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10 Essential Talent Management Lessons I Learned From My CEO

Teresa Roche

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.”
Anaïs Nin

Ithink I am a heretic. Or perhaps I am onto something that does make sense, and I have my CEO and my manager to thank.

When asked to write this chapter, I was honored, humbled, and deeply concerned. A kaleidoscope of thoughts and feelings emerged, with a key one being that we do not say “integrated talent management” at Agilent. At least, the words are not spoken aloud.

And yet I absolutely know it is happening at Agilent.

I am the vice president and chief learning officer, and in this role, I am the lead architect and portfolio manager for the company’s leadership development solutions, which have been at the center of talent management at Agilent.

There was a moment several years ago when I let go of my fixation on needing to see or hear the words “talent management” so that I could simply see what was occurring, much of which my team helped to make happen in partnership with our colleagues in human resources and our line leaders, beginning with our CEO, Bill Sullivan. Bill cares deeply about having the best talent at Agilent. There is not a business strategy where talent is not considered. I’ve known how much talent matters to Bill since I first met him in the early 1980s.

What follows are 10 talent management lessons I have learned from Bill over the course of my career at Agilent. (In fact, I am still learning some of them.) Keep these lessons in mind as you journey through this book. Take only the lessons that fit the conditions of your organization and the characteristics of your CEO.

Lesson 1: Understand the Criteria Used to Make Decisions

I used to come back from external peer conversations full of ideas and processes that, if applied, would guarantee we had an integrated talent management system. I somehow had convinced myself that applying others’ work would cause magic at Agilent. Had I allowed myself to stay in this place of unrealistic expectations, I would have missed the moment to actually do something that had meaning and impact for the organization I was serving. What I now find personally valuable when I listen to others is to understand the criteria used for decisions made and the principles applied.

Lesson 2: Look for the Pull and Know What to Push

When Bill Sullivan became CEO in March 2005, he changed the strategic intent of Agilent from a diversified technology portfolio company to a single focus on measurement. One of his top three priorities was to have a bestin-class leadership team capable of delivering results and transforming the culture. Talk about an opportunity! Our very smart senior vice president of human resources, Jean Halloran, asked me to work with Bill and his team to define what leading at Agilent meant. After a series of key conversations, we have a clean and simple leadership framework that has guided us well for the past five years. It is written in words that others can easily understand and act on, and that has made this simple document alive in our company. The three dimensions are set and align strategy, build organizational capability, and deliver results; and underneath are specific behaviors.

Behind the scenes, we developed specific competencies for our Agilent leadership framework, and we scaled them appropriately to each level of leadership. Over time, we integrated them into our management practices and human resources systems from selection to performance management and total rewards. Not all at once, but when the pull for the work was present, we knew what program or practice to push next.

Lesson 3: Make It Part of the Work

At Agilent, a litmus test for us is whether the integrated talent management solution we provide delivers the results required in the Agilent dashboard. If it is a distraction, we go back to the drawing board. Everything we do needs to be embedded in the business requirements, and nothing can stand alone.

This simple phrase requires incredibly heavy lifting to ensure, for example, that we optimize development with programs that feature integrated, business-focused, applied learning. Or that the effectiveness of our performance management at Agilent is not about the completion of a form by a certain date, but that ongoing dialogue occurs between managers and employees about what is expected, how it is going, and what development is needed to get the work done.

Lesson 4: Start at the Top to Prepare the Soil for What You Need to Grow

After defining what leadership meant at Agilent, Bill said we needed to begin with our general managers. Most of me understood the merit of his words, and yet my head and heart were simultaneously screaming that we needed to do something for everybody. What others call talent segmentation, Bill simply saw as common sense and the only way to move the company forward. He assured me that if the general managers were clear on what was expected of them in terms of results and the specific leadership behaviors and values that define our company, these same managers would “beg” me to do the same for their next level of leaders. After five years, we are living the truth of his advice as we have thematically cascaded what we do only when we know that each leadership level is aligned before moving to the next.

Lesson 5: Principles Need to Be Consistent; Practices Do Not

A long-held bias came to light that development was the only path to building the right team. On our leadership framework we had “develop self and others” under “build organizational capability” and in Bill’s second year as CEO, we added an additional leadership behavior, “create winning teams.” What I came to realize is that leadership supply requires a hybrid approach of targeted recruiting, development, succession planning, and deployment. Often it is a one-size-fits-one approach with multiple strategies being done in parallel depending on what the business needs. Principles need to be consistent; practices do not. An example of this at Agilent is when we embark upon a growth initiative or enter an emerging market: We apply the same principle of ensuring the right talent at the right time, but the choice of practice fits the uniqueness of the specific situation—promote from within, hire externally, or redeploy talent.

Lesson 6: Measure What Matters

At Agilent, our approach to measurement is “outside in, inside out.” Each year, we establish annual targets in the Agilent four-quadrant dashboard for customers, employees, leadership and culture, financials, and markets. We set our targets against external benchmarks.

