Cryptic heading isn’t it? I was thinking again about Continuing Professional Development and pondering on the CIPD behaviours. Three of my favourite behaviours are:
All good areas to work on, the last one is perhaps the most difficult as how do you get yourself into a position of having credibility with your CEO? Then I came across PricewaterhouseCooper’s (PwC) 18th Annual Global CEO Report, no small report featuring the views of 1,322 CEOs in 77 countries. I also read the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Labour Market bulletin and Mark Beatson, Chief Economist for the CIPD said: “This suggests that a greater proportion of employers are facing difficulties filling vacancies compared with last year. In the face of a tightening labour market, employers should look at how they can make better use of the skills and knowledge they already possess and whether they are maximising their potential to attract candidates. Investing in the future talent pipeline with clear progression paths is key to offsetting recruiting difficulties and will help to ease retention problems that are often ignored in the narrow debate about skills shortages.”
So how does this all link up?
People Professionals must align their activities with the needs of the business and help CEOs with their concerns. The PwC report highlights these, according to the report CEOs are becoming increasingly worried about the availability of key skills – in 2013 58% of CEOs mentioned this, in 2014 63% and this year 73%. Surely this is a key way for People Professionals to show their value?
The report says “No matter how CEOs choose to rethink their capabilities, there are three factors they’ve told us are vital for success:
- Creating new value in new ways through digital transformation
- Developing diverse and dynamic partnerships
- Finding different ways of thinking and working”.
I started to think about how to bring this to life and feel that people will need to be:
- Creative in their thinking and approaches
- Collaborative rather than combative
- Customer centric rather than process driven
- Courageous when thinking about the unthinkable
- Champion change by embracing it and not clinging to old comfort zones
- Continuously learning to develop new skills to cope with our ever changing world
- Cultivating and nurturing an adaptable talent pool
What a lovely development agenda! This is where People Professionals will need all their courage to abandon traditional leadership and management development approaches. Courage to embrace development programmes that are about effecting change and not about classroom lectures. Come and chat to us about our views on leadership and management development. We passionately believe that lasting change starts with commitment from the CEO and Board. Without that commitment an organisation is just paying lip service to the development of their managers and leaders. In these challenging times we need to be better than that.
We promise you that our approaches will have plenty of Cs in them!
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