Competency models out, suitability models in

Competency models out, suitability models in with Susan Schmitt, CHRO of Applied Materials

Why it’s time to kill competency models

I'm so excited that you're joining me for an interview with my new friend Susan Schmitt. Susan leads Human Resources for Applied Materials and it's more than 20,000 global employees. She has more than 30 years of experience in HR providing executive leadership not only at Applied Materials but also at Rockwell Automation where she was SVP of HR and the Kellogg Company in many HR leadership roles. Susan has been described as innovative, strategic, engaging and more. She has a passion for creating value with any organization wherever she works. Susan is also the author of an upcoming book called Healing at Work: The Adult Survivors Guide To Using Career Conflicts To Heal Your Past and Build The Future You Deserve with coauthor, Martha Finney, who's the person who introduced us and I'm grateful Martha for that. 

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Susan, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Andy. It's great to be here. I appreciate it.

It’s great to have you on. We were introduced by Martha Finney, your coauthor, we started chatting recently, and you told me all the things you've been doing in your career and that you're working on. I was blown away. There's a lot of stuff to unpack, a lot of things to talk about here. You give a lot of keynotes and talks. You've got the book coming up. We're going to focus in on HR and talent development and on competency models. Something that many people hate. We're going to get into that. Before we do, let's talk a little bit about your background. I'd love to know how you got to where you are now.

Thank you. The benefit of the background is less about what I did, although we can certainly talk about that and more about the lessons that I learned along the journey of things that I decided weren't working anymore. From a career standpoint, I've been in HR for 32 years. I’ve been blessed to work across industry, both in the US and outside the US. I've done about every job you can do an HR. I've been a people manager in HR since I was 26. Having had the privilege to work with leaders and employees all over the world. I'm pleased to share with you some different ways of thinking about talent as a result of having done a lot of the traditional HR work that is good. There are things that we can be doing more effectively to create more clarity in our companies.

You've had a wealth of experience across different types of large companies and different HR roles. Think about the background you've come from in HR just so people have an idea coming up to become a CHRO. Have you had a lot of different types of HR positions like generalists, benefits, and talent development? Did you come up in one define path?

I started in compensation. After I graduate school, I had a graduate degree in Industrial Organizational Psychology which was great because it was a practice of people at work plus all the quantitative analysis. A lot of statistics courses and very heavy math. It was very natural place to start in compensation which is pairing how do you pay people which is all quantitative with the art of what is going to motivate and retain talent. I started my career in Chicago and I spent a number of years in compensation working at two different companies there. I took a little bit of a shift and worked in a very small management consulting firm based in Michigan. It's a powerful experience in terms of having PNL accountability, a cashflow responsibility, sales responsibility to go sell consulting to the customers and I had the opportunity to work in multiple industries dealing with all kinds of different projects. That was very broad. I was in that consulting firm for three years and it gave me good insight about how do you run a consulting business.

Even with the most effective competency models, we still make mistakes in placing people into roles they are not suited to. Click To Tweet

The president of the company was very generous and giving me a lot of responsibility. I could talk a long time on those three years in consulting. I learned a ton. I missed being on the inside of the company and as a consultant, by design on the outside. I ended up joining the Kellogg Company and Kellogg's was great. I grew up there. I was there for twelve years. Fortune compensation, I was a project manager and organization development. Back in the late '90s, I became what was called Director of People Services Act before we had shared services organizations. Kellogg was a little bit on the front end of designing the COEs, the business partners, and the shared services model. I had the privilege of going and building that out of scratch. Over time, that role grew. It started out with us US shared services responsibility with the North American so at Canada. We went from benefits administration, all the administration mobility and they kept adding things to it.

It became HR services and I had employee relations and HR systems plus all of the administrative benefits management to manage that whole group. From there, I went into a large business partner role of Vice President of HR for a $4 billion business at that time. I worked in that business for a number of years and then I had the opportunity to go and be head of HR over in Europe as the head of HR for the UK business. I had European HR responsibilities as a journalist plus primarily the UK business. From there, that's what led me to the opportunity to join Rockwell Automation. They recruited me out of England, out of Kellogg's in that business partner role to come and be the Chief HR Officer. I would say I started working in the COE areas. I've had the opportunity to do a small business partner role, as a project manager in OD, take on that big business and then go into the UK role. That's how I got here.

It's always a long and winding road. We made those decisions at the time and then you ended up in this great position. 