The intention of the employees, leadership, and culture quadrant is to ensure we have best-in-class leadership as measured by our employees on a set of leadership practices, which provides the inside-out perspective. We then evaluate our scores against the top quartile of the external normative data provided by our leadership audit partner. The questions we ask relate to the specific leadership practices that drive our strategy and culture, and we choose practices that, when done well, pull other aspects of leadership to be effective. Twice a year, we ask questions— always fewer than 12, as we want to be truly focused on what really mat-ters—and until we know we have embedded a specific leadership practice consistently, we keep at it. Presently the questions relate to customer orientation, speed and decisiveness, risk taking, and engagement, which together comprise our leadership brand of “speed to opportunity.”

We are signaling the importance of leadership by aligning leadership metrics with other critical indicators of business performance. Similar to how we rolled out our leadership curriculum, we cascaded the individual audit reports starting first with the executives, then senior managers, followed by middle managers, and just this year, first-level managers received a report.

Lesson 7: Outputs Matter More Than Inputs

Outputs tell you if a true impact is occurring. In our performance-based culture, where clear objectives are set and aligned and leaders work in partnership with their employees, allowing appropriate levels of freedom to deliver results they are accountable for, things happen. Our leaders know that how they manage talent matters, and it starts with our CEO. Bill “walks” his way into his leadership, and if I look at what he does tacitly, I see the inputs and the outputs, but they are not what other seemingly high-performing companies do. For him, a talent review calendar with scheduled events such as talent discussions is not required if leaders know that building organizational capability is an expectation of their day-to-day work and, when done well, delivers the expected results.

Lesson 7 does not mean inputs have no value. Let me share two that really count. The first is “facts are our friends,” and the second is the theoretical content that each of us should have to do this work. I believe that our field stands on the threshold of a critical intersection between economics and behavioral and cognitive sciences. Evidence-based human resources, such as the use of human capital analytics coupled with tried and true theories that we know and those that are emerging in the field of neurosciences, is where we bring value to the conversation. However, remember there is no need to remind people by saying the words that this is what you are doing. It is language only those of us in the field admire.

Lesson 8: Read the Wave—Monitor Your Environment and Adjust Your Plans as Needed

As a learning and development professional, you see things systemically. But just because you see the whole picture doesn’t mean you won’t miss signals. I have learned discernment from my CEO, who intuitively phases in changes. When we are in the middle of one, what next needs to be done is often revealed. Agility and adaptability are vital skills. Change is always coming, whether because of technology or demographic shifts or the economy; versatility is a currency worth having to stay competitive and ensure that the right talent is doing the right thing at the right time. Continually monitor your environment for changes and adjust your talent management plans accordingly. Bill often says it is one’s second decision that matters more than the first decision. Your first causes you to act, but your second decision is the one you make to adjust if you find you are off track. Real impact comes from knowing when you are off and how to get back on to achieve a result. It is all about the art of correction as the true source of credibility.

Lesson 9: Conversations Matter

The only real process that matters is conversation. Mickey Connolly, coauthor of Communication Catalyst, helped me see that all our work really happens in conversation. It requires being present to what is being said and remembering that when you have to convince someone, you have probably engaged them too late. In the face of resistance, stepping back and doing research by asking questions and listening is like remembering to hold hands in kindergarten when crossing the street.

Mickey told me to listen deeply for what people stand for that makes them speak against something. In one pivotal meeting with Bill, he was in complete disagreement about something that I presented, and I could not quite grasp why, but I remembered Mickey’s words. That moment of consciousness and my conversation with Bill allowed me to learn that he was not so much against the HR team doing something as he was for managers owning the accountability for leadership. Over many years of such conversations with Bill, I have come to learn that in the marrow of his bones, he believes managers own leading their people. Little of my time is spent convincing leaders to care about leading. I have to deliver effectively what they really need to do so.

Lesson 10: Live the Change

This lesson is really the foundation of all the others. We have to be the change we seek. This requires knowing oneself and being “in integrity” with that which we teach and tell others. How I show up matters, and it is where I have grown the most in learning what integrated talent management is all about and how to make it happen. It is not seeing the words on a slide or hearing the words spoken that tells me it is present and happening. It requires paying attention to signals and outputs such as determining if you have the powerful signal of leaders participating in your programs both as presenters and/or participants and if the output of your post-performance actions after each development program indicates transfer and application has occurred for specific business results.

I recently shared our journey with others, and it was delightful to talk about the results we have achieved as a company since Bill become CEO. We have met the goals in each of the quadrants in our dashboard, even during the most significant economic slowdown ever experienced in our industry.

I am grateful to have a manager who supports me, my worldwide team that makes all of our work possible, and numerous colleagues I partner with daily at Agilent. I also know how fortunate I am to have a CEO who is willing to be taught but, more important, teaches me about talent management day in and day out.

About the Author

Teresa Roche is vice president and chief learning officer at Agilent Technologies. Previously, she was vice president of human resources at Grass Valley Group and served in several executive human resources positions at Hewlett-Packard. She has a PhD in educational technology, a master’s degree in counseling and personnel services, and a bachelor’s degree in education and interpersonal and public communications, all from Purdue University. She co-authored the chapter “Application and Results: The New Finish Line for Managing at Agilent” in the book Leading the Global Workforce: Best Practices from Linkage, Inc. (Jossey-Bass, 2005) and the article “Innovation in Learning: Agilent Technologies Thinks Outside the Box,” which appeared in the August 2005 Journal of Organizational Excellence.