One of my favourite types of project is when I can work on the 'People Strategy' for a company. Probably in part because of my mixed business/HR background – as a People Strategy goes hand-in-glove with the Business and Financial Strategy of an organisation – and...
I have been recently helping a large mining company in Kazakhstan with its strategy for its corporate university. Even prior to the Covid pandemic the wish was to move heavily into digital. Which was also the only way they could meet their vision of 100% of their...
The older you get the more likely you are to be attracted by nostalgia and the belief that things used to be better. Whether this is really the case is not the subject of this blog, but there is one subject on which almost all companies, whether in Russia, Europe or...
One of the classic challenges for HR professionals, even heads of HR, is understanding the business. My career is unusual in that I have had both senior HR roles and senior business roles, and in fact there was a period where I moved back and forward between the two....
I have been assisting a new Italian client design a talent management system and an important part of this has been the concept of talent pools. Groups of people selected as ‘talent’ on whom to concentrate attention. I was reminded how often I have helped introduce...
I was recently asked by a consultancy if I could help with their bid to a client who, as part of the project, wanted to set up competence frameworks. Did I have a couple of slides to explain how one would develop such competence frameworks and some examples of...
Just before the Covid-19 pandemic started to hit Europe, we began Crisis Management consultancy for a large petrochemical company. Working together with the former global Head of Crisis Management for Royal Dutch Shell for over five years, we were asked to share...
Recently I’ve come across a number of articles heralding peer-to-peer support as a new concept in the management of global talent mobility. The articles suggest the challenges of relocating and settling abroad, from administrative and official tasks through to...
I have written earlier about benchmarking in connection with the talent management project at the European Space Agency (ESA). ESA were interested to learn what other similar technological companies did in regards to talent management. As I wrote at the time though,...
There is one organizational development process that I have used occasionally and really wish I had been able to apply more often in my career: Open Space Technology. And why have I not been able to use it more? Well, Open Space is not for the faint hearted. Most...
I shouldn’t still be surprised, I know, but the number of line managers I continue to meet in different companies and different countries, who still only think about formal training courses for the development of their staff, (or even the individuals themselves who...
Having worked with CCL (Center for Creative Leadership) in both Russia and Kazakhstan, who were the originators of the 70-20-10 meme for corporate learning & development many years ago (sometimes written 70/20/10 or even 70:20:10), and also being a researcher by...
Having run the leading Corporate University in Kazakhstan and now advising one of the top Corporate Universities in Russia, both of which were under the expectation of their stakeholders that they would be developed and ‘transformed’ into something better - without...
One of my favourite icebreakers that I have used for people to get to know each other better, especially in new organisations, is People Bingo. There are different versions of the game, but the one that I think works best is when the people involved are...
I was having lunch with somebody who used to work for me in Kazakhstan and who had recently left to join an international consulting firm. In fact I had hired him and seen him grow and develop so that he was actually heading up our HR Consultancy team before he left....
I have written previously about the Ladder of Inference, one of my favourite tools for promoting productive conversations. https://valshebnik.com/blog/the-ladder-of-inference/ This helps us understand why we jump to conclusions, rightly or wrongly, and gives us a...
A simplified risk management methodology - and especially the risk matrix of impact against likelihood - can be extremely useful in HR and other projects, even when your company does not officially require you to use them. Having had business, leadership and project...
I’ve been recently conducting some focus groups for my Russian clients. Finding out what I already know: that Russians in general are not a very mobile workforce, and in this case do not necessarily want to move from their larger city place of work to a much smaller...
Quite often I’ve been part of global leadership teams, who come together for a face-to-face meeting somewhere in the world for maybe two long days and then all dash off to catch planes or go to other meetings at the end of the planned agenda. Nevertheless as a team,...
Many years ago I worked for four years as a recruiter for Royal Dutch Shell. If you do ten interviews a day you need to get very good at asking questions, as you do if you teach interviewing, which was also part of my role. This was useful experience for me later, not...