Sonar6 - Performance Management Blog

It seems everyone is talking about the down economy and its impact on HR lately, but who has the time to read it all? We’ve polled major industry analysts and clients, and boiled their wisdom down to three must-read pieces of advice for managing performance in tough times.

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With four New Zealand Post business units – Datamail, Express Couriers, Kiwibank and Converga – already using Sonar6 for talent and performance management, Sonar6 is now cementing a long term business relationship across the New Zealand Post Group.

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I was lucky enough to recently meet with Debbie McGrath, founder and Chief Instigator of HR.com – a very cool web portal for the HR community with over 175,000 members!

In Australasia I constantly hear that the HR profession is starved of good local flows of information and commentary around talent management. It immediately occurred to me that HR.com should be a great resource for many of our Australasian customers and fans also. So… if you have not already, check out HR.com, AND membership is free !

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Nice reminder from Jim Holincheck around the key to successful talent management –
http://blogerp.typepad.com/hcm_research/2007/03/who_owns_talent.html

As with most of these things, it is a fiendishly simple concept and yet one which many companies still spend millions on trying to “enable” through software and consulting.

If your culture doesn’t actively support line managers owning talent management you are wasting your money.

Interesting few days with prospective clients in Australia. The focus on workforce planning and talent management in general is very clear, with several of the initiatives we are involved in having CEO and or Board sponsorship and involvement.

There is also more interest from traditionally “talent averse” sectors of the market such as manufacturing, where cost reduction and revenue growth have been the dominant elements of business / value creation strategies.

Definitely a market we will spend more time in during 07.

Thanks to those of you subscribed to Gartner for the heads up – we were pretty chuffed to be one of the four “Cool Vendors” in their recent Finance and HCM research:

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=502272&ref=g_fromdoc

Apologies to those who don’t subscribe to Gartner – we will have a release out shortly once it has been approved.

It’s also interesting to see that the others listed all have some potential synergy with the talent management field, especially when you take into account the Talent Science approach we have been proposing (Talent_Science.pdf )

Talent is the new king asset, yet most established business disciplines are designed to manage capital, rather than human, assets. In this whitepaper Mike Carden discusses how a new decision science is rising up to help businesses make better decisions about their people. The Sonar6 term for it? Talent Science…

Talent Science Whitepaper 

Read more Talent Science articles from Sonar6.

A fantastic book in my reading tray at the moment – “How Leaders Build Value” – Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood http://www.amazon.com/How-Leaders-Build-Value-Organization/dp/047176079X.

Having skimmed it a couple of times now, it’s worth the time to read in full.
The authors provide an incredibly simple yet powerful build up of the link between skills / competencies and business outcomes.

In the work we have done to date with sonar6 (www.sonar6.com) it is clear that the key drivers of developing a competency framework have become lost translation.

The more of Ulrich’s work I read the more I understand why he and his colleagues are held up in such high regard around the transformation of HR’s role in organisations.

Ok - I’m back - thanks for the prods from various people to get back to posting and talking with the talent management community! It’s been a huge couple of months with travel to the US and UK as well as a business taking off in our home country of New Zealand.

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Wow - that year went fast! One of my New Year’s resolutions other than the standard get healthier, drink less etc etc. - make more regular contributions to this blog!

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