger or acquisition. By the end of 2012, more than 1,000 Genentech employees had participated in The Energy Project program, and seven more courses are scheduled for Employees at all levels of the company report that they are taking more time for renewal and being more proactive about the choices they make. Genentech leaders are also implementing policies suggested by The Energy Project designed to better fuel their people s energy. Examples include: Shorter meetings with fixed boundaries, leaving people more time to move around campus and to complete their most important tasks Non-negotiable breaks at the 90-minute mark during long meetings Walking meetings short, on-the-go meetings comprised of small groups of people tackling creative challenges An ongoing Take Back Your Lunch campaign encouraging workers to leave their desks and get outside to renew themselves More consistent and useful feedback given to employees Areas and times during the day devoted to absorbed focus and creative thinking The initiative continues to gain momentum at Genentech, with leaders requesting team offsite and leadership meetings to help their employees manage increased demands, improve productivity and satisfaction, and to increase their engagement scores. The Energy Project ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

29 RESILIENCE IN THE WORKPLACE 4. Develop policies and practices that empower employees to build resilience and have senior leaders lead by example. A key to a resilient organizational culture is empowerment, which can come in many forms. Employees need to be given the freedom to take regular renewal breaks throughout the day to help rejuvenate, metabolize, and embed learning. These breaks may come in the form of taking a walk, a stretch break, or a quick work out. Some organizations encourage employees to combine business and pleasure by engaging in walking meetings. Other organizations allow employees quick afternoon nap breaks to rejuvenate. The important point is to empower employees to manage their work and their physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being by offering a flexible working environment. It is also important to teach employees how to recognize and manage their stress responses. This may come in the form of offering psychological skills training and training in stress management techniques. For example, if personal financial management is a concern, a financial management seminar can be offered. As with any initiative, developing a truly resilient organizational culture will succeed only if senior leaders lead by example. HR and talent management professionals should encourage senior leaders to take time out of the day to rejuvenate themselves and to de-stress. When their direct reports see the priority senior leaders place on developing their own resilience, employees will embrace it and follow. Example: Sony Europe Sony Europe was experiencing challenging times and was looking to drive significantly higher levels of energy and performance, and to reduce sick time and employee turnover. In collaboration with senior executives in London, The Energy Project created a four-day retreat that used a modified version of the company s curriculum for the top leaders in Sony Europe. The program was delivered in two-day segments, with a month between meetings. The response from leaders was so enthusiastic that The Energy Project next designed a three-day version of the program for their direct reports. Today, more than 3,000 Sony Europe employees have attended one of these three-day versions. Sony Europe has instituted a number of organizational changes designed to support a new way of working. These include restructuring meetings to include regular breaks; banning the use of during meetings to increase focus and productivity; providing healthy snacks during the day; building an on-site gym and renewal rooms; and creating a web portal that provides detailed information about different aspects of the curriculum. In the division that most openly embraced the initiative, sick time decreased by 36 percent; staff turnover decreased 60 percent; 75 percent of division employees said the program had a positive impact on their business relationships; and 90 percent say their energy and performance have increased significantly. The Energy Project

30 Conclusion Today, business as usual means rapid change, an influx of new technologies, economic turbulence, uncertainty, and ambiguity. To counter this new normal, organizations need employees and leaders who are agile, adaptable and flexible. In a word, resilient. HR and talent management professionals can help by creating resilient organizational cultures. This will require a fundamental shift in thinking, away from squeezing the most productivity from employees to enabling employees to take care of their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs, thereby building resilience. Everly, G. (2011 June 24). Building a resilient organizational culture. HBR Blog Network. Retrieved from hbr.org/cs/2011/06/building_a_resilient_ organizat.html. GCC staff (2012 July 20). Workplace resilience taking action. GCC. Retrieved from com/blog/building-employee-resilienceand-responsiveness-to-change. George, B. (2013 March 22). Resilience through mindful leadership. Huffington Post. Retrieved from huffingtonpost.com/bill-george/resiliencethrough-mindfu_b_ html. Kolski-Andreaco, A. (2012 December 1). How resilience matters in the workplace and what employers can do to increase it. SmartBusiness. Retrieved from sbnonline.com/2012/12/how-resiliencematters-in-the-workplace-and-whatemployers-can-do-to-increase-it/. Lee, D. (2008). Why you will need a resilient workforce in today s economy. HumanNature@Work. Retrieved from articles/workplace_stress/resilientworkforce. htm. Schwartz, T. (2010 September 7). Six ways to supercharge your productivity. The Energy Project. Retrieved from Schwartz, T. (2011 June 1). The only thing that matters. The Energy Project. Retrieved from blog/only-thing-really-matters. Schwartz, T. (2012 August 15). Seeing through your blind spots. The Energy Project. Retrieved from theenergyproject.com/blog/seeing-throughyour-blind-spots. Schwartz, T. (2012 August 24). Six keys to being excellent at anything. The Energy Project. Retrieved from theenergyproject.com/blog/six-keys-beingexcellent-anything. Schwartz, T. (2012 May 17). You are not a computer (try as you may). The Energy Project. Retrieved from theenergyproject.com/blog/you-are-notcomputer-try-you-may. Schwartz, T. (2012 May 29). Take back your life in seven simple steps. The Energy Project. Retrieved from theenergyproject.com/blog/take-back-yourlife-7-simple-steps. Schwartz, T. (2012 November 1). Resilience in the eye of the storm. The Energy Project. Retrieved from theenergyproject.com/blog/resilience-eyestorm. Schwartz, T. (2012 November 8). New Research: How employee engagement hits the bottom line. The Energy Project. Retrieved from theenergyproject.com/blog/new-researchhow-employee-engagement-hits-bottomline. Schwartz, T. (2013 January 23). What if you could truly be yourself at work? The Energy Project. Retrieved from theenergyproject.com/blog/what-if-youcould-truly-be-yourself-work. Spangler, N., Koesten, J., Fox, M., Radel, J. (2012 November). Employer perceptions of stress and resilience intervention. Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine, 54, 11, Towers Watson staff (2012). Global workforce study. Towers Watson. Retrieved from Insights/IC-Types/Survey-Research- Results/2012/07/2012-Towers-Watson- Global-Workforce-Study. Tulane Solutions staff (2012 February 16). Leadership resilience. Tulane Solutions. Retrieved from com/leadership-resilience/?goback=%2eg de_ _member_ Warren, K. (2011 March 10). Creating the conditions for a resilient workforce. CEO Online. Retrieved from ceoonline.com.au/expert_talk/work_life_ balance/resilience_attitude/pages/id aspx. 30 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

