Article: Great Place to Work Institute Series - Redefine The Talent Catchment

Talent Acquisition

Great Place to Work Institute Series - Redefine The Talent Catchment

Prabir Jha, Senior Vice President & Head- HR, Tata Motors,shares his thoughts on the prevailing talent challenges and the need for companies to pay attention to the essence of respect,integrity, fairness and fun in creating a great workplace
 

Getting talent in terms of quantity, and I dare say quality, is really the number one challenge. There are people, but are they really the best people?

 

 

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<</</p><</ <p> Prabir Jha, Senior Vice President & Head- HR, Tata Motors, shares his thoughts on the prevailing talent challenges and the need for companies to pay attention to the essence of respect, integrity, fairness and fun in creating a great workplace

What are the top 3 people related challenges that your industry is facing today? Which of these is the number one challenge? What are one or two innovative ways of responding to it?

I speak with 10 months of experience in the automotive industry and I am still learning and discovering what the challenges are, but very clearly, like many Industries, the number one challenge is really about talent. Everyone needs people, so it is the pair of hands philosophy. The industry is growing exponentially and so you need skills, skills in terms of operators, even people on temporary roles. So, starting from there to the more senior, more niche kind of roles, are getting created every day. I think talent is going to be a huge issue. The catchment itself is reasonably limited, given the aspirations that the Indian automotive industry has. I think, getting talent in terms of quantity, and I dare say quality, is really the number one challenge that is there. It is a huge issue. There are people, but are they really the best people? This is not a question peculiar to the automotive sector alone, because I saw the same challenge in the pharmaceutical sector as well. Therefore, that is the first big challenge at an industry level.

The other big challenge that I find is that, for some of the skills, you compete with other industries for talent. So, if you look at the entry level and at your graduate engineers, IT industry can take anyone and everyone. Thus, it is obviously an issue. The other issue that I find, and again this is peculiar to the automotive industry, but a very strong one, is that even when you take fresh engineers, many of them want to do things beyond engineering, in the years to come. At least among those who are coming from premier institutes, you find this a trend. And that is a challenge by itself. So, either you go down the education value chain and look at diploma engineers or you say that you will take some people at the graduate engineers’ level and it is fine that 3 years later they are not going to be with you, since they want to acquire an MBA or a masters degree. Thus, all of this put together, there are constraints in terms of engineering colleges and quality of ITIs that can churn out people at the lowest end. I think it is an issue of capacity, which in turn impacts quantity and quality and I feel that is one big question about talent.

The other big challenge that I really find about people is what I call leadership, which again from my cross industry exposure is not very unique to the automotive sector but applies to it equally. The industry is growing and while there are people who have spent many years in the industry, they have their own challenges / limitations of leading people where the workforce is increasingly getting younger, day by day. The demographic mix of the industry is dramatically changing and leadership styles and leadership approaches are still brick and mortar. That creates its own friction. At times, even people who have only been in the automotive industry and who are moving up and are less young, are still products of a certain environment because they have been led in a certain way. So, even while they do want to be different, the basic mould itself is a challenge. And we need more leaders. When I am talking about leaders I am not looking at senior management or top management only; I am looking at leaders across levels. Do these people come across as inspirational to the kind of teams that they are leading today? That is a big question. They must have a certain level of competence and they must have a certain level of people handling capability because, the new generation that is coming in, has the option of going to any sector. And with so many jobs chasing them, within the sector and beyond the sector, if they get to work with the wrong kind of managers who don not care much about them, they are not likely to grow.

Leadership is also important because they now should spot talent early. The automotive industry is still more traditional & hierarchical than many other industries. It is still a little more formal. The world of automotive itself is undergoing change, and when the world is in India, the industry has no option but to change its styles of leadership or ability to groom talent and differentiate between talent levels. But I still think, it is more conservative than many other industries, from what I hear and I see. Therefore, leadership is the other big challenge, because if leadership is not appropriate then you do not hire the best people, you do not differentiate the best people from the rest, you do not promote the best people and you do not mentor in the best way. So, the entire thing is about leadership. Are you willing to bite the bullet and are you willing to challenge status quo? I think, unlike some sectors where the demographic profile is young and the leadership is also young, and at least the generation understands each other, the automotive sector faces challenges. Therefore, leadership, in the more wholesome sense, in my opinion, is that other big challenge that I find.

