Challenges in Global Talent Management
Mar 03
The other day I went to my second North Ryde HR Network (NRHRN) breakfast seminar, which was on Talent Management. In 2008 at the very first NRHRN event, Ronan Carolan, HR Director with Sanofi Aventis spoke about their Talent Management strategy that they had adopted in order to address performance, engagement and succession planning issues within their organisation. The strategy was called “People, Performance, Potential”.
Since 2008 a lot has happened as I’m sure you are aware and like many HR strategies, these are a work in progress. As such, the purpose of last week’s seminar was for Suzanne McCord (Peformance and Capability Manager ANZ) to give us an update on their progress and issues they have faced along the way.
Interestingly enough, the APAC region for Suzanne also includes Russia!
Suzanne spent most of last year based in Singapore focusing on talent identification and development across the region. In her role at Sanofi Aventis, she is part of a global talent development project which aims to develop a simplified and consistent approach to talent globally.
One of the first things I remember about Suzanne’s talk is that she started by saying that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to talent management which is a good reminder. She said that it needed to be customised to the organisational structure, and culture of the organisation. It is also imperative that it integrates into all your other HR practices, particularly performance appraisals. It should touch on every aspect of HR. Sounds simple enough, but how many of us can say we have a smooth integration between our performance appraisals and talent management? We should. It only makes talent management harder for us if we don’t!
Essentially Sanofi Aventis looked at the way they were structured and the way in which they wanted to do business to set themselves up for success in the future. Suzanne mentioned that they were going through loads of change locally, regionally and globally. They also appointed a new CEO around 15 months ago and a new Head of HR around 5 months ago.
Change is pretty much a constant in the organisation at the moment.
Globally speaking, there are a number of initiatives happening under the broad “Transforming Sanofi Aventis” strategy, including strategies around remuneration and benefits, rewards and performance management. The specific component around talent is called “Transforming Talent”.
So how do they define talent management? Basically Suzanne says it’s about identifying, developing and managing talent in such a way to ensure that they have the best possible people, in the right positions to enable them to achieve strategic outcomes. In order to be successful, it must comes from the top (i.e. they need leadership buy-in) and it must link back to the business strategy.
The issue at the moment for Sanofi Aventis is that, although they have the buy-in and all the processes in place, the real challenge is to get things consistent across the different countries i.e. correct calibration of talent. There needs to be one company with one process.
But if you think about all the different countries in the mix there such as China, Philippines, Australia and Russia- that’s quite a challenge and a work in progress as Suzanne mentions. One of the first steps was to ensure that they were all using the same definitions of talent in each country, however with the differences in languages and meanings; these definitions can be interpreted differently.
Have you ever encountered this issue in global talent management and how have you overcome it? It would be great to get some conversation happening on this topic.
I’ll post the full presentation when I can get my hands on it 
