Sonar6 - Performance Management Blog

We are starting to see a theme across several commentators recently: That the economic downturn will force an expanded role for talent management.

To quote Josh Bersin’s excellent blog on the topic: 

The critical problems organizations face in 2009 are very different: rapid market changes, restructuring, downsizing, mergers and acquisitions. These problems not only create a need for better alignment and leadership, but a heavy focus on rapid talent planning, employee mobility, rapid skills development, and business agility. 

Today I hear more and more HR and business leaders telling me “we have our talent management strategy well underway” but what we really need is a “People Strategy.”

Read Josh’s full article here.

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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We’ll be unveiling Sonar6 v3 at the huge HR Technology Conference in Chicago this month, as well as presenting at the Cool New Technologies session. Since the conference this year is showcasing Talent Management, Web 2.0 and Workforce Analytics/Planning, it’s the perfect opportunity to show our exciting new release off!

Sonar6 received the HR Technology award at last year’s conference but we weren’t there to collect. This year we won’t be receiving an award, but we’ll certainly have a lot of great new features on display! If you’re in the area, we’d love you to stop by and visit us on Stand 100. And if you haven’t picked up your ticket yet, simply print out this PDF and present it at the venue for free admission.

Full v3 press release here.

To paraphrase every second client conversation I have: “The pressure cooker of the war for talent means I have to rapidly solve this enormously complex problem of attracting, retaining and getting the best out of people. WHERE DO I START?”

In this brief article Mike Carden explains why performance management is the most critical piece of any talent management strategy, as well as offering 4 tips to accelerating performance management in your organization.

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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 big focus of the talent management space at the current time is around integration – clients supposedly driving the quest for the “ultimate package”; a complete suite of functionality across all the elements of the talent “circle” from acquisition to retention.

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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.