This is the final day (half-day actually) of the KnowledgeAdvisors’ 7th Annual Analytics Symposium. The general sessions as well as breakouts yesterday and today continued to focus on ways companies are collecting data for better decision making. I’m pleased to see the focus of discussion move beyond the Kirkpatrick 4-levels of measurement (as in “Are you measuring levels 3 and 4?”), beyond Phillips’ level 5 ROI (as in “What was the ROI for that program?”), to collecting data to make better informed decisions and making analytics and fact-based decision making a integral element of strategy and competition. So, the questions are: what are your talent initiatives intended to accomplish; why are those outcomes important to business success; what decisions do you want to be able to make about your initiatives and when do you want to make them; therefore, what do you need to know about the initiatives and the circumstances of their implementation, what will your standard of evidence be, which data will you collect and how, and what type of analyses will you perform? Kirkpatrick’s 4-levels and Phillips’ ROI method can be useful frameworks for specific purposes, but alone they do not constitute a purposeful decision strategy.Two more things:

• As noted in my post yesterday, Josh Bersin has created a comprehensive framework for thinking about measurement and decision-making across the entire process of creating, implementing, and evaluating human capital initiatives. Josh’s Training Measurement Book does a fine job of explaining his framework and guidelines for using it.
• All of this discussions about measurement, analysis, and dedcision-making inevitably take you back to the fundamental need to manage talent strategically. That means creating human capital plans aligned in detail with:
  • with your business strategies
  • the processes that enable those strategies
  • the human capabilities needed to execute those processes successfully
  • the drivers of and gaps in those capabilities now, in the next 1 to 2 years, in the next 3 to 5 years
• Creating those written plans annually, including your measurement objectives and strategies, and reviewing them quarterly enable you to manage forward, quarter by quarter, toward that 1 - 2 year horizon as well as the 3 - 5 year horizon. They enable you to create a portfolio of short-term and long-term, operational and strategic human capital investments that you can then measure and adjust as your future becomes your present and as your internal and external environmental scans enable you to forecast new 1 -2 year and 3 - 5 year horizons.

These are the indispensable perspectives and competencies that Human Resources or Talent Management or Human Capital Management (whichever term your business uses) must have to fulfill its executive leadership role.State Parkway Partners can help you create such a capability in your organization. See the other sections of this website and the service offering presentations for more information.

This week I am attending KnmowledgeAdvisors’ 7th Annual Analytics Symposium. KnowledgeAdvisors is a great company focused both on its own and its clients’ business success and the advancment of human capital management as a business discipline. Wednesday’s opening Keynote was delivered by Cedric Coco from Lowe’s Companies. He posed and answered the question: How do we measure the value of, then optimize our company’s most strategic asset…our employees? Cedric described the Human Capital Business Model he and his team have built, and are continuing to develop. He begins with the view that people are the largest unmanaged asset in a company. “Unmanaged” doesn’t mean there are no managers: it does mean that companies do not have enough specific knowledge of the role people play in the company’s value proposition to effectively manage the recruitment, hiring, onboarding, engagement, development, and assessment of their people. The idea - which will be further developed today and tomorrow by Heather Maitre, Chris Hardy, Tom Davenport, Laurie Bassi, Dave Vance, Jac Fitz-enz, and Nick Bontis - is that people create value and those who invest in people create greater market value than those who don’t. The key, of course, is defining what precisely to invest in. So, Cedric’s team has done a lot of work and have determined: (a) that the factor that correlates very highly with specific business results like revenue, customer satisfaction, and lower costs is “employee engagement”; and (b) that there are very specific factors that constitute “engagement” in their company. They now know that if they invest in A, B, and C they can optimize engagement, and that engagement optimized to a specific measured level will produce a predictable level of revenue, customer satisfaction, and cost. This basic Human Capital Business Model is now the foundation of a very specific HR strategy, a focused creation of a specific employee experience, and an analytics strategy that will keep the company on top of changes in the factors that drive engagement and business results. Interestingly, Cedric and his team have also drilled down into the “employee experience” element in their strategy and, through lifecycle research, have defined what that experience should be like at each phase of the emploment lifecycle and how to measure it: acquisition, onboarding, engagement, and transition (to another role, to another company, or to retirement).It’s terrific to see such a disciplined approach to defining, developing, and rewarding the specific roles people play that drive specific business outcomes. As a bonus, Josh Bersin (Bersin & Associates) concluded the day with a view of trends and issues in the L&D and Talent Management worlds. The sad aspect of Josh’s research is how few companies have set goals for themselves to manage the acquisition, engagement, development, and retention of their most strategic asset…their employees. By the way, Josh published a book last year titled The Training Management Book. Josh has developed a framework for planning, managing, and measuring any intervention designed to improve the performance of people in a business. While it focuses specifically on training, you can immediately see how you can use the framework for other change initiatives. I highly recommend Josh’s book to all HR professionals.

