Welcome to the recruiting, selection and onboarding portion of our leading people and teams course. It is my absolute pleasure to work with you on your journey on the talent pipeline. I wanna share with you what I have learned in a very long career in managing human capital, and what I have learned and taught since starting our career at our university. My name is Cheri Alexander, and I am currently the chief innovation officer for executive education, as well as part of our faculty, and an executive coach. It is my hope for you that you will begin to understand what it takes to create, to build, and to foster a cadre of talented people to work on your team, or perhaps a region in your company, in your department, or in the company itself. It is my hope that you are able to execute in the future the work that you have at hand. Now I have a question for you. Of course I do, I'm a teacher. What keeps CEOs up at night? According to the corporate leadership council, a survey that they have worked on and repeated over the last few years, they were able to probe deeply into the minds of an elite group of CEOs, and find out what keeps them up, truly keeps them up at night. Now I would guess that you are all guessing correctly, because you know the course is about people. So you're guessing, well, it must be about the people. In today's world, globally, leaders are worried about the human capital that it will take to fuel their organizations in a positive future. The war for talent, words that were coined a pretty long time ago, is still going on. Where will they find the talent? How will they attract them to their companies? And how will they keep them? In some cultures today, people are opting in and out of jobs faster than ever before. How will they grow talent to lead their companies? We hope to inspire you with a few very important concepts that can be applied to your teams, your departments, your regions, for your entire companies. Now this is what I call the talent pipeline. I want to travel with you. So let's travel together on the pipeline. But where do we begin? I want you to note that the talent pipeline is very circuitous. Sometimes we start in the same place. In fact always we start in the same place. But the journey may take us to several different places at several different times. It all depends on one thing. It depends on strategy. Where do we start on the talent pipeline? What I said was we start at strategy. We always start at strategy. But it may take us in many different places. There's no reason to hire one person, or place one person on your team, or in a job or a position, unless we know what value we want to create. The strategic choice of Nordstrom's is customer intimacy. They have determined that the role, the niche, the way that they will make money in the world is to retain their customers through customer intimacy. They want to get so close to their customers that the customers only will shop at Nordstrom's. