Alumni Profiles - Customized Training and Facilitation

CCL Helps Director and HR Team Transform Talent Development to Embrace Change

 

"CCL's facilitation of this session was crucial. We needed to take a fresh look at traditional approaches to talent management and, with this group, we were able to challenge big assumptions."

- Arvinder Dhesi
Aviva

Arvinder Dhesi jokes that after he accepted his new job as group talent management director at the insurance group Aviva, the next call he made was to CCL.

While the true timing was measured in weeks not minutes, Arvinder's sense of urgency and deliberate action was clear from the beginning. He wasted no time in driving a talent management strategy for the entire company — a 300-year-old global operation with 54,000 employees.

Working with CCL's Kim Lafferty, based in London, Arvinder and his team identified several opportunities to draw on CCL's expertise, including the design and delivery of Leadership Perspectives, one of Aviva's ongoing in-house training programs. Center staff has also facilitated segments of other company development programs and issues-based workshops.

In a turning point for the organization, Aviva's top human resources people gathered with several leadership development and talent management experts for a "Talking Talent" meeting. Under CCL's direction, the session became a "no-holds-barred" discussion of talent, says Arvinder. "CCL's facilitation of this session was crucial. We needed to take a fresh look at traditional approaches to talent management and, with this group, we were able to challenge big assumptions."

Traditional talent management involves three main functions, Arvinder explains: Identify the right competencies, assess the people and invest in the best. This approach, Arvinder and his colleagues agree, is flawed. "The first problem is in knowing what skills are needed. More to the point, what is right today might not be what we need tomorrow."

"The second problem comes when you identify the small percentage of who has the 'right stuff' and call them your talent. The corollary is that most people have the 'wrong stuff,'" says Arvinder. "What is the cost to the organization of implying that the majority of the workforce is not considered talent? Organizations over-invest in a few individuals, rather than investing in the organization as a whole."

During the Talking Talent gathering, the group dramatically shifted its understanding of talent and how to develop it. Now, Aviva's talent management and leadership development efforts are geared to creating the capacity to adjust, adapt and be resourceful in the face of change — and to create an environ-ment where everyone will learn and grow.

Rather than focusing on a narrow band of high-potential leaders, "We're placing bets on a bigger percent of our people so that more leaders emerge. We now view talent management in terms of creating fertile fields for talent so that talent grows itself. Instead of fighting a war for talent, our actions are seeding, feeding, weeding and transplanting."

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