Can I add one thing? The two best moves I made in my whole career that led to my CHR position were both backward steps. In other words, I took downward moves. When I left consulting, I had three different job opportunities. Two of them were at interesting managerial level roles. The Kellogg job was to take a step backwards and go back in the compensation department as a specialist. I did the analysis and decided the Kellogg opportunity was going to be better for me longer term. That proved to be true. It looked like I couldn't keep a job. I had so many opportunities in the twelve years there. The other time when I took a step back was moving from being the Vice President of HR for that $4 billion business to take the assignment over in the UK which was technically a smaller job. It was $1 billion business at that time. The title was smaller but I didn't care what the title was. I was excited to be able to go and learn how to take everything I learned from the US and Canada standpoint and think what are the differences when you're working in different countries. I wanted to mention that point. Career moves backward, sidewards of what downwards, whatever. If they enrich, develop, and broaden you, it's going to be good for a longterm career track.

That's so cool. I love that you mentioned that because there's so many people feel the pressure to keep moving up and taking that position that's up even though they feel drawn to something else that might be take a step back or it looks like ostensibly on paper it's a step back but it's better to get the experience internationally, in a bigger company, or in a smaller company, wherever it is. I introduced you recently to my friend Christine DiDonato, who is on this show a long time ago. She always talks in her programs about how the old ways of the career ladder has gone and people now are moving laterally, backwards, and upwards in all different ways. That's a modern way to approach your career. You've done it that way.

None of it was by design but when I look back at some of the best opportunities I had, the two where I took a little bit of a smaller job ended up being the most important in my whole career.

Why It’s Time To Kill Competency Model

You've done a lot and you've risen to this very senior role as a CHRO in a huge organization, 20,000 employees. You've gotten experience to see what things work and what don't work. One of your strong points of view, as I mentioned earlier, is on this idea of competency models. You have a keynote you call it's time to kill competency models. I'm also not a big fan of competency models, but I haven't worked on the inside and HR with those. I'd love to hear your perspective on that. Why is it time to kill competency models?

Suitability Models: Employees’ number one reason for leaving companies is because they perceive more career advancement or development at another company.

Here's why. All these years of experience, if nothing else, I’ve learned a lot of things that don't work. Along the way, as HR practitioners, we're all taught to develop competency models. I was working in one of those companies along the way, good, effective competency model.  I'm talking about the soft skills competencies. This isn't necessarily specifically around technical or functional skills. A lot of times, it's leadership competency models. I started to notice that even though we had the competency model, I pay attention to the fact that we were still making mistakes, placing people into roles using a behavioral-based interview on their competencies. That was the one thing. When I stand in front of a group of people managers, I would ask them, how many of you have ever made a mistake placing someone into a role. Including me, we all raise our hands. We all made choices on talent that we regretted for lots of different reasons coupled with employees.

Number one reason for leaving companies is because they perceive more career advancement or development at another company. In all my companies, that's been true in terms of employee surveys and when you look at the external benchmarking data as well. I started asking employees questions about how do you feel about where you're at in your career. Do you understand how you're viewed by the company? Do what you need to do to move up in the company? I'd get employees and I'm sure many HR people do in our offices after they didn't get a promotion. They're upset, mad, they don't feel valued, and they don't understand why they weren't selected. In many cases, they're on the edge of leaving the company when they'd been skipped for a promotion. That frustrated with the competencies. From an employee standpoint, we're often asked to do a self-assessment on a competency model.

What I started to notice was that I don't care how many competencies you have, if you have ten and you give your own self-assessment to someone to do on themselves, they will say eight of those competencies that good at. One that they need to work on or one that's bad. Almost everybody picks business acumen is the one that they need the most work on. That's not what matters where we're making decisions about talent. I got frustrated and as I've evolved, I tramp move myself through this career. I've discovered that one of the greatest things that we can do for our customers, our internal employees, and leaders is to create clarity although the competency models have been designed with the best of intention, which is intended to help people know what matters, I would sit in succession discussion meetings with leaders and they'd be talking about potential successors. They never referenced the competencies.

They were talking about other things. There was this big disconnect between what the leaders were talking about, employees doing their own self-assessments on competencies, getting skipped for opportunities and leaving the company as the data suggests. I got tired of that. I got tired of not being able to explain to somebody in a fairly consistent way what matters most. The other thing that is frustrating is that we read all the time different publications, whether it's Fortune, Forbes, or Harvard Business Review about leadership. It's confused thing about what matters where we're assessing people for leadership roles. It depends on the next article or the next assessment from a consulting firm that comes out. It can become very confusing about are the future leaders all about digitalization, having knowledge in artificial intelligence, and how to transform cultures. Maybe but is that all that matters to be a successful leader?