31 We help you develop executive talent while tackling real-world challenges. U N C E X E C U T I V E (Now that s multi-tasking.) D E V E L O P M E N T CUSTOM EXPERIENCES Businesses today face many distinctive challenges. We listen to your needs and develop a thorough understanding of your business and industry. Then we create unique executive learning experiences designed to develop your executives as they address and overcome these challenges. Multi-tasking at its best. UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT The Power of Experience. To learn more, visit 31

32 The Big Data Talent Gap Stan Ahalt Director The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) Kip Kelly Director UNC Executive Development Introduction Big data the massive amounts of information companies routinely collect through web crawlers, social media feeds, server logs, customer service databases, and other sources (CIO editors, 2012) is quickly becoming big business in today s competitive marketplace. If HR and talent management professionals haven t added big data to their strategic agenda yet, they will be compelled to in the near future. Few organizations possess technical leaders with the expertise needed to collect, organize, and analyze the data and provide meaningful insights. Even fewer have business leaders with the knowledge and experience needed to create value from big data. Promise This white paper: Analyzes the big data revolution and the potential it offers organizations. Explores the critical talent needs and emerging talent gaps related to big data. Offers examples of organizations that are meeting this challenge head on. Recommends four steps HR and talent management professionals can take to bridge the talent gap. The Big Data Revolution The International Data Corporation (IDC) describes big data as the new generation of technologies and architectures designed to extract value economically from very large volumes of a wide variety of data by enabling high-velocity capture, discovery and/or analysis. (Villars, Eastwood & Olofson, 2011.) In other words, as authors Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier write in their book, Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (2013), big data refers to the things one can do at a large scale that cannot be done at a smaller one, to extract new insights or create new forms of value in ways that change markets, organizations, the relationships between citizens and governments, and more. The potential applications of big data analytics are vast. Internet giant Google, for example, uses big data analytics to identify flu outbreaks in the United States in real time a feat that takes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about two weeks to complete because it relies on slower reporting mechanisms. Google can do this because it receives more than three billion search queries on a daily basis. By using big data analytics, Google was able to identify 45 search terms that when used in a mathematical model, showed a strong correlation between 32 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

33 THE BIG DATA TALENT GAP their predictions and the CDC s flu outbreak statistics (Schönberger & Cukier, 2013). Another example of big data analytics comes from Target Corporation. Target wanted to capture a very attractive and lucrative market: new parents. New parents spend a lot of time and money shopping and creating new buying habits, and building loyalty among this audience can be very profitable. This market is so valuable that Target worked to identify customers who might be pregnant before a new parent buys the first diaper, or even registers for the baby shower. Since Target captures and records vast amounts of consumer data, they were able to review purchase patterns looking for trends and examine the items couples tended to buy prior to pregnancy, like vitamins, unscented lotion, hand towels, etc. Through mathematical machinations, Target determined the likelihood that couples were pregnant and used these insights to market to these couples well before their child s birth, creating customer loyalty and capturing an extremely valuable market segment. Big data is transforming every industry, as companies realize opportunities to leverage big data analytics in marketing, sales, and operations and HR leaders are realizing the potential as well. Technical recruiting firm Gild, for example, identifies highly-skilled engineers by analyzing open-source code, assessing it for quality, and reaching out to engineers who make the cut. Online auction company ebay uses analytics to fight attrition. Beth Axelrod, e-bay s senior vice president of human resources, notes in a recent Forbes article that big data analytics allows them to identify managerial or departmental hotspots for talent loss. If somebody 33

34 has been in a role for three years, hasn t been promoted, and hasn t changed roles, there s a far higher probability of attrition than someone who doesn t have those circumstances, she says (Clark, 2013). And, according to some reports, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer relied on big data analysis to ban telecommuting in the company. Business Insider reports that Mayer analyzed Yahoo s computer logs for the company s virtual private network (the network tele-commuting employees access when working remotely) and determined that remote employees weren t logging in to the VPN often enough to justify the policy (Klobucher, 2013). What Is Big Data? Big data are high volume, high velocity, and/or high variety information assets that require new forms of processing to enable enhanced decision making, insight discovery and process optimization. Source: Beyer & Laney, The Trends Fueling the Revolution Several trends have converged to fuel the big data revolution. First, technology costs continue to plummet. It is cheaper than ever to purchase memory and storage, and good quality, open-source software is competing with commercial software, putting pressure on commercial software developers to keep their prices The Three Vs of Big Data Data challenges can be big in terms of three characteristics, commonly known as the Three V s : Volume Challenges that arise from the vast amount of data that must be processed. Velocity Challenges that arise from the need to process data within a certain timeframe. Variety Challenges that arise from the many different types of data needed to understand a situation. Source: Ahalt, down (CIO editors, 2012). Second, technology has evolved to make business analytics more accessible and faster than ever before. Third, businesses are acquiring new data at an astonishing rate and from more varied sources, such as operational data, customer service data, sales transaction data, and machine or device data (Manyika et al., 2011). The amount of new data being created is mindboggling. The IDC forecasts that there will be 4 trillion gigabytes of new data created in 2013, nearly 50 percent more than in 2012 (Press, 2012). Google alone processes more than 24 petabytes of data each day, a thousand times more than all of the printed materials currently housed in the U.S. Library of Congress (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013). Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier also report that Facebook has more than 10 million photos uploaded every hour, and that the number of messages on Twitter grows about 200 percent each year. That s a lot of data. Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier note that while technology has played a large part in creating the big data revolution, something else also occurred to push it along. There was a shift in mindset about how data could be used, they write. Data was no longer regarded as static or stale.rather, data became a raw material of business, a vital economic input, used to create a new form of economic value. 34 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