The third challenge which is increasingly becoming prominent and which is flowing from all of the above is capability building. Because there are more jobs chasing lesser people, even an average person can think of moving and jumping jobs without the industry necessarily improving his/her skill base. Therefore, capability, which is actually a function of demand supply equilibrium, is in a way a downstream to my first 2 points. Thus, with the industry itself evolving, we investing in capability building and that too at the level the industry needs, are pertinent issues. A lot of companies are exporting automobiles to other places on the globe, yet the Indian environment some years back was willing to take any kind of product. Today, the product quality is getting better, and I think the world is shrinking and quality expectations along with customer expectations are sky rocketing. But are we able to build an improved capability, within a specific time, with respect to manufacturing and R&D, sales & marketing and pretty much the entire gamut? I think that will be a big concern. People will still get jobs because companies will need a pair of hands but by jumping jobs you do not necessarily improve capability and I think this might be an industry issue that I see. How do we overall shore up the capability in a context where people may not be coming to the automobile industry as a natural preference? There are exceptions, but I am just generalizing. And if they do come, how quickly and how well are they inducted, how well are they mentored in the industry that they would like to build their careers in and then how deep and quickly do they improve capability? This entire concept of learning, unlearning and re-learning is going to be a big challenge. Compared to other sectors, there are still more senior people in the automotive sector and there is a huge challenge in terms of how do you re-equip them and get them to change their own mindset. I think that is a very interesting part of being in this industry; huge growth, huge explosion, younger people coming, senior people already being there, how do you get the two of them to talk and re-tool themselves?. These things, to my mind, appear to be challenges.

In terms of responding to these challenges, different thoughts come to my mind. I feel we must ss the catchment. I think there could be a great opportunity of questioning traditional thinking in terms of staffing of this industry. Why do you need an engineer for every job? Why not a diploma engineer? And I will push the envelope a little more, why not a higher secondary school graduate? What is so complex? It is more about skill building attitude rather than a formal diploma or a degree which counts, because in India we know that not every degree or diploma is saleable. There are so many graduates who do not get jobs. Therefore, I think, one of the ways of increasing the catchment is to go down the education value chain. Align jobs, de-skill jobs and get it done by people with a lesser educational qualification. You need more of vocationalism so that you bring down the costs, the economics actually get lower, the person does the job that he or she is mentally prepared to do rather than getting an engineer to do a job which does not really excite him and he leaves a couple of years later. So, I think that is one possibility that I find, of looking at pushing down the education value chain and in that process redefining the gap.

The second is, looking at solutions from beyond the industry. Why should one hire only from within industry in any area of work? I have worked in many industries and I find that no industry is unique. Therefore, another way in which you can expand the catchment is to look for learnability. Hire from beyond the industry. Unless you question the established paradigm, you will be where you are. These are some of the ways in which we can respond to the challenges. But it will mean, people getting comfortable with new thought paradigms and saying ‘it is ok not to be an engineer, it is not a sin’. There are many jobs, for instance, where it is not a sin not to hire a Chartered Accountant for that job, it is not a sin not to hire an MBA HR for certain jobs, etc. That may not be required. But I think we have to revisit a lot of our paradigms and changing paradigms is one of the most difficult propositions.

