Background
Boral Limited is Australia’s largest building and construction materials supplier; it also has a significant operation in the US and Asia. It produces and distributes a broad range of materials including quarry and building products for the building and construction industries.
The company has over 15,000 employees working across 650 operating sites in Australia, the USA and Asia. The majority of these employees are unskilled and semi-skilled – mainly quarry workers, operatives, transport workers and production staff. Boral has a set of stated values “to provide a grounding for a common culture in the organisation and provide the basis for consistent decision-making throughout the company”. Boral’s values place considerable emphasis on leadership - seeking an environment where people “can excel through a management style which is participative, encouraging, demanding and supportive”. Recently particular attention has been placed on identifying and developing those managers who are capable of offering this style of leadership – about 1,000 individuals fall into this group. This is the target population for an extensive range of organisational development interventions.
Organisational development
Almost 40 years ago, the leading US academic and writer on leadership, Warren Bennis, defined organisational development as “a response to change, a complex educational strategy intended to change the beliefs, attitudes, values and structure of organisations so that they can better adapt to new technology, markets, challenges and the dizzying rate of change itself”. Organisation or organisational development (both words seem to be used interchangeably with OD as a favoured abbreviation) has been, with varying degrees of fashionability, a key concept in human resource development ever since. As can be seen from Warren Bennis’ definition, the emphasis is on the organisational change process rather than the narrower conception of individual training.
OD is the term preferred by Mary Dahdah, Boral’s Learning and Organisational Development Manager, to describe her initiatives and activities. There are a number of reasons for her preference. The first concerns the perceptions of managers. In her view learning and training can be seen by senior and line managers as “fuzzy” soft terms, whereas OD, with its change implications, is more likely to be recognised as offering a hard contribution to business goals. To an extent the issue is one of appropriate branding of the human resource development function.
Certainly OD is a more holistic discipline and Mary Dahdah has responsibility for broader interventions including those that could be considered constituents of talent management: such as management development, career management and succession planning. Again perception is important, as Mary Dahdah comments:
“Surveys within Boral have indicated that staff are happy with the development opportunities that are available, but they do not think that satisfactory career management systems are in place.”
One further advantage of a holistic view of human resource development is, in Mary Dahdah's opinion, the scope that is offered for more effective measurement. For example retention figures are a clear indication of success as are improvements indicated in 360° feedback scores and the percentage of internally filled roles as opposed to externally sourced employees – whereas training evaluation data is a less satisfactory indicator of the impact on company priorities. Effective measurement can also permit benchmarking against outside companies.
A key issue in implementing a holistic approach based on OD is the need to ensure that all parties play their part. Progress cannot be achieved by learning and training specialists acting alone. Indeed Mary Dahdah sees her main challenge as educating and influencing stakeholders who have not come across OD and don’t appreciate its potential value to the organisation. Ironically one of the most demanding groups are fellow human resource professionals outside learning and training. Often they can be drawn to a focus on short-term transactional aspects of human resources, rather than those that build a longer-term strategic capability. This can create problems. In Mary Dahdah’s view it is essential to manage people’s development proactively; if not, staff who are critical to succession plans become frustrated and seek opportunities elsewhere.
In the longer term Mary Dahdah has aspirations that:
“All the potential development processes, systems and strategy are in place and are aligned to the business goals; people at all levels are fully on board and play their part.”
Progress to that end will be achieved through the introduction of a set of consistent initiatives – currently one of focus is the Executive Development Program (EDP).
The executive development programme
The EDP has been a feature of Boral’s management development initiatives for many years. However it has recently been restructured and the focus has shifted from top-down instruction to embedded individual learning. The current programme design is set out the attached diagram . The programme lasts eighteen months and some 24 individuals are chosen to participate against declared selection criteria – for example, they must have been in a senior management role for a year and have demonstrated high potential.
It can be seen from the diagram that there are two residential elements. The first, which follows shortly after participants have completed and received feedback, is a series of psychometric assessments focused on self-awareness and the softer inter-personal skills – for example, coaching. Participants then prepare an individual development plan which is skills-orientated. Recent examples have included extending leadership and promoting the capability of subordinates. It will be seen from the Table that there is a two-stage team or group project. This is firmly business orientated and implementation is expected to pass a financial threshold – examples here have included the more effective management of equipment. The results of the group project are presented back to senior managers. In the table Employee Estimated Potential (EEP) is the talent identification and succession planning tool used in Boral, which is integrated into the EDP participant selection criteria. The second residential session concentrates much more on harder technical subjects – for example finance.
It can be seen that the emphasis on the EDP is on encouraging learning over an extended period. A similar emphasis applies to development programmes in place at lower levels in the organisation.
The important thing, according to Mary Dahdah, is that learning is seen as a continuous activity not as something that is associated with attendance at discrete events.
Reference: BENNIS, W. (1969) Organization development: its nature, origins and prospects. Reading, MA.: Addison Wesley. p2.