35 THE BIG DATA TALENT GAP Seven Insights into Big Data Research conducted by MGI and McKinsey s Business Technology Office examined the state of big data and found the following seven insights: 1. Data have swept into every industry and business function and are now an important factor of production, labor, and capital. 2. There are five ways big data can create value: a. Big data can unlock significant value by making information transparent and usable at much greater frequency. b. As organizations create and store more transactional data in digital form, they can collect more accurate and detailed performance information on everything. c. Big data allows ever-narrower segmentation of customers and can result in much more precisely tailored products or services. d. Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision-making. e. Big data can be used to improve the development of the next generation of products and services. 3. Big data will become a key basis of competition and growth for individual firms. 4. Big data will underpin new waves of productivity growth and consumer surplus. 5. While the use of big data will matter across sectors, some sectors are set for greater gains. 6. There will be a shortage of talent necessary for organizations to take advantage of big data. 7. Several issues such as privacy, security, intellectual property, and even liability, will have to be addressed to capture the full potential of big data. Source: Manyika et al,

36 The Big Data Talent Shortage The demand for big data talent is growing rapidly. A 2012 survey by InformationWeek found that 40 percent of respondents said they planned to increase their staff in big data and analytics in the upcoming year and estimated that big data staffing would increase by 11 percent over the next two years (Henschen, 2012). The McKinsey study supports these findings. The authors predict that there will be a severe shortage of those who can analyze and interpret big data, predicting that by 2018, the United States could face a shortage of up to 190,000 workers with deep analytical skills and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the ability to use the big data analytics to make effective decisions. (Manyika et al, 2011.) This includes the ability to integrate findings from big data with knowledge derived from other techniques which offer different strengths and biases, such as focus groups and targeted surveys. The increasing demand for big data analysts who can crunch and communicate the numbers and the lack of managers and business leaders who can interpret the data means there is a growing talent shortage in the field. A survey conducted by The Big Data London group (in Raywood, 2012) found that 78 percent of respondents said there was a big data talent shortage, and 70 percent believed there was a knowledge gap between big data workers and those commissioning the projects (e.g., managers and CIOs). Another survey by NewVantage Partners (2012) found that 60 percent of respondents reported finding it very difficult to find and hire big data professionals, and 50 percent of respondents said it was very difficult to find and hire business leaders and managers who could identify and optimize business applications in big data. This impending talent shortage will create a significant challenge for HR and talent management professionals responsible for recruiting, developing, and retaining a critical skill set that will soon be in high-demand. To help their organizations realize the full potential of big data, HR and talent management professionals must understand the fundamentals of big data, why it matters, and what skills their organizations will need to analyze and interpret the large amounts of data they collect. Big Data Skills According to the editors of CIO, big data scientists and analysts need strong math skills and proficiency in working with massive databases and with emerging database technology. Plus, they must have a deep knowledge of their businesses, understanding the business processes, customers, and products. The most difficult big data skills to find, they contend, include: Advanced analytics and predictive analysis skills Complex event processing skills Rule management skills Business intelligence tools Data integration skills (CIO editors, 2012.) Big data analysts or scientists must possess skills similar to their IT predecessors they must have a solid computer science background that includes knowledge of applications, modeling, statistics, analytics, and math but they also need business savvy and the ability to communicate their findings to business and IT leaders in meaningful ways, skills that are not typically required on IT job descriptions. Good data scientists, writes IBM, will not just address business problems, they will pick the right problems that have the most value to the organization. (IBM staff, n.d.). As Rob Sentz, vice president of marketing for Economic Modeling Specialists International, notes in an interview for Career Builder, big data analysts need to understand why they are using data. What is the end goal? Data is like an assembly (line) of facts, which aren t necessarily the same thing as truth. If facts are poorly interpreted, it could lead to the wrong conclusions. (Lorenz, 2012). Hilary Mason, chief scientist for bitly, a URL shortening service, offered her opinion in The Wall Street Journal. Data scientists, she says, must be able to take data sets and model it mathematically and understand the math 36 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

37 THE BIG DATA TALENT GAP required to build those models. And they must be able to find insights and tell stories from that data. That means asking the right questions and that is usually the hardest piece. (Rooney, 2012). CIOs will also need to adjust their roles in this new, big data environment. The authors of the Strategic Guide to Big Data Analytics noted that CIOs will need to realize that useful data can come from anywhere and everywhere. Big data, for example, can come from the organization s server log files which track who checks into a website and what pages they visit. Analyzing who is checking in and where they go after they leave a page can give an organization better insight into what their customers want. CIOs will also need to realize that big data does not need to be organized beforehand; instead, data should be collected first with the goal to decide what to do with it later. Finally, CIOs will also need to recognize the skills their organizations will need to analyze big data and be an active participant in the training of or search for talent (CIO editors, 2012). It is not just the technical leaders who need to rise to meet the challenges of big data; managers at all levels will also have to develop new knowledge, skills, and experience to be effective. As Jeanne Harris, senior executive research fellow for Accenture Institute for High Performance, wrote in an blog for Harvard Business Review, managers must become more adept at mathematical reasoning, and while they do not need to have the depth of statistical knowledge required of big data analysts, they will need to understand how to use statistical models and how to interpret data, metrics, and the results of statistical models. They must also have the ability to look beyond their functional areas and see the big picture so they can tell the story the data reveals (Harris, 2012). It is this combination of business acumen, knowing the right questions to ask, and deep technical knowledge that is confounding most organizations when it comes to finding big data talent. One survey found that more than 60 percent of respondents said their employees need to develop new skills to translate big data into insights and business value (Harris, 2012). Developing these skills will take time, so many organizations are also looking to recruit critical talent but these hard-to-find men and women won t come cheap; a Wall Street Journal article estimated that some data scientists were making as much as $300,000 a year (Press, 2012) which gives large companies an advantage over small and medium sized companies for acquiring the big data talent. Recruiting and Developing Big Data Talent Unfortunately, you won t find big data talent coming out of many colleges and universities because big data majors are few and far between. The rapid growth of big data has outpaced colleges and universities ability to develop and implement new curriculums. A few universities are ahead of the curve, though, including North Carolina State University, which has a one-year Master of Science in Analytics (MSA) program (supported by SAS, a business analytics software and services provider headquartered in Cary, North Carolina), University of Ottawa, Northwestern University, DePaul University, University of Connecticut, and Louisiana State University. Oklahoma State, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, California State University at Long Beach, and the University of Alabama also have strong analytics programs (Henschen, 2012). Data analytics courses are also available through Carnegie Mellon and New York University (Bradshaw, 2013). IBM is following SAS footsteps in helping move formal big data analytics education forward. In late 2012, IBM announced that it would partner with Ohio State University to develop a new data analytics center in Columbus, Ohio. The center will offer research, client services, and skills training (Press, 2012). IBM plans to hire 500 big data consultants and researchers in the next three years to staff the center and to work with the university to develop a curriculum in business analytics and mathematics (SmartBrief staff, n.d.). IBM and SAS are both involved in another effort designed to unite the private and educational sectors to meet big data analytics educational needs. IBM, SAS, GE, Cisco, and NetApp have recently joined with a number of leading research universities to form the National 37

