Gary Steel
Adam Burns:
I’m Adam Burns: Burns and welcome to meettheboss.tv. This week I’m in Zurich, home of ABB, one of the world’s leading engineering companies. As a truly international organization ABB works in more than 100 countries and employs more than 118,000 staff. Overseeing them all is the man I’ve come to meet, Gary Steel Steel, member of the Group Executive Committee, executive vice president, and head of human resources and sustainability affairs. In a wide ranging discussion Gary Steel will be explaining his strategies for people management and how he plans to win the war for talent. So Gary Steel, firstly thank you so much indeed for joining us. If we can start sort of at the beginning really your list of business excellence, talent management, and rewards and recognition is ABB’s core business priorities. How do you approach those?
Gary Steel:
These form the focus areas of our ABB people strategy, the foundation of which is values, leadership, and performance. So if you like the six things that we’re trying globally to pay attention to, values, leadership, performance, as our baseline, our foundation if you will, and then the three interlinked focus areas are business excellence, career development, and reward and recognition. It’s the whole that drives the way we think about people in ABB. It drives the way we think globally and it influences the way we act locally.
Adam Burns:
And talent management of course takes on a particular kind of importance in an environment such as today where the war for talent is raging more fiercely than ever. What measures do you take to improve your staff?
Gary Steel:
If you position talent management in the people’s strategy for ABB it is truly the spine or the thread that determines everything we do. People’s strategies designed to affect all 180,000 people who work in our company today, and talent management is not restricted to the high potentials or the top end of the organization. We’re trying to drive talent management through the organization at all levels. The reason for that is like everyone else we want the best people. So the aim that we have got is a high aim, and what we’re trying to do to get there is paying attention to the development needs of people at all levels in the organization.
We’ve introduced a number of development programs, some of which are exclusive for a certain group of people in the organization, and some of which are inclusive for everyone in the organization, but all of them are building on the same concept of leadership, which is one of the foundational principles of our strategy, leadership at all levels in the organization, all of them aimed at driving the culture of performance and delivery across the organization but most fundamentally all of them driving it, building a common and consistent set of values the way we do business in the ABB group. So talent management is deployed through training and development programs, assessment, both performance assessment and behavior assessment, career development through job moves, through job rotations, global assignments, international assignments, and assignments outside one’s normal business area, whether that be functional or one of the five divisions.
Adam Burns:
Of course. I suppose aside from getting the best out of the people who are already here, you need to make essential new hires. How do you go about this?
Gary Steel Steel:
Well I frankly did the easy thing at the beginning. I brought a couple of people with me from my previous company, people that I had confidence and trust in and felt could make a difference. At the same time I recognized that with ABB’s rich history there were good people already in ABB and of course that’s the high …when you can take the majority from within and spice it with a few people from outside. In common with what I told you earlier about the succession plan target of 80 percent from the inside I’ve tried to stick roughly to that metric in appointing HR people around the world. Also consistent with what I said earlier about diving deeper for new talent, I’ve spent a lot of time traveling the world and meeting a lot of the younger talent, people who will hold the bigger jobs in the future.
So actually today I’m really very comfortable, confident, in the balance of external and internal talent we’ve got. I think the fact that we’ve got alignment around the ABB people strategy says it’s clear to everybody in the function what it is we’re trying to achieve. We’ve also spent in the last two years a significant amount of time and effort defining the HR competence framework in two areas. We have centers of excellence, which are things like career development, learning development, including the very important transactional elements of HR, and we call those our HR centers. That’s where our centers of expertise lie country by country.
The other side of HR is our HR business partner, people who will consult, guide, direct, and challenge line managers. What I’m trying to build is an organization globally of two equal halves, and people’s careers will be developed across the two because I want both halves to understand the precious priorities and activities of the other half by moving through and working in both such that when they come to HR management jobs in the future or in my job eventually then they have a good appreciation of everything that goes on inside HR.