If you start trying to incorporate all these different trends on competencies in terms of what matters into your model, you're constantly feeling frustrated because you're never going to get anywhere. It was feeling that I'm not helping it. It seems we're still not doing a good job of connecting the dots for people. By the way, the competencies are generally very generic. You talk about strategic thinking is often one of the competencies. I start to thinking of strategic thinking, what exactly is that? It depends on what level of work you're doing. It might be a twelve-month strategy aligned with developing a budget for twelve months. That's one capability. Are we talking about someone that needs to develop a twenty-year strategy for the entire enterprise? That's a totally different game in terms of strategic thinking. The generic nature of a lot of the competencies and then what companies have done.

I can talk about one of the companies I worked, and I won't mention the name, they had developed such a complex competency model with multiple layers of behaviors to describe what each of these competencies means. They incorporated into every talent management program that they had to the point where it was so heavy. The performance management system had the what, what are you accountable for and the how. The how was fifteen pages of competency language. I'm doing these assessment performance reviews on people and I wanted to cry because I would lose track because there were so many competencies and so many of behavioral descriptions depending on your job. Luckily, we took a totally different approach which is a good lead into competencies are limited. They create confusion which can be very counterproductive to what the company most is trying to do, both in terms of placing people in roles, figuring out how to develop people, how to coach them, how to accelerate development, and how to determine who goes on a succession plan.

For whatever reason, I've been incredibly blessed with amazing teachers, mentors, experts, and thought leaders. Some of them completely unknown in the field of HR along my journey. One of the individuals in my career introduce me to a simple model. It was back in the mid-90s, I didn't understand how powerful it was until many years later. It didn't have a name. The original work that was done occurred over 30 plus years of practical work in organizations all over the world, big, small, for-profit, and not-for-profit. What the research and application within all these organizations determine was that when you're trying to determine who is most suited to do a role, four things matter or four broad buckets. Those four broad buckets were introduced to me in 1996 include the following. The first one is obvious. Everyone gets us one. It's skills, knowledge, experience, and education.

Work varies in complexity, and people’s ability to handle complexity also varies.. Click To Tweet

Every job has a set of requirements around SKEE, skills, knowledge, experience and education. Many times, leaders put way too much emphasis on that category. We all know cases of when someone did not have what would be the required SKEE to do a role and yet they're still successful. We all know examples of people who had the SKEE went into a role and failed. A quick story. I had a boss years and years ago who on his resume, he looked A+ HR leader until I had a leader in the business that I was working for who said to me one day, "If I ran my business as your boss runs HR, we would never sell a box of cereal." Even though he had all the technical skills, knowledge, experience, and education to do the role, he didn't stay in the company very long. I don't know exactly what happened, but he was there less than fourteen months. Generally, people can relate to this that a lot of employees say, "I have the skills, knowledge, experience, and education to do the job. Why did Andy get it and I didn't?"

Sometimes it's hard to explain it. That's only one element of this model that matters important but there's more. The second category is all about complexity of work. It's called capacity for complexity. What it means is that work varies in complexity and people's ability to handle complexity also varies. You can't assume that all people are created equal in terms of their ability to navigate complexity. What's interesting is it's a simple concept. Managers make this judgment all the time, very single day. I can interview anybody who has direct reports and I can ask them this question, "I want you to tell me about your direct reports. All I want you to tell me is which of those people on your direct reports team are a good match for the complexity of the work? Which ones in your team are bigger than the job? In other words, they can do more than what the job requires." These are the people that we often have to keep challenged because they're able to do more than the requirements of the role.

If they're not challenged, they end up doing things outside of work like nonprofit boards, political roles, whatever. There are people who have a lot of capacity. Leaders can also tell me when someone's in a role that the job is bigger than the person. Sometimes it's because the person's new or it's getting overwhelmed by the complexity. Every manager can also tell me who could do your job which is a judgment of capability to navigate more complexity. We don't have time to go into all the details, but if you're ever interested, I can build out the factors of complexity and what that means. This is a key one because leaders will use code words like, "She doesn't seem to be able to juggle all the balls." We've heard that. If you've sat in a succession discussion or had a conversation with a leader talking about a potential person to go and do a job, you hear language like that. That's an indicator or a symptom that the person is struggling with managing the complexity of the role.