My last two posts have been about managing performance through The Accountability Principle. It would be helpful - but not absolutely necessary - to read them before this post: Accountability - The Key to Performance Management posted April 29th and The Accountability Principle and Engagement posted April 30th.The antithesis of The Accountability Principle is The No-Nonsense School of Accountability. No-Nonsenseers have advocated performance management as it has been practiced at least since the 1960s. Managers give clear expectations up front, a thorough performance appraisal at the end, and regular feedback, maybe even some coaching, in between. If someone’s really off track, managers confront that right away. For top performers, there are rewards and recognition along the way. For poor performers, there is progressive discipline. For the rest, well, they have their pay checks and get to keep their jobs. What could be clearer and fairer and more motivating? The reality is that performance management is a fiction for the vast majority of people in the vast majority of businesses.

The beginning of the process - clear expectations or objectives and measures - often never happens except in general terms. When it does, it is seldom sustained because it is too difficult and time consuming to resolve all the questions that more systematic approaches call for:

Are these the right things to do to make the strategy successful? What’s actually being measured? Is that the right thing to measure? How accurate are the measures? How timely are the measures? Is the goal even achievable? What if unexpected forces make the goal either too easy or unattainable? What about all the things people do that are not measured but are critical to keeping everything running, how are these accounted for?

The middle of the process - performance feedback, and maybe coaching - seldom gets done because of the complexities of the business and the environment in which it operates.

Ambiguity delays judgment. Communication struggles with interpretation, completeness, and timeliness. Collaboration falters under the pressure of adversarial motives and contending views. New knowledge emerges that changes the playing field. Priorities change frequently and occasionally radically. Resources are reduced or diverted to meet new objectives. The measures chosen turn out not to achieve the real goal. Important aspects of the business are neglected to the detriment of the business in order to “make the numbers”.

The one piece of the process that eventually does get done is the performance review. But, this is usually viewed by both parties as an administrative requirement. There is very little accountability in this annual event because the beginning and middle parts of the process either have never happened or were pro forma or occasional at best.

Often expectations or objectives are written down for the first time when the performance review is due, and the past year is recollected from whatever reports or memory is available. Some organizations have feedback collected from people affected by an individual’s performance. But the biases of memory and the power of emotion and personal perspective make useful, accurate evaluation rare. Managers regularly pick the “rating” they “feel” is right and write the narrative to support the rating. In any case, the best that this process produces is a point-in-time judgement that usually has some marginal effect on the expected rewards.

The reality of managing a business is that there are no clear beginnings or endings. We estimate various measures and the forces that will impact them; but none of this is science, and all of it is affected by new knowledge that regularly is discovered about the past, present, and future. Priorities change, resources are redirected. We arbitrarily evaluate results quarterly and annually. But the goals we project, the measures we set, and the data we collect are very often not in one-to-one alignment and have only an approximate relationship to one another. While goals are essential to frame expectations, develop plans, and calibrate the actions we need to take, few, if any, bear a readily assessable relationship to the clear meting out of rewards and punishments the No-Nonsense School of accountability advocates as the driver of performance.

No-Nonsense performance management is a relic of industrial organization and a command-and-control system of management. No-Nonsense performance management should be replaced by The Accountability Principle.

