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Business Intelligence: Are You in Training or Talent?
November 15, 2006
From Training magazine's Inside Training newsletter
By Margery Weinstein
Changing the plays to a game you appear to be winning sounds self-defeating, but New York-based financial services company CIT Group is doing just that. The company, which boasts more than 7,200 employees, and more than $70 billion in managed assets, is giving its human resources a revamp. The effort will tie the work of the department closer to bottom-line results and foster executive ownership of employee development and retention, says Herb Harback, senior vice president, head talent and strategy, who is leading the transformation.
"The training department is a gray elephant," he says. "They focus on classes and students, and their metrics are how many people are in there, and that's it." Harback, who?s been on the job just 16 weeks, says he quickly realized the emphasis needed to change from measuring class usage to gauging the impact those classes have on the financial performance of each business unit. Rather than refer to his department and its mission as "training" or "organizational development/learning and development," Harback's team is known as the Talent & Strategy Group. "We're involved with talent, the strategy around it as well as the development," he emphasizes. "We're looking at talent as we define the business leaders, and we're looking at talent in terms of the CIT employees.
The effect of that talent nurturing on the company's business lines is what Harback says he will measure his success by. "We look at people that we have worked with, that we've coached, that we've sent through programs, and we're going to look at the business," he explains. "Did it make a difference, or didn't it make a difference in the bottom line?"
Along with changing the way end results of talent management are measured, the new approach also includes a shifting view of acquisition. When employees are promoted to new positions, they are now transitioned as though they are new hires. "In my mind, you're in a new role, therefore, we're going to move you back to the acquisition phase because we've got to make sure you're equipped properly for this new job," Harback says. "You're going to have a whole different set of relationships because of the new responsibilities. It's going to be more complex, and we've got to make sure you have the right skill sets to do that."
To make sure management keeps an active eye on budding talent—helping it grow instead of only noticing it's gone once there's already an empty chair—a senior executive from each line of business, such as sales or commercial finance, has been named a "talent and relationship manager," participating in meetings with Harback's group. An executive from sales, for instance, might be charged with learning as much as she can about talent acquisition, or an executive from commercial finance may have to get up to date on all the latest regarding talent development. In addition, within every line of business, each executive working with the talent and relationship manager has a designated responsibility, such as college relations as it relates to talent acquisition, or leader assimilation in regard to talent development.
This system allows execs not only to feel a sense of ownership in talent strategy, but feel they're getting guidance from an inside source, as opposed to an outside entity such as "HR" or "training" that considers the department its "customer."
"So, if you're the head of a business, hopefully sitting at your table now is Mary," he says, offering a hypothetical example, "who is a talent expert, and who will advise you not as a consultant, but as a member of the team."
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