Companies are great at hiring and onboarding managers on processes and operations, but what about the people they have to manage? What about the personalities, diverse characters, cultural identities and forces, personal experiences, professional experiences, interests, and unique details about their new employees?
Firms and HR managers need to be more innovative in their approach to managerial hand-off or replacement. To do that, firms must create personalized employee portfolios for all their staff, not ones that just list salary, competencies, and time served. With a good employee portfolio, a new manager should be able to intimately understand his or her team in a few hours. How does Matt like to be spoken to? What kind of learner is Marie? Does Peter prefer to work on design projects or implementation projects? What does Kevin do as a hobby?
With this valuable information, a manager can walk into the room to meet his or her new team prepared to hit the ground running, avoid relationship gaps or personality clashes, and can begin the first day with an intimate and organic connection with the team (personally and professionally).
This strategy of managerial innovation is not one way. Employees should be given the same level or transparency about their new manager and receive a personality and professional portfolio on their incoming manager (i.e., interests, experiences, personality, learning and managerial style). Who is my new manager? Does she or he have any similar interest to mine? What is her or his management style?
The road to creating this level of transparency is not an easy one, but the long-term returns are immeasurable, particularly for firms that operate globally and across diverse cultural borders. Here’s how to get to this point:
- Be transparent. Share your decision, strategy, and vision with your employees. A good firm makes sure it keeps team members on board and up to date.
- Test your employees. Find the personality, leadership, and social behavior test that will match your firm’s needs. Better yet, build customized assessments!
- Get organized. As we are in a digital age, you need to find a cloud or big data source to hold and secure your staffs’ portfolios. Digital files can be accessed, tracked, and updated in seconds, which is critical for a global company.
- Share it. The process of implementation has to be scaled based on employees’ roles and their level of access to firm information. However, all team members and managers in the same group should be able to access their co-workers’ portfolio at any time. If you are able to master this, then you can make basic profiles that are accessible to anyone in the firm from anywhere in the world. This becomes critically important for international and multicultural teams. Teams can onboard themselves in minutes with their co-workers’ or managers’ portfolios and then engage without creating conflict or delays.
- Maintain it. This is where most organizations fail. We buy or implement great tools, but then fail to maintain them. You have to develop a customized strategy and make sure everyone is accountable for keeping their portfolio and those of their direct reports are up to date, almost like a balances sheet for accountants.
There is no one-strategy-fits-all method to creating this portfolio culture. You need to dig deep as an HR department and do your research to find the assessment, tools, and firms that can provide you the support you need. The best thing is that we live in a digital age, so everything is just a few clicks away for you to discover and engage with.
Harlem Williams, MBA, MS, HRM, MS, is a human resources, strategy, and innovation consultant; a humanitarian, and a professor. Williams also is the founder of Out Of The Case Consulting, which helps organizations improve sales, productivity, organization, company culture, and employee relations. For more information, visit http://www.Harlemwilliams.com and http://www.outofthecase.com