38 Consortium for Data Science (NCDS). This consortium aims to better align university curricula and research with the needs of the private sector. In response to the talent shortage, HR and talent management professionals are getting creative and looking outside the box when it comes to finding big data talent. Big data talent could come from the fields of research and development, finance, physics, biology, medicine, and even meteorology (Henschen, 2012, Hall, 2012). Jeremy Howard, chief scientist at an Internet startup that runs data prediction competitions has a degree in philosophy. He believes that the key job requirements in data science are really curiosity, flexibility, and the willingness to learn, capabilities that can be found in a wide variety of studies and job backgrounds (Hall, 2012). At Google, recruiters try to assess a candidate s agility, curiosity, and willingness to experiment in the interviewing process by asking questions like, How many golf balls would fit in a school bus? or How many sewer covers are there in Manhattan? Getting the right answer isn t really the point of the exercise the point is to assess a candidate s skills in experimental design, logic, and quantitative analysis (Harris, 2012). Capital One also assesses mathematical reasoning in the recruiting process. All prospective employees including senior executive candidates are tested for mathematical reasoning, logic, and problem-solving skills. Proctor & Gamble has developed a big picture/data literacy program which establishes a baseline digital-skills inventory for all employees. The program then offers developmental opportunities tailored to every level in the organization (Harris, 2012). As demand for big data talent grows, competition for this talent will become more aggressive - and expensive. Recruiting and retaining big data talent will become a significant challenge. HR and talent management professionals will also need to provide development opportunities; helping managers and business leaders at all levels develop the right skills. According to a survey conducted by The Big Data London group, 80 percent of respondents said that on-the-job training is among the best ways to learn and keep up-to-date with the latest big data skills, and 72 percent cited self-teaching (Raywood, 2012). The NewVantage Partners survey found that 69 percent of respondents were training their existing analytic professionals to get up to speed (NewVantage Partners staff, 2012). On-the-job training and self-teaching may not be adequate in developing existing staff, particularly if they don t know what they don t know. Fortunately, according to an Information Week report, a growing number of organizations are offering big data training and development through conferences, seminars, online courses, webinars, and certification programs (Henschen, 2012). 38 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

39 THE BIG DATA TALENT GAP 4 Steps to Bridge the Big Data Talent Gap To address the talent gap created by the big data revolution, HR and talent management professionals should: 1. Educate themselves about big data. HR and talent management professionals must educate themselves about big data and learn how big data will be a strategic driver for competitive advantage in their organizations. This means they must be proficient in big data and familiar with the skills and abilities big data scientists, analysts, managers, and senior executives need to be successful. HR and talent management professionals must also understand how big data can be applied to their own jobs, in recruiting (e.g., Gild s analyzing of open-source code to recruit technical engineers), salary, benefits, retention, social media, and performance reviews, and they must be leaders in using big data to advance the HR function. 2. Educate managers and senior leaders about big data. To use big data successfully, managers and senior leaders (including the CIO) must also develop new knowledge and skills and they must understand the real potential of big data. Business leaders must develop and continue to nurture a broad perspective, to see what s possible. Successful leaders will be those prepared to look beyond the current business model to see future opportunities that are made available through big data. They must be prepared to ask blue sky questions. They must be willing to take some risks. They need to become comfortable with the complexity that is inherent in big data and become adept at making the complex easier to understand. They must also embrace the change that is inevitable through big data, and have the ability and courage to lead the organization through change. Many of these skills are not new, but they take on new meaning and urgency when viewed through the lens of big data. HR and talent management professionals must work with managers and business leaders at all levels to educate them about big data and help them to develop the skills they will need to be successful. HR and talent management professionals must also work as business partners to the various business units seeking to attract big data talent. As noted, a key component of recruiting the right big data people will be asking the right questions and this will require close collaboration with business leaders to understand the business needs. 3. Develop creative strategies to recruit and retain big data talent. Big data analysts and business leaders who understand big data will be in high-demand and ripe for poaching. Talent management professionals should anticipate this talent shortage and adopt a more aggressive recruitment strategy for this population. They should also think outside the box and become more creative in recruiting for this skill set considering non-traditional background and experience to meet the growing need. Retaining this talent may also become a challenge, so HR should consider compensation, incentive, and recognition systems designed to keep this talent within the organization. 4. Offer solutions to build big data talent in their organizations. HR and talent management professionals may want to consider taking a page from Proctor & Gamble s training book and develop an appropriately scaled organization-wide big data literacy program. The program can include formal programs and seminars, but on-the-job training, mentoring, and self-paced learning programs can also offer affordable and effective results. These developmental opportunities may also provide an opportunity to identify employees in departments other than IT who possess an aptitude for, and interest in, big data analysis. 39