What key trends do you see that will impact the way people are managed in organizations in future?
I would not like to be proved wrong but I think organizations and industries will need to redefine the way they look at the people agenda. If you look at the automobile industry, it has typically been about people coming into organizations and spending years because it was a manufacturing company and it was largely a philosophy of ‘keep it going the way it has been’. By itself, the automobile industry is a more functional structure where you come and do a certain kind of a job. But I think, the nuances are changing, and changing very dramatically. The customer preferences for one are changing so much that you no more drive just an automobile these days; people have a range of options. A huge range of options are being sold in such interesting ways. The customer who is deciding is sometimes not even the person who is making the actual purchase. It is the kids, families and teenagers who are deciding. Thus, I think the entire context is changing. If you look internally among the people who are choosing to come into the industry, these are typically younger people, and the huge numbers of people who are going out of the industry are people who are retiring. Suddenly, the age profile, the average ages, the mode and the median of the age mix is changing. And people increasingly are willing to move locations, they are no longer willing to be in the same location where they were born, they are willing to go beyond India, Indians abroad are willing to come to India and expats are willing to come and do jobs in India. All of this is actually flattening the world and it means that we have to create work environments which are more non-hierarchical. The typical command and control of a manufacturing environment, to my mind, is going to come under a lot of question because people are not going to be submissive just because you happen to be two levels higher. They want to work with inspiring bosses and they want to do better quality jobs. With boredom levels increasing, no one wants to do the same job for ten years. So, if one wants to retain people, one will have to get people to be more productive, with a certain level of expertise, in quicker time, in shorter time-cycles, and move them onto other jobs. One will have to take risks with people far more than the industry typically has hitherto done. You can not say this person has never done it. That is not going to be the way forward. If you do not give it, someone else will give that challenge to that person. I think, taking risks with talent, rotating people in very dissimilar jobs, reducing the time-cycles for people to learn and making an impact and moving away from ‘years of seniority is equal to promotion’ is going to be the way forward. You will find younger leaders getting into bigger jobs much earlier in their career, because that is how they understand their customer, that ‘is’ their customer profile. Similarly, in manufacturing, when one is creating newer plants which have largely a young workforce, it is obvious that the plant head cannot be a much older person. This is however not to say that every old person is not young in approach and that a younger person cannot be dogmatic, but, typically that is how the realities are going to play out. Thus, the trends are really about consumer preferences driving a certain behavior, that in turn impacting manufacturing and product development choices, also the added dimension of changing employee demographic mix and all of that, demanding a very different view of the customer and therefore a very different view of the employee. Moving forward, there are going to be flatter organizations, culturally less hierarchical, more agile, and more egalitarian. They will be more respectful and trusting, allowing people to experiment, to innovate a lot more, and therefore a big move away from the traditional world view that automobile as an industry is more to do with command and control. Some of these behaviors should become more of cultural habits rather than a policeman’s disposition. And I personally do not see things like quality, etc., getting compromised, because of the world becoming more egalitarian. Some of the industries which have gone that route, for example, software or pharmaceutical, are not less quality conscious than the automobile industry. I see a lot of scope for learning from beyond the industry. The more the industry learns from other industries, like others want to learn from the automobile industry, more the silos between industries will shrink. People will need to learn a lot more from each other and therefore I see a lot of talent transfusion happening between sectors.

What is the one characteristic that you believe every people manager should possess? Why?
Every people manager should recognize that his or her job is to manage paradox. You either have a set of managers who say ‘I am very focused about results and targets and project plans and timelines and all the technical aspects of the job’ and traditionally that is how people were; or you have those managers who say ‘I am only bothered about my people, I cannot differentiate, how can you say that X is different from Y, all my guys are equally good’, essentially, what I would call appeasing managers.

I think the new generation people manager, and here I am referring to the line manager who needs to be a good people manager, is a person who must be comfortable enjoying ambiguity and managing paradoxes. The person has to build emotional engagement with his people and yet, must be able to give very tough feedback and real time feedback to his team. He or she must be comfortable differentiating between average performers from best performers and worst performers. The approach, that everyone is equally good and socialism prevails, I do not see that lasting, if at all it is there, in the automobile industry either. Companies and industries have moved beyond that. And I think managers will be able to get more comfortable with this fundamentally paradoxical expectation from a people manager. At one level it is all about outcome, result, performance and at another level it is about people, their engagement, mentorship, feedback and coaching and the realities which lie in between. People do not move organizations because they get a delta more in terms of compensation in another organization. A person floats his resume because something is not happening right between him and the manager. It could be the quality of job, it could be the level of challenge, it could as well be just the fact that the manager does not care for him. The old world command and control and target and numbers approach is as dead as is the total appeasement approach. The reality is how you manage the paradox of doing both. Easier said than done but that is the change that I see very clearly coming, because there is just no other way of doing it. And managers who are more equipped and more adept at being able to have these conversations and manage these paradoxes & contradictions, to my mind, are going to be highly successful people managers in the future.

The other factor that I strongly feel is going to be important, is influencing non-reporting relationships. That is a very big art. Organizations are increasingly going to be matrixed, and more so in the automotive world, which has largely been one command and control mechanism where everyone reports through one hierarchy. I think the automotive world is also going to go largely the way which other industries have gone, which is increasingly matrixed. And therefore, it is not going to be easy to say that he is my person, I have instructed him and he will do it. Again, one has to be weary, that people have choices; they are more footloose than they were traditionally. And because there are more players coming into the industry, there will be more opportunities and therefore people are going to have options. So, I think that the biggest thing for a leader will be to manage the paradox and to improve the ability to influence, rather than instruct; command or control, more so with respect to people who are not formally reporting to them. But one will be impactful only when one is able to get the larger eco-system to help deliver one’s goals. So, influencing non-reporting relationships will be a very important skill. And I think future leaders are going to be the people who can master this art much better and quicker and do it far more naturally than people who get into the old command and control mechanism of ‘he does not report to me’, ‘please show me’, ‘please ask me’, ‘I will sign and approve’, etc. That world is going to die out.