Accountability is a very weighty and quite personal concept. It is burdensome and liberating at the same time. The accounting it calls for is a first person accounting, not a disinterested bystander’s report. Accountability obliges the person in charge to tell her own story. And in the telling, she is expected to know clearly what she is trying to accomplish and why that’s important in the larger scheme of things. Starting with the results her actions have produced so far, she is expected to go deeper and give her analysis of what accounts for those results: what forces are at play and what she has done to manage those forces; where there are shortfalls or overruns and what she’s done to overcome their causes. She is expected to demonstrate that she is monitoring and evaluating what is going on all along the way: exercising judgment, seeking counsel, soliciting help and making adjustments to overcome unforeseen obstacles and to compensate for unintended consequences.

Interestingly, the rewards and losses associated with being an accountable person are many; and they are experienced every day, not just at the end of a project, or a quarter, or a year. That final payoff or loss is critically important because it affects a person’s possibilities - his future and his broader life beyond this job. It affects both reputation and wealth and, therefore, expands or contracts the horizons of his life - the things he can do and the interests he can explore. But, accountability is also an intensely emotional thing. A person experiences accountability as an energy welled up within him. He feels the pressure of that point in time when he’ll have to tell the story of what he’s done. He wants the story to be a good one, the story of a hero overcoming daunting forces. His awareness expands to take in everything affecting his goals and becomes keenly alert to threats and opportunities, with a hunger for all sorts of situational information. He feels concerned about other people: do they know their responsibilities and are they all doing their parts. He feels concerned for other people: how are they feeling about what they’re doing and how are they holding up when the pressure is on. He feels worried about resources: are there enough and are they being used well. His mind is a flow of checklist questions. Have all the right communications been made? Are all the parts of the job getting done? Are the customers satisfied? Will we meet our objectives? The accountable person experiences the emotional rewards and losses that are evoked by the multitude of step-by-step successes and failures as he carries out his mission. In fact, this is a major reason why the accountable person seeks out accountable jobs - to experience himself handling all of the challenges presented by the quest for some specific measure of success, important to himself and others. This experience of handling a myriad of challenges - sometimes not so successfully, but then recovering and learning for the next time - is as important to a person’s internal possibilities as the final financial and reputational rewards are to his external possibilities. It is in the day-to-day tests that a person comes to know his own internal horizons - his current and expanding capabilities.

So, accountability is a simple yet exceedingly powerful concept when used systematically throughout a business.

• It becomes the motive for people to achieve and maintain a big picture view - what are we trying to accomplish and how do all the parts fit together to make that happen.
• It becomes the motive for measurement of progress and results - how can you evaluate the situation without measures?
• It becomes the motive to develop and implement constructive changes in order to tell a story of success.
• It funnels all of the wisdom in the business to the transaction level as each person is in turn accountable to another.
• It becomes the network of conversations that drive the ongoing modification of strategy and redesign of processes to better pursue the overarching objective.

In a big-picture view, human capital management is the process of making sure you have the right people, with the right competencies, in the right roles now and in the future. To be effective at human capital management, leaders at every level of the organization need to treat talent as an asset that produces value for the organization today and which can produce more or different value in the future. Unlike other organizational assets, talent belongs to the people in the business and not to the owners of the business. So, leaders have to embrace the challenge of engaging people in ways that cause them to invest their best abilities in the business, to improve the productivity of their talents over time, and to acquire new competencies that they enjoy and that the business needs. When recruiting and hiring, leaders need to assess candidates not only for the job that is open but for the broader role they could play and the more valuable contributions they could make over time.Much of our future leadership training and leader development will have to revolve around a full appreciation of the fact that talent is an asset that belongs to someone else yet accounts for a substantial portion of the current and future market value of the business. What percentage of your business’s market value is attributable to physical assets? What are your talent assets worth? What do you need to do about that?

A big part of human capital management will be:

• providing the networks, job assignments, project assignments, and coaching that develop the conceptual thinking skills, problem solving skills, and interpersonal skills leaders need to engage people
• implementing practices and processes that cascade through the organization to make a “talent as an asset” mindset part of the organization’s DNA
• expecting leaders at every level to provide a regular accounting of the increased productivity of the talent assets for which they have leadership responsibility

Although it has always been true, it is even moreso today: the future is invading the present at an accelerating rate. There is no such thing as a sustainable competitive advantage. So, we need to shake up and speed up the present to be able to sustain our ability to find new advantages with which to compete in the future.