40 Conclusion Big data is big business, but its sudden appearance in the marketplace has left a huge hole in terms of talent. HR and talent management professionals must stay ahead of the curve by learning more about big data, its applications to their organizations as a whole and their functions in particular, and plan now to develop existing talent and recruit new talent that will be needed to realize the full potential of big data. Ahalt, S. (2012 July). Establishing a national consortium for data science. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from wp-content/uploads/2012 /09/NCDS- Consortium-Roadmap_July.pdf. Bradshaw, D. (2013 February 11). Business schools big data revolution. Financial Times. Retrieved from cms/s/2/c017f2cc e2-85d feab49a.html #axzz2lfxfesdr. Beyer, M. and Laney, D. (2012 June 21). The importance of big data : A definition. Gartner. Retrieved from gartner.com/displaydocument?ref=clientfri endlyurl&id= CIO editors (2012). Strategic Guide to Big Data Analytics. Framingham, MA: CIO. Clark, D. (2013 March 8). How big data is transforming the hunt for talent. Forbes. Retrieved from sites/dorieclark/2013/03/08/how-big-datais-transforming-the-hunt-for-talent. Dahad, N. (2013 January 20). The Internet of things: The next platform for global innovation. The Next Silicon Valley. Retrieved from com/7502/internet-things-next-platformglobal-innovation#.ut5rhr7d9jp. Davenport, T. & Patil, D.J. (2012 October). Data scientist: The sexiest job of the 21st century. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from Hall, S. (2012 July 23). Big data talent shortage requires creativity. ITBusinessEdge. Retrieved from com/cm/blogs/hall/big-data-talentshortage-requires-creativit/?cs= Harris, J. (2012 September 13). Data is useless without the skills to analyze it. HBR Blog Network. Retrieved from blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/09/data_is_useless_ without_ the_skills.html. Henschen, D. (2012 October). Filling the Talent Gap in Big Data Analytics. Manhasset, NH: Information Week. IBM staff (n.d.). What is data (a) scientist. IBM. Retrieved from com/software/ data/infosphere/datascientist/. Klobucher, D. (2013 March 8). Big data ended work from home at Yahoo will your company be next? Forbes. Retrieved from sap/2013/03/08/big-data-streamlines-theworkplace-and-may-end-telecommuting/. Lorenz, M. (2012 November 15). Does big data live up to its hype? The Hiring Site. Retrieved from careerbuilder.com/2012/11/15/does-bigdata-live-up-to-its-hype/. Manyika, J., Chui, M., Brown, B., Bughin, J., Dobbs, R., Roxburgh, C. & Hung Byers, A. (2011 May). Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity. McKinsey Global Institute. Retrieved from insights/mgi/research/technology_and_ innovation/big_data_the_next_frontier_ for_innovation. Mayer- Schönberger, V. & Cukier, K. (2013). Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. NewVantage Partners staff (2012 November 13). Big data talent shortage a potential challenge at Fortune 1000 organizations according to NewVantage Partners Big Data Executive Survey Part II. Yahoo! Retrieved from yahoo.com/news/big-data-talent-shortagepotential html. O Ryan, R.E. (2012 November 19). Big data talent shortage? Is recruiting to blame? Dice. Retrieved from com/2012/11/19/jobs-in-big-data/. Press, G. (2012 December 1). Big data news of the week: Beautiful $300,000 minds. Forbes. Retrieved from forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2012/12/01/ big-data-news-of-the-week-beautiful minds/. Raywood, D. (2012 December 3). Big data analyst shortage is a challenge for the UK. SC Magazine. Retrieved from article/270538/. Rooney, B. (n.d.). Big data s big problem: Little talent. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from Smart Brief staff (n.d.). IBM targets big data talent shortage with research center. SmartBrief. Retrieved from smartbrief.com/news/comptia/storydetails. jsp?issueid=24c1241e-d7b3-47e1-b3a9-03fd89052b88&copyid=8b1dbcb9- AD A9E-474DFB6868D4&brief =comptia&sb_code=rss&&campaign=rss. Thomson, I. (2012 October 4). Big data skills gap needs filling says tech industry. The Register. Retrieved from theregister.co.uk/2012/10/04/big_data_ skills_gap/. Villars, R., Eastwood, M. & Olofson, C. (2011 June). Big data: What it is and why you should care. International Data Corporation. Framingham, MA: IDC. Woods, D. (2012 November 21). Will data science become the new bottleneck? Forbes. Retrieved from com/sites/danwoods/2012/11/21/will-datascience-become-the-new-bottleneck/. 40 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

41 Helping you grow your greatest asset: your people. U N C E X E C U T I V E D E V E L O P M E N T OPEN ENROLLMENT PROGRAMS Our executive development open enrollment offerings combine powerful continuing business education content with real-world work experience. Through action learning and business simulation activities, we challenge participants to think, reflect, and grow as leaders. GENERAL BUSINESS MANAGEMENT Executive Development Institute Change Management Sales Management Strategic Planning and Business Decision Making LEADERSHIP AND EFFECTIVENESS Leadership Effectiveness Workshop Intentional Leadership Project Leadership: Build a Best-in-Class Project Team Women in Business: Transitioning to Leadership HUMAN CAPITAL MANAGEMENT Business and Human Resources: Leading HR and Your Organization into the Future Talent Management Institute BUSINESS COMMUNICATIONS Negotiation Skills for Effective Managers Enhanced Business Communication through Storytelling Developing Leadership Presence FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT Financial Analysis for Non-Financial Managers STRATEGY AND INNOVATION Strategic Innovation for the New Business Environment Leading Social Media Strategy CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY Becoming Green: Effective Sustainability Strategies for You and Your Organization To learn more, visit UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT The Power of Experience. 41

42 One Page Talent Management Marc Effron President, The Talent Strategy Group Miriam Ort Senior Director, Human Resources for PepsiCo This special section of Volume 5 has been reprinted from the book One Page Talent Management: Eliminating Complexity, Adding Value by Marc Effron and Miriam Ort with permission from the authors and Harvard Business Press, Copyright (c) 2010 by Harvard Business Publishing Corporation: all rights reserved. Chapter 1 A highly respected business journal has recently published an article proving that when a CEO makes and serves a cake to his employees, it causes huge increases in employee engagement [humor us]. Two CEOs read the article, believe the findings, and commit to making a cake for their staff. They each ask their talent management leader to design a process that will produce a suitable cake. 42 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