What makes it so difficult for most organizations to become great workplaces?
It starts first with ‘respect’. Does everyone feel respected? And respect does not mean agreeing with whatever the person is asking or demanding or wanting. But is there respect even when one disagrees? Can people speak their hearts and minds out and does one hear it with respect and without judgment? I think respect is very important. The second thing, which I find very important, is integrity. Do we as leaders act the way we speak. Therefore, it is not just integrity in the financial sense. It is integrity of thought and action. I think great workplaces must always and repeatedly demonstrate integrity of thought and action because credibility comes only from that. The third thing is fairness. You know it is important to be fair, but it is even more important to be perceived to be fair. And I, for once, am saying this very consciously, that fairness is not appeasement. Fairness is not being soft. Fairness is calling a spade, a spade. Fairness is about taking tough calls. Fairness is saying one person is better than the other person, fairness is saying, this person is at the lowest end of the performance bar or potential bar and the other person is at the top end. But it is indeed crossing your heart and saying that we have collectively applied our thought and judgment and this is what it is. Because it will be equally unfair to people who have great potential and to people who are better than others, in a world which is so talent deficit, if you appease and say everyone is equally good. I think fairness is on both ends of the continuum, even if you are taking tough calls on people. To be fair to the person is to give the person an opportunity to understand where he or she stands, but if the person does not improve or change, then even doing tough things but doing it with respect and with integrity is what can be called a testimony of fairness.
Therefore, respect, integrity and fairness come to my mind very clearly. The fourth thing that makes an organization a great workplace, according to me, is the kind of talent environment that you create. I increasingly find that great talent wants to work with great talent, they do not want to work with mediocre talent and that takes me back to one of my earlier points that becoming a high talent environment is a high by itself. It draws great people; it keeps great people, because they together make it a very happening place. The results are of a different kind, they challenge each other, and they help each other. Thus, a high talent environment is another definition of a great place to work.

And the last thing is that people must have fun. It must be a fun workplace. Fun is of both kinds; fun is not just about cutting birthday cakes and doing these little Friday evenings thing; all of that is important, but we must ensure that whatever the demographic composition is, one size does not fit all. Some people have great fun solving great technical problems. Do you have enough opportunities for such people to solve great technical problems? Fun place is where people like to connect with each other. Do you have enough cultural contexts to allow people to cut across and connect with people across levels, across locations sharing the same interest or passion? You also have people who like to do things beyond formal work. Suppose it is helping with community development, do you allow people that space to have an opportunity and official patronage to do that? I think you can define fun in different ways. Fun is not just in the casual sense of the term. As I read the future, these are the dimensions that will become instrumental in building great workplaces.

Personal Questionnaire

Please give an example of managing people which has been personally rewarding and meaningful for you.
There is no thrill like building and nurturing a great team. The team that you build, the kind of people that you get, the way you get them to work, and therefore the results that you achieve finally, is by far the biggest reputation builder for any manager. And I think the success in building a high performing, high caliber and highly engaged team is the biggest thrill. Mentoring people and helping them to succeed, is the biggest high that I have had, personally. When people who may not be working with me today or may have changed jobs, take that minute to call and say that this is what they have got and this is where I have helped them to get to, then that is a high in itself. And some of these people could also be those whom one has fired earlier. It is not always positive. But even when you ask a person to leave, how you are able to hand hold the person through the process, helping him discover that what he is doing is not what he was born for, is a vital point. He was perhaps born for greatness in something else. To me that has been the most satisfying part of being an HR manager; the way you can touch the lives of people, the way you can mould the lives of people, the way you can help them be successful and in their success you get such tremendous happiness. I have had an occasion in one of my earlier jobs where we used to have these annual awards night and someone who was a marketing leader went up to the stage and among other things he said, he wanted to thank me as well. I had just been a career coach to him some years back, and he said that the kind of advice, feedback, inputs, hand-holding he got from me, the fact that I could be reached any time, to get a little knock on the head or a little pat on the back, a little tone of appreciation and recognition, is what kept him going. But the biggest thrill is in building great teams.