We never put meaningful words around it. We all assume like, "I know exactly what that means." Especially explaining that to an employee, you're not managing all of the balls very well or worse is he doesn't see around corners. How far are you asking me to see? Are you asking me to see twelve months out around the corner? Are you asking me to put together a plan that requires three to five years? I had to be able to see how things are converging to be able to align around what we should be doing to prepare for three to five years out. If you're a CEO of the company, are you trying to see around corners that are 10, 20 even 30 years out? Seeing around corners doesn't help me explain to people what they need to do differently. That's the capacity for complexity. The third category is my personal favorite, it's called temperament. What that means is our nature. We all show up in the world with pluses and minuses.

We all have good days and bad days but what matters nor matching to a role is a simple question which is there any element of this person's temperament that could impair their effectiveness in this role or the effectiveness of others? This cuts through all the stuff on competencies because generally if you have a list of twelve competencies. You may have one in there about being collaborative that the person is not collaborative but because they're good on the majority of the other competencies, the person doesn't realize that not being collaborative could derail or stall his or her career. The issue with temperament isn't trying to fix people. It's trying to help people understand what they're doing or not doing that's getting in the way. If the person isn't willing to moderate whatever it is that might be causing them to not be as effective as possible in a role, they're going to stall out or even possibly get asked to leave the company.

The interesting thing about temperament is it could also be a positive aspect of someone's temperament that impairs them. For example, in my career, I've had a lot of people in the organization who aspire to be CEO. Let's say arguably, they had all the skills, knowledge, experience, and education to do the role. The board determined that they had the capability to navigate that big jump up from Senior Vice President to CEO. The element of temperament that kept them from getting that assignment was they were too nice. They didn't like taking tough decisions that affected people in a way that would be perceived as negative or they kept weak people on their team and that brought the whole team's performance down. Temperament isn't necessarily, you can't judge a person's temperament whether it's good or bad. It's all role dependent.

You may need someone with aggressive take-the-hill temperament to go turn a business around that's not profitable because that individual is willing to make tough decisions, cut heads, and create profitability, whatever it might be to be effective in terms of the business outcomes. Keeping him or her in that role on a longer period of time and more of a maintenance role may be a terrible decision because the person's not suited to do that work. I love temperament. It's capacity for complexity and temperament are generally why people he excel in their careers or stall or get asked to leave the company. The final category, which often gets overlooked and competency models is called accepts role requirements. What this means is every job is a set of obligations and demands. It's important that we align up whether or not the person that we're asking to do that job or who is in that job fully accepts all the obligations and demands of the role.

Suitability Models: Boards don’t really talk about competencies in succession planning. They talk about what makes a person suited or unsuited for the job.

For example, it's not uncommon where we promote strong technical people into people management roles. They want that job, it's a bigger job title, they get more money, it's a bigger bonus, and they don't want to manage people. They don't want to hire and fire, do performance reviews, coaching, it's a nuisance, but if they don't accept that part of their role, it's going to be a mismatch. Those four elements we've made it the suitability model. In other words, determining suitability for role or future roles. When you're thinking about matching people to roles that they're best suited for, you need to line up. There's never a perfect candidate for any job. You always have to make tradeoffs with any positions you're filling. Good leaders do this nationally, it's very intuitive and powerful because people that are good at people assessment do this naturally but giving them this language cuts through all the noise of the competencies to help them understand what matters most.

It's all in the context of a specific role or a future role. When you start comparing people on these four categories I described, you can start getting a good sense about who's going to be best suited to do this assignment or from a development standpoint, how do I best develop Susan to be more effective in her current role? Do I need to focus on testing her ability to navigate more complexity? Do I need to build her SKEE, her skills and experiences that could be it? Is there some element of her temperament that if she doesn't figure out how to moderate, it could be a derailment? She might get impatient and she comes off judgmentally to the people she's working with. That's the language people talk about when they're sitting in succession discussions is it's not about sharp elbows. That's another one. Let's be specific. What is it about sharp elbows that's impairing him? Is it impairing him? If he goes into another assignment where he has to lead a lot of people, is that sharp elbow?

What does that about? Let's talk about the element of temperaments that could be getting in the way. Is he too competitive? Is he all about winning that cost everyone else losing? Is it all about oppositional element of temperament? In other words, always want to argue and debate and crowd everybody out. It could be rigidity. A person's a black and white thinker and no matter what opinion you share, they're going to shut you down. Those are the realities. I like temperament because it's underneath behavior and it's easy to figure out because all you have to say is anyone doing something that's getting in their way or getting in the way of other people. When you stand back and you look at people through the lens of the suitability factors, you've got a much more comprehensive assessment. You were able to use language that's consistent. I'm giving you a high-level interview or introduction in this discussion. There's training that goes initially with the HR team and then ultimately with leaders how to implement it. I guarantee you, it totally changes the dialogue, discussion, applicability, and practice of talent management programs.