Even today, HR roles and functions tend to operate in relative isolation from one another. HR generalists tend to handle the day-to-day people issues, and HR specialists tend to the day-to-day of running their functions - recruiting, training, leadership development, compensation, and benefits. Sometimes one or the other “rolls out” a program intended to plug a gap or improve a process. But mostly HR generalists provide general guidance to business leaders and, from time to time, ask for some service from a specialist function. All this despite a decade or more of concepts like “strategic HR”!

I think a major reason why this is so is because few senior HR leaders know how to lead and organize people to produce holistic, integrated talent strategies tightly connected to business strategies through a holistic, integrated talent assessment and workforce planning process.

Yet, right in the middle of all of the issues about “talent” and “human capital” is the person in charge of learning & development whether titled as CLO or not. The people in this role are in a unique position to pull together their HR colleagues and fashion a holistic, integrated process with which they can engage business leaders to attend to their current and future talent. Why should the L&D people take on this challenge? The reason is that it is likely the most significant learning challenge their organizations face, learning how to operationalize talent strategies robust enough to execute business strategies, year-on-year.

A place I like to go for fresh thinking on this topic is http://www.newlearningplaybook.com/ hosted by Jeanne Meister.

I invite you to participate in what I hope will be an ongoing series of lively conversations about mangaging talent and investing in human capital. There are a myriad of topics related to all of the aspects of acquiring, developing, and retaining the talent your business needs now and in the future, and we would like to address them all as our thinking and your thinking evolves through dialogue, research, and experimentation. So, where to begin?

The bottom line is a good place to start. At the KnowledgeAdvisors’ 6th Annual Analytics Symposium early in March, I particularly enjoyed being exposed to the work of two organizations doing great work in this area. The first was McBassi & Company. Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer http://www.mcbassi.com/ have developed methods for measuring human capital capabilities and then connecting them to a company’s bottom line outcomes - see “Maximizing Your Return on People” (by Bassi and McMurrer) in the March 2007 Harvard Business Review. The second is the Institute for Intellectual Capital Research and its Director, Dr. Nick Bontis http://www.nickbontis.com/main.swf who has developed methods to causally connect human capital investments to specific financial outcomes. You can see his papers and books at http://www.nickbontis.com/Research.htm.

So, the challenge to business leaders is to be more transformational than transactional. That means recognizing that the overarching and constantly repeated question for HR has to be how to make human capital more productive. The place to start always has to be with the human capital performance the business needs today and in the future to execute on its strategy, run its operations, and achieve specific measures of success. The art and science of human capital management is then to work backwards to identify the leverage points that will produce the performance needed. I’m anxious to hear your thoughts and examples!

Read all about State Parkway Partners in the media and various industry publications.

KnowledgeAdvisor’s 2008 Analytics Symposium: Measuring Learning & Maximizing Human Capital –

Tom was invited to present a keynote presentation “Workforce Planning in the Real World”.

Elliott Masie’s Learning 2007 –

Tom was asked to facilitate a session on “Dividing Your Learning Time: Implementation, Evaluation, Innovation or Benchmarking.” The discussion was about how successful learning leaders:

1. identify and invest in the know-how their companies need to succeed;
2. hire, develop, and retain the best talent;
3. manage their cost structure well;
4. validate that their L&D group is among the best at what they do; and
5. innovate to deliver improved business advantage.

The Best of OD 2007 Summit –

Tom presented “A Comprehensive Approach to Talent at CNA” in which he described the approach being taken at CNA to reviewing and planning to address talent needs in an integrated fashion across the HR silos of recruiting, workforce planning, performance management, leadership development, compensation, benefits, and learning.

Elliott Masie’s Learning 2006 –

Tom was invited to co-facilitate the Financial Services & Learning Industry group discussion.

KnowledgeAdvisor’s 2006 Learning Analytics Symposium –

Tom was invited to give a presentation titled “Strategic Value Creation: Mapping Learning to Organizational Strategy”. Tom described the approach he developed and used at CNA, beginning in 2000, to manage learning expenses as a portfolio of investments that are directly mapped to strategic and operating objectives.

Elliott Masie’s Learning 2005 –

Tom was invited to participate on an industry panel discussing trends in learning and how companies were adopting new practices to meet the demands of improved business performance.