If you were to hire the entire workforce with just one interview question, what would that be?
‘How will you change the world?’,And the world could be the operating world; need not be a ‘Barack Obama world’. If a person is an HR person and if he were to change the HR environment around him, how would he change it? If he were to change the automotive business environment around him, how would he change it? It is more to check with the fact that does the person dream big? Does the person have the belief that he can think big? He may fail, but does the person think big? It just gives you a sense of how much of a challenger of a status quo he is. Unless one is a dreamer, one is never even going to get closer to where one wants to get. And the challenge is that in all my years of interviewing people, I have not found too many people who dreamt big. Everyone talked about the little things that they have done, which is fine because that is how most people will be, but I think the people that you really would like to meet and therefore hire, are the people who dream big. Otherwise, keeping things going is no big deal. I recognize that most people would however be people who will be solid citizens but I think great breakthrough thinking and great challengers are the kind of people who provoke a very different paradigm of thinking. I personally like people who challenge status-quo and challenge me.

Mention the top 3 metrics that you track to keep any eye on your business health and the top 3 people related metrics that you track.
It really flows from my response to the first question which is about the talent health in an organization. How deep is the talent, how much of it is at risk and what are we doing about it? That is the most important part.

The second important part that I would be looking at is the entire piece on engagement, which really cuts through across the organization. We work with certain approaches and it is very important because it gives you a little dipstick of which way the world is going and where one is headed.

And the third thing that I feel is important and is increasingly getting critical, is your entire gamut of the learning and the capability development piece, and how this capability building is happening. To track that is a difficult thing. If it were just a skill issue you can always resort to certifications, tests, etc. and evaluate it, which is much easier and one can do that. But the other element is where one talks about building the softer element within the organization, which is the more difficult part. So, the soft is hard. You can do it in different ways and you can measure it in the form of post initiative or post training impact, etc., you can trace it in terms of scores of individual managers as per their 360 degree evaluation. So, even though there are ways of doing it, it is not an exact science. I think it is important to have a tracker, because it keeps yours and your organization’s intent focused. These would be the top three things that one would track. To my mind, some of the other issues like cost and productivity are hygiene in every organization and therefore, I am not highlighting that, because those are very typical, standard things that get tracked. But the three that I mentioned would be the top, because not all of them have easy answers and not all of them can necessarily be a reflection of sheer quantitative indicators. Many a time what numbers indicate, do not really tell you what they do not indicate. Therefore, that is to be probed. It is important to have one’s dashboard right. At least the critical questions remain center-stage and that is important. HR takes time, it takes commitment and it is not ‘Maggie 2 minutes noodles’, nor is it instant coffee. Increasingly, in a complex world that we are living in, I think it is important to choose more strategic levers and not merely the tactical levers. Of course, someone will be measuring the more tactical levers but personally I would like to see the more strategic metrics and keep a track of that.

One thing that you have learnt over your career as a People Manager that you wish you had always known at the beginning itself?
Many of my paradigms have not changed since the time when I was in the Civil Services, they have remained the same. But if there is one thing that I have learnt and I am a very strong believer of, is, ‘do not tolerate mediocrity’. Build a second line that is better than you; hire people who are smarter than you. This is what, I think, I have learnt. And I will be honest, not too many of us actually want to do it. People feel scared, anxious, and insecure, but I have gained this by learning it the hard way. I got some feedback on this some years back and I have hired some of the brightest guys to work with me, and it has only added to my reputation and to my effectiveness. So, I think very clearly that one thing that I have learnt will be – ‘hire people better than you and build a second line that is smarter than you. Do not live with mediocrity’.

Describe a people related decision which has been a value dilemma for you. What did you do and why?
Some of the issues that people think of when you talk about value dilemmas are really not value dilemmas. If it is an integrity violation, to me it is not a dilemma, even if it were in relation to the best guy. I have been fortunate enough to be working in companies where it did not matter who the person was; if you had made money the wrong way, you had to go.