Getting People Aligned

It's such a comprehensive model. It's a great replacement for the competency models. I see what you're saying. The traditional system is broken because we put all these specific models in place that are out there somewhere written down in a rule book, but when you get on the actual board room and they're talking about succession planning and who should be the next SVP or CEO, whatever it is, no one even talks about the competency models. They're talking about their gut feeling about this and that. You're trying to create a more scientific model. I'm glad you mentioned training. I'm sure the question in the minds of a lot of people reading are it's cool that you have all this stuff. The SKEE, the capacity, different complexity, the temperament and except for role requirements, how do you get people aligned on that model so that they're all speaking the same language in that meeting and they're making the right decisions. Their judgment is sound instead of it's still being gut feelings on this and that.

Before I answer your question, I have to give recognition to who designed the foundation of the model. The original work was done by a man named Dr. Elliot Jaques. He was a Canadian. He started his career as a medical doctor and his medical degree from Johns Hopkins. He wanted to help people ended up getting his PhD in Social Sciences from Harvard. I'm way oversimplifying his work but he set out on a path to try to figure out how do you create more effective organizations. This oversimplification centered in three broad areas. How do you design roles to drive the strategy you're trying to drive? How do you match people into those roles? That's what we named the suitability model. Finally, how do you create a set of managerial practices that foster trust and performance? His research and management consulting work occurred over many years in global companies. I want to give him all the credit for the original foundation.

There've been a number of contemporaries who have built on his original work. I'm not going to be able to name all the names, but Mark Van Clieaf, Gillian Stamp, Ken Wright, Nancy Lee, there are a number of others who took that original foundation and enhanced it. A number who overlayed the business context of how do you create future current value in the marketplace. I didn't want to read anyone to believe that that was something that was created by me or the companies I've worked in. That's the first thing. The second thing then is how do you teach people how to start applying it? One of your questions I know that you've asked other people on your show so I'm prepared to even mention it right here is what are your lessons learned. What would you do differently with some of the things you've introduced from a talent standpoint? When I was at Rockwell, I was so clear about the power of the suitability model that I started to introduce it to the executive team.

What tends to happen is that when you come from a place of not pushing something or you put it out there and you let leaders start to absorb it and realize the power. It took me a little longer because I was slow when I was first introduced to it. What I did at Rockwell has introduced it into the back of a competency model to tell you the truth because the competencies were quite embedded within the company which is very normal. It also established with the help of the CEO and leadership capability advisory committee or council, if you will, looking at future potential leaders in the organization to help guide HR and myself on the journey of leadership and how do we think about it. One of the executive sponsors that I brought on to the leadership capability council was looking at the suitability model, which is at the back of the competencies. He said, "Why aren't we using this for everything?" That's generally what happens.

There’s never a perfect candidate for any job. You always have to make tradeoffs. Click To Tweet

It's so intuitive and it's natural because it aligns to what good people managers are already doing when they're assessing people. What happened was I was able to shift it in terms of the focus became the four categories of suitability. With his partnership, we ended up being able to move that forward in the organization. The mistake I made and what I'm doing very differently at applied materials was when I started to introduce it out to the business leaders, they loved it and they started to grab onto it. The problem is as HR people have learned their whole career how to do competencies, I moved too quickly with the business and it caught on fire in a good way because they're like, "This is great. How, how do we build a selection process around this? How do we develop development plans that reinforce and support this?" I got ahead of the global HR organization so I had to slow myself down and slow down what we were doing in the business. It changed management with the HR team.

Since I'd had eleven years at Rockwell to see the power of the suitability model but I also learned the lesson of you can't move faster than your HR team because they're the competency experts. How do we bring the HR team along as the first core group from a change management standpoint? We were very intentional about that in the company at applied materials. I see time and time with the global HR leadership team setting the stage for why do we need to rethink competency. It certainly was much better than not having anything. To start getting them involved and understanding what wasn't working as well as it could be and how could we be even more effective in helping our leaders. That was the first key block, bringing the global HR organizational long starting with the talent team. They're the ones who are driving everything. That was a big thing. I did a similar thing at Rockwell was to start slowly.

