The Portfolio Executives

My goal in becoming a Portfolio Executive is to extend my message that the failure of talent management is fixable. You can get the results I have achieved during my 30+ year career in HR. You have to reject or modify certain HR dogma that can be an obstacle to getting those results. It is not by chance; it is a process.

I started out as a finance guy, and I have always been a problem solver, even if I did not initially know much about the issue in front of me. I would learn what I needed to know to get the required results. When I first went into HR, I did not know the rules, but I was getting results. I only learned later, from HR people, that I was supposedly doing it wrong. I asked them, am I violating a law or an ethical issue? They said no. Then what was the problem? This was when I learned that HR dogma can be an obstacle.

My first real success came when I was thrown into HR and charged with minimising or eliminating turnover among our senior technicians, and for that matter across all of our positions. I was also charged with maximising our ability to recruit, specifically senior technicians but also across all positions. Within six months, we had identified the main root cause of the technician turnover, developed a plan, implemented it and started seeing results. Our turnover ceased and we had numerous technicians contact us about coming back. During my last five years at that company, we had zero turnover in our senior technician ranks, we were receiving resumes from our competitors’ technicians, and we were known as the Employer of Choice in our industry.

Along the way, I’ve learned that employee turnover has to be the first step in getting control of your workforce. It is like a trauma patient: first stop the bleeding. Everything else is secondary. Employee turnover eats culture for lunch. Culture cannot be instilled in a workforce that is losing 20, 30 or 40% of its people a year. At that point, turnover is part of your culture. There are organisationally specific root causes of that turnover, and they are rotting your culture from the inside.

The answer is to identify those root causes, develop a plan to minimise or eliminate them, and implement it successfully. Only then are you ready to build your culture based on shared goals and values, integrity, respect, communication, transparency, employee growth and environment. Limit activities and over-communicate.

It’s working for me now because the main difference between today and ten years ago is a greater clarity in communicating what I do, how it is different and why I get significantly better results. HR people are often shocked by my results. The reason for their reaction is an area of HR dogma that says: build an awesome culture first, based on activities and events, everyone will fall in love with it and turnover will go away. I have never seen that happen. My process creates consistent results.

Looking ahead, my goal is to demonstrate that it is a process, not chance or circumstance. There is nothing wild or crazy about it. Fix the root problems and obstacles, and from there lead with integrity and sincerity. This is why certain companies have engagement numbers in the 70s while the vast majority are in the 30s. Businesses deserve a stable, productive and happy workforce, and I want to show them how to achieve it.