I think the biggest value dilemma is when you have to opine as an HR leader on people who bring very niche functional or technical capability but who may be very poor people leaders. You realize that the person brings in technical competency and capability which is very difficult to replace, because that skill set itself might be very challenging. The functional premium itself has got him to a very high level in the organization; he is being paid a lot of money but he is a very disruptive people manager. It is a huge dilemma because when you try to influence senior leadership, as an HR Head your word matters a lot. At the same time it is not easy for senior leaders to take views, these are, at times, very counter intuitive because what has got the person to this position are his skills but what is going to possibly cost him his job is lack of something that was never his core strength in the first place. And to influence leadership one way or the other is a big value dilemma.

Some of these people are very highly regarded because of their functional skills. However, because of what they are, they do not grow their team and are very dismissive of dissidence. Even if you are able to attract very high pedigree people, they do not want to hire great talent, they drag their feet or if people come on board they leave in quick time. Now when you share this data with senior people, the board or the CEO, these are big value dilemmas. What should one say? If the person is not there you do not have the technical capability, and these are mostly for R&D kind of jobs, but if the person is there, today may be fine but tomorrow is doomed. I have had the opportunity of having some of these hard conversations on this subject and my conscience is clear, irrespective of what decisions got taken. I spoke my mind and in some cases I also put it down on an email. So, at the end of the day, I have always felt that the job of an HR leader is a very difficult job. You have to be very encouraging, nurturing, the nice guy at one level but you must give absolutely straight feedback at another level, because that is not only the prerogative of being an HR leader, it is the privilege of being one. You have to speak your mind. You must not speak what is nice to hear, you must speak what is right, even if you are the only voice. And many a time, as an HR practitioner, I have felt that people may not like you at that moment, but it adds to your reputation, when you speak your mind. And I think I have worked with leaders who have almost without exception been people who have appreciated this. They may not have liked what I said, but they have always respected the fact that I spoke my mind, fairly but unequivocally. A wrong leader in the wrong job is cancerous, I am convinced about it. People who want to move up also start cloning that behavior and you have wrecked your entire environment. And then you cannot get good people anymore. These are very tough calls to make. The good news is that in most cases finally, we made the right calls. It took some time and effort, it also created some tension, but all said and done, the organization became a better place to work.

What in your opinion are the 3 biggest / common mistakes that CEOs make when it comes to people management?
It is more of a generic comment than about any specific organization or individual, that, not every CEO spends the time that he or she should be spending on people issues. Intellectually everyone says ‘it is my biggest priority’, but I do not think they actually spend the time that is needed. It needs that time commitment, unlike certain decisions which are here and now. Building a high talent company takes years and I think it is very important for the CEO to have that perseverance, that passion and the time for it because if he or she does it, everyone else does it; if he or she does not do it, it cannot be delegated to the HR Head. It is the CEO’s job, that of building a high talent company. CEOs are very busy people, and therefore even in presentations; the people issues come after 75% of the presentation. Very rarely do you find it as the number one aspect. I think these are mind-set issues, so that is one challenge that I find.

The other challenge for the CEOs is that some are unable to cut through the hierarchy and touch people. I think it is a very important skill and ability of a CEO to touch people many levels below them. Many a time, when town-halls are done, they become more of a spiel from the top. To my mind, it will be wonderful for CEOs to have more of ‘no agenda’ meets and it can be just to listen to what people are saying and make some comments, sit around people at the same level and not a higher level. The more they do that, they will signal hierarchy neutrality. Of course they cannot meet everyone, they cannot speak to everyone, they cannot shake hands with everyone, but a conversation with the CEO in an informal context spreads magically in organizations, because that goes back to their lunch table conversations. And I think it is very important for a CEO to demonstrate, because if he or she does it, everyone down the line will do it.

The third thing that CEOs sometimes do is that, being human beings, they live with mediocrity; they live with the realities of long term relationships, people sensitivities, like any one of us. But I think CEOs must build high talent and a very solid team, not a set of individuals; a team where trust levels are high. At times they may hire individually bright people but they do not invest in getting them thinking, behaving and working like one team. This is the job only of the CEO. So, the management team of a company must think of itself as a management team and that onus is totally on the CEO. There will of course be difference of opinion and personality issues but they must behave as one team, think as one team and rally and debate with each other as one team. Therefore, if nothing else, the CEO must create a management team which is a high talent team that teaches each other. Again, this takes time and effort. Otherwise, a dysfunctional management team creates huge grapevines in organizations and disrupts the entire organization. Thus, it not just about hiring and filling positions of senior management, but it is really about getting them to think, behave and rally with each other as one management team.
 

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, #BestPractices

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