It's a new language. It's a different way of thinking about talent although it's aligned. I don't immediately go out with we're going to completely overhaul the selection interview process. It's too much. It's got too high of stakes and affects people's lives, teams, and managers. I'd like to start slowly where we introduced the model and we say to managers, "We want you to practice using this model to have a good development discussion with your employees." We also introduce it to all employees. We're in the middle of doing this right now at applied where we say to employees, "Here's a new way that's going to help you get more clarity about what you need to do in your career to develop and to move forward, whatever that looks for you." It's almost like a soft launch. We were doing required training for people managers, you need to understand the model. It's going to help you better assess talent for employees.

We're saying, "We want you to think about yourself and your development through this framework because every employee in the company is required to have development objectives each year." That's all we're trying to do in this fiscal year. Introduce it, do an intro training. I did intro sessions for managing directors and above. We rolled it out to people managers, but everything on the front end was HR. HR was in the loop way at the beginning and then throughout. We have a four-year roadmap. The team originally came back and said, "Here's the three-year roadmap to transform all of our talent management practices." I said, "It's too much. We don't want to overwhelm people managers. Companies require people managers to be responsible for so many things that if we overwhelm our people managers, it will fail. Let's go slowly?” I knew what would happen because when you start to teach people managers how to think through the lens of suitability and this is already happening, the managing director vice president session that I did, I did a live session for all of our managing directors and vice presidents for two or three of them, people raising their hands saying, "This is cool. How come we can't put this in selection right away?"

We're accelerating some of the work because the managers are holding for it. I put it more on the category of we're slowly getting people used to it. Some people will get it immediately, some people take a little bit longer. The other piece that we're doing as well is working with the executive team. I'm lucky the CEO loves the model. It's one of the reasons why he brought me to the company. He said, "We never talked about competencies in any of these meetings. The suitability is relevant." It is what matters most working with him and his leadership team. What we did last year before we did any rollout to anybody in the organization is we started to introduce suitability model into our succession planning discussion. I only asked the leaders to come up with an assessment on two candidates who could be potential successors for big jobs just to start practicing. Simple, easy, their HR leaders were fully trained and there to support them through it.

When we did our executive promotion process, we also use the suitability language for talking about people that they were recommending for promotion. It's a multipronged approach of how do you teach it but then there's so many different talent management practices, selection development, coaching, and performance management, it goes on and on. You can't do it all at once. It's an intentionally designed, thoughtful, slower generally than what managers want. When they start pulling for it, we'll start to reassess the four-year schedule. That was a long answer to your question but that's how we're doing it.

Getting The Organization On Board

That's good. A lot of people were wondering about that stuff and trying to wrap their heads around and figure it out. The one last question I'd asked that I'm trying to imagine people in the talent development who are reading this blog. I'm in an organization and we've already got a bunch of these competency models which are half adopted, half not. I'm sure you've seen this story many times. If I'm on board with you, how do I navigate this and try to get the organization on board to go forward with something like this and get rid of the competency models?

Suitability Models: The suitability model cuts through the noise of the competencies and helps leaders really understand what matters most.

When I think about how would someone in an organization move this forward, there are a couple of different approaches that I would take. First of all, there are a couple of good books out there. They don't call it the suitability model but there are a couple of good references. There is a book by a woman. She's one of my mentors. She worked with Dr. Jaques. Her name is Nancy Lee and it's called The Practice of Managerial Leadership. It's the most recent edition. It's about the pure, original model. I would say that the suitability model is based on the original work but it's not the original specifically. The original model didn't call it capacity for complexity. The second category was called Information Processing Capability while conceptually what Dr. Jaques was talking about was capabilities to navigate complexity. It doesn't describe it that way. I don't think it's described in a way that's practical for organizations.

It's a little bit of academic sounding. I like some of the adaptation of other leaders and contemporaries who've added to it. There's another leader who's name is Mark Van Clieaf. He wrote a couple of different articles where he talks about different levels of CEOs. Not all companies are created equally in terms of complexity and therefore CEO roles are not all equal in terms of complexity. How do you differentiate CEO roles? I could forward you the article but I would read a couple of these things. I've written a chapter, this is how Martha Finney and I originally met. I should have referenced my own chapter first. We put a book together a few years back called HR Directions. In her book, I have a chapter called building leadership capability using the suitability model. That's a good place to start. Read the chapter of Martha's book and then you can wrap around some of these other resources. I do a number of keynote speeches on this topic.

