Jack Welch ‘gets’ HR
Jack Welch, the long-time (former) CEO of General Electric has always been an evangelist for the importance of HR in leading businesses. He writes a column in Business Week where he answers reader questions, and this week’s post was a great one. The reader asked what to do when a top performer gets a great offer from a competitor. I loved his answer. Paraphrased, he said two things:
- If you’re taking care of your best people at all times from all the right dimensions, it doesn’t matter. When they decide to go, let them — there probably isn’t anything else you can do to keep them.
- Anticipate the possibility that just such an event will happen and have a strong succession plan in place so that you could replace a departing star with someone ready to do the work in eight hours. Yes, eight hours!
This is a provocative idea, and for most organizations you could only manage it on behalf of a handful of people. But from the HR executives I talk to, more progressive organizations see a need to manage at this level (ok, maybe not the 8 hour SLA!) for dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people. It isn’t going to happen without technology.
To effectively do this, organizations will need tools that support robust measurement of what people did (performance management) as well as measures of their readiness and potential for target jobs (a key element of succession management). This requires an integrated database of employee data, performance results and data about future plans. Plus the analytics to distinguish between people and make fast (for Jack, very fast) decisions when critical positions become vacant.
Hmmmm…maybe a software company should solve that problem for HR leaders around the world! Oh wait, that’s us!~
Tags: performance management, succession management, business week, jack welch, welchway