43 DEVELOPING ONE PAGE REAL TALENT SKILLS FOR MANAGEMENT VIRTUAL TEAMS In Company 1, the talent leader is excited about this challenge. His goal is to design a plan that will allow the CEO to make a world-class cake. He starts by benchmarking the best cakes in the best companies around the globe and consulting with renowned bakers. He takes this knowledge and everything he has ever learned about cake making and designs a detailed cake-making plan. When followed correctly, his plan will produce a five-tiered cake with flowers of multicolored frosting cascading from layer to layer, intricate icing designs, a working fountain of melted chocolate, and a rich butter-cream filling flavored with imported Madagascar vanilla. When his plan is finished, the proud talent leader hands the CEO a 73-page instruction manual, 124 different ingredients, and 7 pans. This, he tells her, will produce a world-class cake with less than 100 hours of effort. The CEO politely thanks the talent leader but wonders how she can ever make this cake. She s committed to making a cake, but she simply can t justify the time and energy required to make this one. When she asks the talent leader if there s another way, he repeats that this is a great cake-making plan in fact, GE uses a very similar plan to make its cakes. The busy CEO never finds the time to make that cake, and without cake her staff s engagement decreases and the company s performance declines. At Company 2, the talent management leader is equally committed to the goal. She understands that the CEO has great intentions but no expertise in cake making and little time to learn. Her goal is to develop a solution that will meet the CEO s goal employees eat cake and become engaged. She knows that she has to make the process as easy and understandable as possible if her busy CEO is going to use it. Although she s quite competent in making cakes, she starts by reviewing the science behind making a great cake to ensure she s applying the fundamentals correctly. Her research reminds her that only six ingredients are required to make cake, and she realizes that the process might be easier than she had thought. (On a benchmarking visit to Company 1, she had seen the cake design proposed by its talent leader and, while she admired the intricate detailing and cake bling, she didn t think they supported the core goal. She decided not to include those extras in her cake design.) Finally, she realizes that while her basic recipe simplifies the steps involved in making the cake, she can add even more value. She mixes together the dry ingredients to create a cake mix, greatly reducing both the time the CEO will need to spend making the cake and the chance for error. She gives it to the CEO with two eggs, a can of frosting, a pan, and a one page instruction sheet. She tells him that in one hour this simple process and few essential ingredients will make a nice cake that the employees will enjoy. The CEO sees that with little effort he ll be able to serve his employees cake, making them, him, and the talent leader happy. The client now values the talent leader, who gets invited to have a seat at the table and share the cake

44 companies and employees can work best together. We understand the combination of job experiences, coaching, and formal training that is optimal for development. We know which talent practices have proved to be effective over time. In short, we already have nearly every answer needed to develop talent in our organizations. Yet, there seems to be a gap between our knowledge of how to develop talent and our ability to actually do it. This is difficult to understand, given that most companies have an HR department and many larger companies have dedicated talent management or leadership development groups focused on precisely that task. So, if our organizations want to grow talent, know how to do it, and have the resources necessary to get it done, what is not working? More importantly, how can we fix it? Sound a little silly? Substitute performance management or succession planning for making a cake. Does your organization resemble Company 1, with academically perfect talent-building processes that are both unusable and unused? Or are you closer to Company 2, building talent with lean, easy-to-use processes that are guaranteed to achieve results? Recent research by McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, and Deloitte suggest the former. 1 Their studies confirm that organizations are unhappy with their ability to grow talent and are becoming increasingly frustrated as their talent needs become more severe. Outside their walls, they see a competitive environment in which winning requires top-quality talent, while inside those walls, they see millions spent on talent development with very few results. Line executives blame human resource (HR) groups for not delivering better leaders, while HR says those same executives talk a great game but do not deliver the necessary resources or commitment. While this situation is challenging, it is also somewhat strange due to one key fact: we already know almost everything necessary to grow great talent. Sixty years of high-quality behavioral and industrial/organizational psychology research can help us understand how Four Barriers to Building Talent Through our corporate and consulting experience, we have identified four talent-building barriers that organizations create for themselves and then regularly stumble over. These barriers explain why line executives exhortations and HR s actions to build talent are not translating into increased talent quality and depth. Creating Needless Complexity When you consider the simple intent behind most talent processes, it can be challenging to understand why a line manager experiences so much complexity. A simple process like setting goals often becomes a multipage, headache-inducing exercise and in doing so puts a huge barrier in the way of increasing organizations performance. Where organizations go wrong is that they fail to balance complexity with value as they build these processes. It is not that the additional components layered on from highly detailed competency models to the extra hundred questions on an engagement survey are technically wrong. Many have sound behavioral science to support their inclusion. However, as each additional element is added, evaluating the trade-off between the complexity 44 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

45 DEVELOPING ONE PAGE REAL TALENT SKILLS FOR MANAGEMENT VIRTUAL TEAMS it brings to the overall process and the impact it will have on the original business objective is critical. Adding No New Value Talent management tools have not been designed to help managers make smarter decisions or to make their jobs easier. Managers often need to attend training sessions to learn how to use a talent tool or process or must rely on their HR manager or other expert to help them. When a manager receives an engagement survey report, can he quickly understand the business choices he should make because of it? The talent review process may differentiate the best talent from the rest, but do managers know how to use that information productively? In many organizations, managers have come to see talent management tools and processes as largely divorced from their day-to-day management challenges. Neglecting the Science As we mentioned earlier, HR and talent management can rely on a rich body of academic research to help inform the right decisions. Basic behavioral science (e.g., Ivan Pavlov s classic conditioning or B. F. Skinner s behavioral research) provided the foundation for the industrial and organizational psychology research (e.g., Victor Vroom s expectancy theory or Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham s job design) of the past fifty years that informs every modern talent practice, from 360-degree feedback to conducting performance reviews. If companies would faithfully follow this science, they would find that it performs up to its billing. Their talent practices would work as the research suggests they should. If they do not understand or choose to ignore the science, companies will build talent practices using biases and assumptions and wonder why their talent problems are not going away. Lacking Transparency and Accountability Few managers enjoy having tough conversations with their employees. Giving feedback about subpar performance or explaining that a career goal will never be achieved significantly increases most managers heart rates. But transparent conversations like these drive higher performance. Unfortunately, in too many companies, fear of the consequences or a genuine belief that employees do not need this level of clarity means talent practices are opaque. It s also understandable that managers usually prioritize coaching, performance feedback, and creating development plans after activities that provide a more immediate benefit to their business. These talent practices are still important, however, and most organizations do not hold their managers accountable for executing them. Designing a New Approach In late 2005, finding a way to overcome these challenges dominated our thoughts. Marc was the recently appointed vice president of talent management for a $9 billion consumer packaged-goods company, and Miriam was a manager on his team. The company had started a major restructuring process that would require great talent to achieve its objectives and strong talent processes to sustain them. The organization was not utilizing the talent processes in place, which unfortunately felt like those in Company 1. Our charge was to make fundamental changes that would allow the company to quickly and easily identify the talent it had, deploy that talent in the most effective possible way, and rapidly develop critical capabilities. As an added twist, we had to build and implement these processes and show meaningful results in less than a year in order to support the turnaround. Sitting at a conference table in our New York City office, we started to address our task with a blank sheet of paper. We knew that we had great latitude in what processes we proposed for performance management, talent reviews, and other talent practices. We also knew the somewhat depressing research on the effectiveness of those practices. We recognized that we had to find a better way. 45