Building on an entire system around it, done that at my last company. The company I'm at now is taking and accelerating some of the work that we did before. It's quite amazing. It's starting to have the dialogue about, is the competency model helping us or is it confusing? I have a whole other talk on the role of HR in terms of creating clarity and minimizing confusion. It's important to challenge our conventional thinking and question whether or not it is indeed making a difference in the company. There are lots of companies out there using competencies. When I think about CEOs, I still stands COO is very long despite having succession planning competency models, companies are still making mistakes at the CEO level. Suitability helps crack the code a bit on what happened, what went wrong, what didn't get assessed, and how do we take that into consideration when we're helping organizations figure these things out.

Major Trends In Talent Development

It sounds like it starts with a lot of education. There's some good books out there starting with your chapter in the book, HR Directions by Martha Finney. Taking an assessment of how things are working now. Are they working or waste of time? Should you be trying different things? Starting to have conversations with people in the business about how things are working introducing the idea of doing things differently. How that could work? What the benefits are of that explaining in business terms? You mentioned one of the top competencies that people need for, especially in HR, is business acumen. If that's a need for you, we've already talked about that on this show many times. Go learn about the business and how the business works. If you want to be a successful HR Executive like Susan. We've talked about some successful things you've done. You've already talked about a failure or a mistake you made which there's a great lesson there about moving too quickly. I know you are knowledgeable of a lot of other topics. We specifically think about talent development. Any other major trends in talent development that you're following right now?

There are a lot of trends. I read your trends document too. What I'm seeing in terms of trends, and I don't think this is a big secret but the whole world of digitalization. If you think about companies now, if the company isn't already a software company, it's going to be a software company because it's the future. Companies are all in varying stages along this evolution, this transformation to becoming more digitized. Companies are becoming data companies. If you think about the Cloud service providers, Artificial Intelligence, the future of automobiles being fully automated, the future of smart cities where everything is connected, everything talks with each other, every company is going to have a place in that future world of technology.

The trend from a talent standpoint is how do you think about the future of work? There are so many jobs that are going to be created that we haven't even begun to conceive of. Many jobs are going to become antiquated. Having a strategy around, the future of work and how work is changing. I think about the world of the digital, the social media world, and all the different kinds of roles that had been created because of digital businesses. Jobs that didn't exist years ago are completely new jobs. All these different platforms. There was a platform called Upwork where you can grow out and source any work you want. There's 99Designs. If you need to go find an artist to do anything, you put the work out there. It's all crowdsourcing work assignments.

I've heard there are tons of those.

Certain elements of a person’s temperament, whether positive or negative, can get in the way of being effective in their role. Click To Tweet

There are huge trends around leveraging the digital social media world to solve business problems as well as there are legacy businesses, every company has its legacy core business, which has been its meat and potatoes for years. You see companies moving into this new space. The big automobile company is the Ford Motor Companies of the world, the Jeda Motors and certainly Tesla even Amazon all thinking about the future of cars and how it connects into all of these different worlds. To take a company that has been very good in the past with hardware firmware products to this evolution into subscription services, software of service, and Artificial Intelligence. How old are going to change? How do you bring your workforce along on that journey? Where do you do upskilling of capability within the group? Where do you do reskilling? How do you bring in partners to help you augment capability that you don't have internally? These are huge trends. I don't have all the answers, but it's interesting. It's like the oceans are moving in terms of the impact for us as HR practitioners and as talent leaders to think through that knowledge transfer, retention of key talent, upskilling, reselling, and technology implications for all of us. Not only in terms of how we do our own work but also how the company becomes a different company. There are some interesting challenges ahead.

Healing At Work: A Synopsis

I love everything that you talked about. It's so true and relevant. Almost every company is going through some type of digital transformation. I hear it all the time. You mentioned auto companies, I used to give examples of this. You hear Ford and say something like, "We're no longer a car company. We're a technology company." That happens to make vehicles. Kellogg's is no longer a cereal company. They're a technology company. They happen to make cereal. A lot of companies are thinking that way. We've done a few episodes on that one that comes to mind for anybody who wants to go deeper on this idea of digital transformations. I had a guest on named Michael Leckie who's an expert on this. Check that out. Susan, you've already mentioned a couple of books. You've got a book coming out. That one is called Healing at Work: The Adult Survivors Guide To Using Career Conflicts To Heal Your Past and Build The Future You Deserve. I'm getting familiar with this writing process now that I'm writing my own book. It's going through the process, going to the publisher, everything. We don't have an exact date. Give me the real quick a bit on what that book is about so people can lookout for it.

