ORC Sightlines
October 2007
- Adding Breadth and Depth to Leadership Development Experiences
- Improving Worker Health to Cut Employer Costs
Adding Breadth and Depth to Leadership Development Experiences
The general strategy for how to develop senior leaders is probably fairly standard:
- Understand the skills and behaviors that define success at that level in the company now and in the foreseeable future.
- Provide educational opportunities that help people understand leadership and business principles and practice skills in an environment that is “safe” but still challenges conventional thinking.
- Put people into stretch assignments in which they can apply the principles and learn how to play them out in the real world.
In roundtable discussions during last month’s Global Talent Management Network meeting, members probed below the surface to explore how the large multinationals represented in the room solve some of the issues involved in implementing these strategies.
One question that arose was how to standardize leadership development programs globally while also exposing participants to new ideas from outside the company. Members shared a variety of tactics for “opening leaders’ minds to what’s possible,” as one participant put it:
- Determining what the company’s “signature processes” are—those in which the company is best-in-class or that will differentiate it from the competition. These processes will be done the company way, while in other areas the company can look for inspiration to successful processes in other companies.
- Pairing internal and external presenters in leadership courses.
- Partnering with a university to deliver a customized leadership course, but using in-house folks to design and present the kickoff session before the course and any follow up coaching and action learning projects.
- Sponsoring and participating in research conducted by external organizations or academics in order to have access to the data and the thinking surrounding the research.
- Sending teams of top leaders to benchmark with other companies on a topic of interest to the company and make recommendations based on their study.
Another issue that often vexes talent management leaders is structuring developmental assignments to ensure that change in the individual’s abilities actually occurs and can be measured. One common obstacle is the fast rate of promotion for high-potential leaders, who may only stay in a position 12 or 18 months before moving to the next one. Strategies for confronting this issue vary: Some companies are setting policy requiring executives to remain in a job for a certain period of time—three years, say, or the length of a business cycle. Others handle it on a case-by-case basis, requiring that the expected assignment term be agreed to up front based on what needs to be accomplished.
Helping leaders understand why the pace of advancement should be slowed goes a long way towards gaining acceptance for longer assignment terms. One company also found that once it defined the career path, showing very clearly what needs to be learned to reach a certain position, executives had a much better sense of why they might need longer to get there. Another company tracks the amount of “churn” in executive positions so that leaders can see the consequences of too-rapid movement.
For more information on ORC’s talent management network, contact Michal Fineman, 212-852-0354, Jodi Starkman, 212-852-0394, or Susan Carter, 708-358-1361.
Improving Worker Health to Cut Employer Costs
The U.S. currently spends 15.5 percent of its national income on health care—an “unsustainable figure,” according to John Howard, M.D., director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Improving workers’ health and cutting costs was the driving idea behind WorkLife 2007, a national symposium held Sept. 10–11 in Bethesda, Maryland, that was sponsored by NIOSH with the support of 25 other organizations, including ORC Worldwide.
What Sick Employees Really Cost. “Making the Economic Case for Workplace Health” was the first of two breakout sessions co-moderated by ORC consultant Ann Brockhaus and Tim Bushnell, Ph.D., MPA, an economist at NIOSH. During the session, Sean Nicholson, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell, noted that his research has led him to conclude that employers may underestimate the real cost of workers’ ill health:
- Employers tend to focus only on direct medical costs while ignoring the costs of absences and “presenteeism”—employees who come to work in subpar health and are less productive as a result.
- Managers may overestimate employee health.
- The benefits of reduced absenteeism may be undervalued because of the false assumption that a day lost is equal to an employee’s wage, when in fact a single worker’s absence may affect productivity of an entire team, or involve costs associated with lost or postponed output.
- Employers may be skeptical that health promotion or disease management programs work.
Mental Health. Corey Keyes, Ph.D., an associate professor at Emory University, argued that mental illness is an important contributor to health-related costs for employers. Only 20 percent of Americans are mentally healthy, he maintains, while many others are neither ill nor healthy but “languishing.” Companies cannot afford to ignore the costs of these “languishers,” according to Dr. Keyes. Health promotion can and should focus on increasing the outcome of positive mental health, not just reducing the risk of illness.
Obesity. A growing body of literature connects obesity to a number of problems in the workplace: higher health care costs, greater risks of incidents, higher workers’ compensation claims, higher absenteeism, and decreased productivity, according to Paul Schulte, Ph.D. At the same time, weight bias is the most frequently reported form of discrimination among overweight white women, according to Mark Roehling, J.D., Ph.D., an associate professor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Michigan State University.
Employers that set up weight reduction programs need to administer them properly and ensure that those in charge are properly trained. Insensitive weight-related comments can be the basis for a successful legal action.
For more information on these issues or ORC’s Occupational Safety and Health networks, contact Jim Nash or Ann Brockhaus at 202-293-2980.