Finance Business Partners are like many other support specialists extremely “time-poor.” Given the highly presurised weekly and monthly cycles that most work under, it’s all too easy to get sucked into the act of just “doing” as opposed to thinking and then influencing strategically. Our work at PPI with many functions reveals some key action points for finance professionals to look out for and execute.
Enabling finance people to engage in wider business discussions about how their understanding of the numbers can influence real business outcomes and effect organisational change.
Therefore, once you have decided to conceptualize your Talent Program for all the right reasons it is now time to start crystalizing it to a firm deliverable.
Great leaders have an innate ability to make people feel strong rather than weak. How do you create the conditions for your people feeling strong?
Creating a clear plan to manage workplace anger and being aware of the triggers that can cause outbursts.
You would expect that today all companies would see the importance of having a Talent Management strategy yet Jeffrey Joerres, former leader of Manpower, commented in a recent interview in Harvard Business Review, “Nevertheless, companies routinely fail to put in place a workforce strategy that supports their business strategy. Most have done a pretty good job of looking out three years, maybe five, but they don’t then marry that up with the skills they’re going to need.” Talent management can be understood as a set of integrated organizational workforce processes designed to attract, develop, motivate and retain productive, engaged employees. The goal of talent management is to create a high-performance, sustainable organization that meets its strategic and operational goals and objectives consistently going forward.
We help high potentials understand how their style of communication is impacting on their relationships with their colleagues, subordinates, manager and other stakeholders in their ecosystem and what the consequences and knock-on effects of this might be.
A key challenge for all leaders today is to be consistent in their leadership behaviour and decision making. This is an important factor in building and maintaining the trust of their people. They also need to be role models of the leadership behaviour identified as critical for giving life to the desired culture that will deliver the expected results. Central to being able to exercise conscious control over their behaviour as leaders is having a good level of self-knowledge.
In effect “speaking truth to power” means having the capacity and ability to take a stand on an important issue. It means giving yourself the power to dissent in the face of greater strength and power.
The notion of a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world emerged from the US Army as a means to describe the environment arising post-cold war with the appearance of multilateral and non-state threats. It is an apt description for the environment that business now faces with significant disruption coming from political, economic and technological developments. How do we equip high potential employees and others for navigating this world while retaining their engagement and commitment to the company?