Oregon Scientific: recruiting the Oregon Trail of leaders

Due to the current war for talent, many corporations are facing greater challenges in recruitment and succession development every day. At a recent HR Magazine conference, Dr Frankie Lam, Executive VP HR, Oregon Scientific provided insights into recruitment and succession planning strategies at Oregon Scientific.

Dr Lam stated that the current challenges that Oregon Scientific faces in their human resource departments are global people resources and management succession. He said, “If you walk into any organisation, the problems are all the same-recruitment and succession. It’s like playing soccer, but why do some teams perform better than others? I think it differentiates by your planning and execution; you find the right people in the right spots, and then they perform at the right match, at the right time, with the right skills and score the right goal.”

Oregon Scientific has approached these issues by looking at external and internal resources and has implemented two programs in their workforce, the Executive Associate Program and the Management Development Program. They also believe an important task to prepare for succession planning is by conducting a people and organisation review.

In order retain their current talent, Dr Lam said one solution was to use external resources and implement an Executive Associate Program in order ‘to build a strong leadership bench for future global leaders’. He said, “Recruiting from the outside is important for the company but not necessarily the best solution; sometimes the best solution is training from the inside.” The objectives of this Program include identifying talent candidates externally and internally for business growth, developing internally and externally current and future global leaders, accelerating the organisation development and part of the succession planning. This is a three year intensive program with the following breakdown:

On-the-job development, 70%: job rotations and special task assignments.

Mentoring and feedback by senior management, 15%: performance review and 360 degree feedback.

Learning and development programs, 10%: I-MBA and I-Engage Programs and book assignments.

Company activities, 5%: CSR and deliver training for management.

Oregon Scientific believes it is critical for employees to continue reading and learning with Lam adding, “In Hong Kong, many do not read and have never even heard of Jim Collins so we give them books to read. What is the best way to acquire knowledge from others? Reading; I’ll say one of the key differentiators and why the Chinese are catching up so rapidly versus Hong Kong is because they read a lot.”

Oregon Scientific’s criteria for staff enrolment in this Program includes a minimum of seven years working experience, MBA preferred, fluent in English, Mandarin and another foreign language is a plus, ability to frequently travel or work overseas and appropriate work values aligned with the defined management style. The characteristics of key future leaders includes alignment with core values, global perspective, savvy in e-business and internet applications, ability to manage in a rapidly changing business environment, good team leader and team player, excellent interpersonal and communication skills, inspirational to others with excellent coaching skills and a good role model with the ability to establish rapport.

Dr Lam stated that 27% of high potentials are at risk of career derailment with one out of every four never reaching his/her potential. Characteristics of derailers include not being a team player, defensiveness, arrogant, too ambitious, hurrying to move ahead and a sense of entitlement. He said that effective mentoring is the key in order to prevent the derailment of employees. Ideal mentors should possess the following characteristics:

• experienced and respectful senior management personnel;
• able to commit their time;
• passionate, and possess coaching and mentoring skills;
• right pairing—chemistry.

Another solution that Oregon Scientific has implemented is their in-house developed core training Management Development Program which is grouped into three categories: personal development, management development and commercial development. The Program consists of executive leadership forums for senior managers, I-MBA Programs for selected managers and I-Engaging Programs and Management Essentials Programs for all managers. The I-Engage Program is a two day ‘boot camp’ for middle level managers that focuses on supervisory skills, work engagement and team effectiveness. The I-MBA Program is designed to accelerate selected talent to see if they are capable of senior level management.

Many organisations regularly conduct performance management reviews, but Dr Lam advised to also execute a people and organisation review. This review is a business unit by business unit, function by function review with CEOs and executives. He said the review is important in order to agree on and select the high potential talent, the back-bone talent and the bottom 10% and then provide for specific plans in order for performance improvement or exit. Dr Lam stated that it is necessary to separate the back-bones from the high potentials because while some employees may be key contributors, they are not high potentials.

Results

After one year of implementing these Programs and reviews Dr Lam said Oregon Scientific learned the following:

• We need to link talent and critical competencies more explicitly to our strategy—emerging market, war of talent market.
• We need to be more strategic about where, why and when we rotate people throughout the organisation.
• We need to manage our talent earlier or our competitor will.
• We need to get better at addressing performance issues and creating more candid dialogues.
• Bottom 10% cannot be bottom 10% again and again.
• Talent and capability sharing across business units is critical.
• Leadership development is a shared accountability between senior executives and HRD.

Dr Lam acknowledged that a common problem is for some employees within business units to believe that their resources are solely theirs so this results in problems of sharing and communicating with other business units within a large corporation. He added, “I believe to overcome this we need commitment from the leadership team, cross business unit rotation and leadership development and shared accountability.”

Due to the competitive market in the search and recruitment of talent, more and more corporations may start to cultivate and implement similar programmes in order to augment management succession and development within their workforce.