46 Since little research existed about why talent practices succeeded in organizations, we asked ourselves what we knew to be true. We concluded that: The science works. We knew that, thanks to legions of behavioral and industrial/organizational psychologists, how to change leaders behaviors, grow their skills, align them with the business, and achieve almost any other desired organizational outcome was widely known. Although that research still required some translation into actual process designs, the raw material did, for the most part, exist. Only implementation matters. Our experience (and a little common sense) told us that no matter how artful the design, a talent practice would work only if it was being used. Unfortunately, we had seen that many companies talent practices were bureaucratic, complex, and time consuming, so managers either did not use them or made a minimum effort to comply. Managers want to succeed. Line managers have challenging goals, and most welcome a talent tool or process that helps them to be successful. In our corporate and consulting experience, we had heard from managers worldwide that traditional talent practices from talent reviews to 360-degree feedback seemed designed to benefit HR, not to help the average manager. Transparency and accountability guarantee results. We understood the noise caused in an organization when processes were not transparent. Eliminating that noise would make the processes more legitimate and likely to be used. We also understood that some managers would never elevate talent to the top of their agenda. For them, and for forgetful others, accountability for talent outcomes was required. We were confident that if we used these truths to shape our talent practices, the results would be at least somewhat more effective than traditional talent processes and, we hoped, much more. Our design process started by identifying the business s most urgent talent objectives. First, we needed to understand the quality and depth of the company s talent in order to ensure that we could make the right talent selection and investment decisions. Next we needed everyone in the organization aligned on the vital few goals and behaviors that would turn around the business. This alignment would accelerate progress toward those goals. Finally, we needed to raise engagement to the highest possible level to maximize every associate s performance. We designed our solutions by faithfully applying our four truths. Since we knew the science worked, we researched what the core science found to be effective at driving individual and company performance, not how HR practices were typically designed. We knew that only implementation mattered, so we stripped complexity from existing processes and built new ones that balanced complexity with a commensurate amount of value. Our constant focus was on whether the most skeptical managers would find the process simple and valuable enough to use. Since we knew that transparency and accountability guaranteed results, we built these elements into every practice. 46 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

47 DEVELOPING ONE PAGE REAL TALENT SKILLS FOR MANAGEMENT VIRTUAL TEAMS When we finished designing our processes, even we were surprised by the results. After accurately translating the research into practice, we were left with the simplest possible path from science to effective execution. Practices that managers had experienced as intensive, bureaucratic, time-consuming exercises had been reduced to one page, intuitive, business tools. When we applied this approach to our performance management process, for example, the result was a simple, one page form that managers quickly adopted. In every practice, the elements of complexity that could not justify their overall value to managers had fallen away. Not only was complexity gone, but value had been added back. We could now turn complex HR data into valuable insights for managers. We could tell them exactly which actions would increase engagement in their group and by how much. We could highlight the most important behaviors for them to change, while avoiding the resistance that typically accompanies 360-degree feedback. We had found a way to turn the theoretical power of behavioral science into actual results. Focus on the Business Objective: Creating Clear and Motivating Goals When we wanted to set and communicate goals that would maximize performance, we examined the academic research on goal setting, not the best practices in performance management. In the research, we found four key concepts related to setting motivational goals goals should be extremely challenging, in the employee s self-interest, few in number, and very specific. Along with those findings, we found research that disproved conventional goal-setting wisdom, including that participation in goal setting improves performance and that one scale is superior to another. In our goal-setting design, we included just those elements proven to work and left out everything without clear science to support it. The result was a model of OPTM (One Page Talent Management what we call our structured approach and philosophy for building talent) applied to the performance management process. Our finished goal-setting form kept employees focused on the most important goals by allowing no more than four to be listed. Since the science did not indicate that anything else was needed, we included just two boxes per goal the goal and the metric. A one page instruction sheet explained how to write goals that were challenging and in the employee s self-interest. This new process our first attempt to design on one page yielded two benefits. The expected benefit was that participation in goal setting went from about 30 percent to above 90 percent. The unexpected benefit was that managers now understood that we had their best interests at heart, which gave us permission to continue our talent management transformation. 47