Bersin & Associates 2005 Research –

Bersin’s research report “High Impact Learning Organizations” named CNA as a “best practice” company for both the centralized/decentralized, insourced/outsourced balance in the governance structure Tom developed and for the method of aligning learning investments to business strategy.

CLO Magazine February 2005 –

CLO Magazine, in an article titled “CNA Insurance: Supporting an Effective Workforce”, highlighted the unique approach Tom and his colleagues took to training all of CNA’s management in all five aspects of performance management (performance planning, performance assessment, development planning, coaching and feedback, and rewards and recognition) in five 60 day increments over one year. This approach combined e-learning courses, synchronous webinars, an online collaboration platform where participants would post their assignments and receive feedback from peers and a coach, and in face-to-face classroom settings.

Click HERE to read the article.

Corporate Executive Board: Learning & Development Roundtable –

Research conducted and published by the L&D Roundtable for its members highlighted Tom’s work at CNA as a benchmark for aligning learning investments to business strategy.

Training Magazine January 2004 –

Training magazine, in an article called “Managing Projects”, noted the holistic approach to learning Tom instituted at CNA. It is an approach that leads people not only to learn technical knowledge but also to learn how to apply and make decisions with that knowledge in a team setting as they would have to on the job.

Click HERE to read the article.

Elliott Masie’s TechLearn 2003 –

Tom presented “Focusing on What Matters: A Novel Approach to Curriculum Design and Blended Learning” with Chip Cleary, VP Advisory Services, NIIT Cognitive Arts and Bill Bruck, Founder and General Manager, Q2 Learning. The presentation described how Tom implemented at CNA the use of NIIT Cognitive Arts critical mistake analysis process to develop content for e- learning programs and how those e-learning programs were integrated into Q2 Learning’s collaborative eCampus where participants not only completed the e-learning courses but then practiced application and received feedback and coaching via the eCampus.

Tom Hilgart and Shirley Kitzmann have had the unique opportunity of working alongside some of the most esteemed executives in the nation.

Here’s what a few of them have to say:

“Tom is the smartest learning executive I have had the pleasure to work with. He is scrupulously honest and fair, and equally capable of devising innovative learning solutions, charting the political waters to get them funded, and carefully managing the process to ensure they are implemented.”

–Bill Bruck, Principal, Q2Learning, LLC (was a consultant or contractor to Tom at State Parkway Partners) January 31, 2008

“Tom is a recognized thought leader in the learning and talent management arena. He combines strategic vision, leadership skills, and deep business acumen to deliver world-class talent development and management solutions that drive results. His integrity, humor and intellect make him easy to work with and fun to be around. I recommended him highly in any capacity and would work with him again without question, reservation or hesitation.”

–Brian Richardson, PMP, President, Richardson Consulting Group (reported to Tom at State Parkway Partners) January 28, 2008

“Tom is an outstanding leader and business professional. He possesses a rich knowledge of the learning and development industry, the insurance industry and general business.”

–Jay Kostrzewa, Assistant Vice President - Knowledge and Learning Group, CNA Financial (reported to Tom at CNA) VP, Knowledge & Learning Group CNA, May 25, 2007

“Tom is one of the most highly respected senior executives I have worked with in the learning industry. He is creative, experienced, and knows how to combine the strategic with the tactical.”

–Kent Barnett, Owner, KnowledgeAdvisors, Inc. (was with another company when working with Tom at CNA) February 4, 2008

“I’ve worked with Tom Hilgart for many years and his vast knowledge of learning and development and human capital is among the best I know. His creative insights and years of experience would be a tremendous asset to any organization. Further, Tom is an honest and ethical business person. He is fair and objective. His character is second to none.”

–Jeffrey Berk, Chief Operating Officer, KnowledgeAdvisors_(was with another company when working with Tom at CNA) February 2, 2008

“Tom is a forward thinking executive with a fluent understanding of the learning and development and talent management needs of his organization. As a provider of Project Management services to CNA insurance Tom was instrumental in helping us to align our solutions with CNA’s larger corporate business strategies. As the organizations business strategy and needs shifted Tom and his staff were there to make sure that we remained in alignment with the organizations evolving needs.”

–John Scuras, Midwest Regional Sales Manager, PCI Global_(was a consultant or contractor to Tom at CNA) January 28, 2008