In terms of talent identification we use the same leadership framework that we use for the identification of talent across the whole company. HR people today need to understand the business. They don’t need to know how to make every piece of our technology but they have to know what the key drivers are for our business. It’s certainly in my view that appetite, enthusiasm, curiosity around business is a dominant factor in people that I choose to work in my HR function today. I’m an HR person through and through but I think most people would accept that I have a very strong interest and conviction towards the business, and that’s the kind of people I think we want and that’s what we need.
Adam Burns:
I think one might expect an engineering company to be more focused on its technology but ABB seems to spend an enormous proportion of its time focusing on its people. What’s the business rationale behind this?
Gary Steel:
Well it’s people who develop technology. It’s people who spend money. It’s people who innovate. There’s nobody doing it for them. We haven’t got the machine yet that’s more intelligent than a human being, and I think there’s a very, very broad recognition that everything that gets done here gets done through people. I think it comes back to the recent history where we did have the turn around and the heroism across the company from every corner was definitely significant in the speed of the turn around. In today’s leadership most of us presided over that period so we know the efforts and the sacrifices that people made. It would be absolutely ridiculous to then say they’re not important anymore, let’s focus on all the other stuff.
If you think about it in terms of – I joke with our engineers that they were human beings before they were engineers, but if you think about it in those terms it’s actually not a bad way to think about it, and it helps you set the priorities. Good people who are oriented towards technology will produce better technology if they’re motivated and led in an appropriate manner, as the same with any other function, whether it be research and development, finance, HR, whatever. Good people want good leaders and good people want to work in a successful environment, which today ABB still is.
Adam Burns:
With rising unemployment and therefore potentially a lot more people to choose from, how do you make sure that you keep the talent within ABB that needs to remain within ABB but can also pick and choose the best of that potentially far wider selection?
Gary Steel:
Well in one part it gets back to what I said earlier with succession planning. If we’re able to demonstrate to the organization that our existing people are coming through our system and they’re developing and prospering, that will be one way that shows to people that we are a company that’s interested in developing our own people. At the same time both our organic and our inorganic growth plans dictate that we will need more people
We have a very strong position both from a financial balance sheet point of view but also our current performance. We have an exciting value proposition. We’re a very well recognized brand within the engineering world. Good people are attracted by success. We have that. Good engineers are attracted by leading edge technology. We have that. I believe as I’ve said several times good people want to be well led and we have that. So we have I believe a potential differentiator versus many of the other people who operate in this space.
Adam Burns:
There’s a phrase for information security that it is people, processes, and technology. I think if you take technology out of that equation, people, processes, and X becomes a fairly good analogy for most business strategy. How do you within HR, which is an emotional beast, you’re dealing with people, how do you mandate for those emotions? How do you mandate for the politics? How do you mandate for the real world?
Gary Steel:
The first thing you do is you develop a number of different lenses through which you look at people and judge them and that’s what we’ve done. We have a top down we call it a leadership development assessment. We’ve developed a leadership framework, which is a competence based framework, and we’ve trained about 50 people in our organization to assess our leaders against the framework. So we have this leadership development assessment, which is once every three years roughly activity. The tool by the way was developed in partnership with an external consultancy and they’ve helped us train up these 50 people, ABB people who are now competent in using the tool.
Then the other side of the coin is we have the annual appraisal process where we look at not just somebody’s performance but also their behaviors. This is very much a GE concept. It’s not just what you deliver, it’s how you deliver it. In some areas we’re using 360 feedback also for our leaders, and then finally the other thing that we’re doing is we’ve developed as a matter of the leadership development assessment we’ve developed a senior leadership development program at IMD, which is where we’re saying so here’s your profile on the leadership framework, and here’s a program that you can go and learn to close the gap on the things that you have gaps on. Of course we as leaders go to those events and whilst we’re there we’re assessing people also.
So without saying for a second it’s easy I think we have some strengths that are exploitable, and with the effort and focus that we’re putting into it, for example we just hired a new global head of recruitment on the first of September. We’ve never had a global head of recruitment before and with that and our other strengths I believe we’re very well positioned to continue to prosper against the business demand that we have.
Adam Burns::
Gary, thank you very much indeed.
Gary Steel:
Pleasure.