Thank you for the opportunity. The book is about changing the workplace from a place that can be known as a stressful place to a laboratory for emotional healing. Turning workplace conflicts that happened all the time at work into gross moments. Learning how to let go of self-limiting beliefs that many of us, me included, come away from our childhoods with that sometimes few our success but also can potentially impair and derail our success. It's how do you take those moments at work whether it's being missed for a promotion, it's a conflict with another freelancer, or it's a disapproving boss. All these conflict moments can trigger old things from our past. I can guarantee you for years and years of my own career, I was unconscious to some of the self-limiting beliefs. If the workplace moments, I was getting hooked or triggered by things that reminded me of things that happened to me when I was younger that had nothing to do with what was happening at work.

It's becoming aware that we can choose one of two career paths. We can either go down what I call the wounded career path which is what I was on for a while. Unconscious unaware of how self-limiting beliefs are showing up. How our reactions and behaviors that we learned when we were younger to navigate sometimes challenging childhoods are what we depend on where we're in a similar feeling moment at work. Those things can work against us and it can have an impact on our relationships with colleagues. It can have a negative impact on our relationship with ourselves. It can lead to a lot of the issues we see at work, depression, health-related issues, loneliness, isolation, stalling out in their careers, whatever. That's the wounded path. What we teach in the book is how to intentionally and we gently guide leaders and readers how to do this to go on the healing career path. Becoming aware that the conflict moments get negative feedback on a 360 assessment.

There's lots of things that happen at work that create conflict. When we start to go into those triggered responses, we teach our readers how to use that rather than going into the old reactive behaviors that lead us oftentimes in distress, anxiety and worry to learn how to do it differently. My purpose in life is to teach self-acceptance and to create a more joyful world. What we're doing through this book is teaching people how to learn to be more self-accepting with very practical and applicable ways of renavigating these moments so that the workplace becomes your laboratory and that you are able to get less triggered by other people. When you do the amount of time you spend there is much shorter. You don't go home and beat yourself up all night. You move through it much more effortlessly so that you can start having some more fun at work. It's not just about fun but it's about an experience where there's less stress, worry, time, and unproductive reactions. That's what we teach people in the book.

Advice From The Pro

I love the concept and the whole thing. You're working with a great coauthor Martha. I love your purpose as well. I don't want to go down this whole rabbit hole but we talk about all this stuff with work and it's very impressive in everything you've done and we've connected already, but I feel so much more connected to you. It's so powerful to hear your purpose about teaching self-acceptance and creating a more joyful world. I want to support it so I can't wait to get my hands on the book. Last question for you. For anyone listening in HR Talent Development looking for ways to accelerate their own careers and get to that CHRO or CLO role one day, what's one more piece of advice you would give?

It goes back to one of the first thing that we talked about when I was talking about my career is I learned this side of interviews with business leaders to try to figure out what's the right career track to become an executive in the company? In my interviews with executives and in my own journey, the ones who reached the top came to the top in a variety of different ways but the consistency was there a willingness to take on whatever job the company offered them. It was the broadening and deepening of experiences and understanding of how the total system worked. Backwards steps, taking an assignment that seems a pain in the neck assignment with an opportunity to prove that you could navigate through it.

Suitability Models: A category that is often overlooked in competency models is whether a person assigned to a job fully accepts all the obligations and demands of that role.

My experience is do as much in terms of different roles. I personally think it's good to get different industry experience because you see things. I moved from different industries, consumer packaged goods, to industrial automation technology, and now into the summit conductor industry. Each industry, customers, and challenges are different. You see things in ways that people in the industry don't see because they've never worked outside the industry. That's another piece of advice. It's valuable to have an opportunity to practice HR in different settings. Getting an opportunity overseas, working outside your home country. It doesn't matter what country you're from. Having a non-home living experience professionally is critically important.

Get as much experience as you can in different situations outside your industry or country. That variety of experience and taking whatever comes your way. I will serve people well. Susan, this has been awesome. For anybody reading this blog that wants to get in touch with you, where's the best way for them to do that?

You can find me on LinkedIn. It's Susan J. Schmitt. The website for the book is SusanJSchmitt.com.

We'll put a link to that in the show notes. This has been fantastic. Thank you again, Susan, for coming on and sharing your experience, your wisdom and your advice with us. I appreciate it. Thank you again for coming on the Talent Development Hot Seat.

Thanks, Andy. I appreciate it.

• Applied Materials
• Healing at Work: The Adult Survivors Guide To Using Career Conflicts To Heal Your Past and Build The Future You Deserve
• Susan Schmitt
• Christine DiDonato – related episode
• The Practice of Managerial Leadership
• HR Directions
• Upwork
• 99Designs
• Michael Leckie – related episode

Susan J. Schmitt on LinkedIn

SusanJSchmitt.com