48 Long-Term Performance Results This is an appropriate time to ask whether this very untraditional approach actually delivered results. It is also a good time to briefly share our point of view on talent metrics, which, as you may now suspect, varies somewhat from traditional views. We are big fans of quantitatively measuring talent results and using the data to make decisions about talent. However, we believe that the best overall talent metric is the long-term performance of the business. Other talent metrics are interesting intermediate measures of process performance and, although helpful in measuring progress, do not measure the only talent outcome many shareholders and executives care about. Long-term performance is also a good metric because, if you believe what the research indicates that better leaders deliver better results over time, better talent practices deliver better leaders who deliver better performance. Both the Top Companies for Leaders research and a number of academic studies provide ample proof. 2 In short, if talent management is working well, the company is much more likely to succeed. We also recognize that although talent is critically important, hundreds of other variables affect corporate performance. It would be wonderful if it were possible to draw a straight line from talent practices to specific business outcomes, but it is not. For the work on talent management that we did in our company, we can point to corporate performance metrics and both quantitative and qualitative measures of process performance. During the three years after we implemented our OPTM processes, our organization was able to reduce administrative expenses by nearly 4 percent, increase revenue by more than 20 percent, increase profit margins by almost 50 percent, and was regularly cited by the media as a well-run organization. 3 These were certainly strong results, but can be considered even stronger because they were delivered during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. At the process level, we worked to increase engagement, the power of talent reviews, and the effectiveness of performance management, among other efforts. Engagement increased 20 percent (30 percent among managers), and performance discussions took place for more than 90 percent of associates, up from less than 30 percent. The number of ready now successors for key roles increased by 25 percent, even though we aggressively increased the quality standards for talent each year. Our success rate for using coaching to change behaviors went from well below 50 percent to north of 90 percent. There are many more similar results that we could present. Strangely, the qualitative measures actually seem more powerful than the quantitative ones. General managers thanked us for the new performance management process. That was certainly the first time in our careers we had ever heard that! The executive team praised the talent review process as the most effective in the company s history and said that better people decisions were being made faster because of it. Engagement was woven into the culture of the company. There were more qualified general managers available for key roles. We had moved a meaningful amount of talent who no longer fit out of the organization. Overall, these metrics seemed a much better measure of success than anything quantitative. Can we claim that everything that went well with talent was because of our processes? Of course not. It would be impossible to separate out the effects of new executive team members, adjusted compensation structures, and all the other variables that might have had an impact on talent outcomes. Still, at the end of four years, we felt comfortable claiming that our approach was more effective than typical talent process and, very likely, quite a bit more. One Page Talent Management Shortly after we began implementing these practices, we were invited to speak to a leading HR group about the talent management changes our company was making. Needing a clever title for the presentation, we coined One Page Talent Management. We now use the term to define the integration of behavioral science, simplicity, accountability, and transparency into practices that accelerate the development of talent. 48 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

49 DEVELOPING ONE PAGE REAL TALENT SKILLS FOR MANAGEMENT VIRTUAL TEAMS We use OPTM both figuratively and literally. As an integrating concept, it stands for the addition of value and removal of complexity from talent practices. At the most practical level, it suggests a design discipline for creating these practices and a metric for evaluating their design. We do not expect that the key form or process for every talent practice can be reduced to one page, but we believe that aspiration forces an entirely new way of thinking about process design. Most importantly, we consider the OPTM approach to be a superior way to grow better leaders faster. The Added Benefits of Simplification It Gets Even Better If having talent practices that allow you to build better leaders faster is not enough to convince you that OPTM is the right approach, a few other benefits are worth considering. Line managers get a free week. If you transform talent practices, managers will get back at least forty hours a year compared to what they are spending now on current talent practices. Processes that used to take an hour per employee will take as little as fifteen minutes. The design process is faster. Although it might seem intuitive, simpler processes take much less time to create. Weeks, not months, are needed to design and implement talent practices. A faster design cycle means you will start building better leaders, even faster. It also means that you can get feedback more quickly on which parts of the design need adjustment, make fast changes, and re-release the new process in record time. Processes are cheaper to design. Less complex processes do not require as much consulting time, as many benchmarking trips, or other costs traditionally associated with the design process. Given the $50,000 to $500,000 you can spend designing and implementing more traditional talent practices, OPTM starts to look even more compelling. HR earns the right to do more. A simple, effective process quickly wins the loyalty of managers and executives. They will be much more receptive to your next recommendation if your last one proved its effectiveness. 1. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and the Economist Intelligence Unit, Aligned at the Top: How business and HR executives view today s most significant people challenges and what they re doing about it (New York: Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, May 2007), 6; Ranier Strack, Jean-Michel Caye, Michael Leicht, Ulrich Villis, Hans Böhm, and Michael McDonnell, The Future of HR in Europe: Key Challenges through 2015 (Boston: Boston Consulting Group, June 2007), 16; Matthew Guthridge, Aamus Komm, and Emily Lawson, Making Talent a Strategic Priority, McKinsey Quarterly, no. 1 (2008): Marc Effron, Shelly Greenslade, and Michelle Salob, Top Companies for Leaders 2005 (Lincolnshire, IL: Hewitt Associates LLC, 2005); Mark Huselid, Susan Jackson, and Randall Schuler, Technical and Strategic Human Resources Management Effectiveness as Determinants of Firm Performance, Academy of Management Journal 40, no. 1 (February 1997): , AOM Archive, Ebscohost. 3. Avon Products, Inc, The Avon Opportunity, Annual Report 2007, annualreport2008.pdf, October 8, 2009, 49

50 Drive your organization s talent management agenda. TALENT MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE One of the most pressing strategic issues facing CEOs today is whether they have the right talent with the right skills in the right places. UNC is partnering with three of the world s most experienced Talent Management Practitioners to help HR and Talent Management leaders productively and proactively steer their organizations talent. Come learn from Marc Effron, Corey Seitz, and Jim Shanley it s your turn in the driver s seat. UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT The Power of Experience. To learn more, visit 50 ALL CONTENT UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 2013 To subscribe, visit

51 UNC EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT Managing employee talent is vital to the success of any organization. At UNC Executive Development, we provide learning experiences designed to empower participants to think differently and consider new ways to tackle challenges and grow business. We listen to our partners and develop a deep understanding of their business, industry, and needs. Our approach to program design and delivery draws upon the power of real-world, applicable experiences from our faculty and staff, integrated with the knowledge our client partners share about the challenges they face. We make a commitment to the organizations we work with to meet their business and academic objectives and to provide ongoing support, client management, and follow-up. We call our approach The Power of Experience. We combine traditional with experiential and unique learning to ensure that all individuals gain relevant new skills that they can implement within their own organizations. Through action learning and business simulation activities, we challenge participants to think, reflect, and make decisions differently. Our goal is to provide memorable, transformational learning which results in stronger individuals leading stronger teams and organizations.

52 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School Executive Development Campus Box 3445 Rizzo Conference Center Chapel Hill, NC Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Permit Number 177 Chapel Hill, NC In this issue: V C U A Developing Leaders in a VUCA Environment Got Game? The Use of Gaming in Learning and Development Building A Resilient Organizational Culture The Big Data Talent Gap One Page Talent Management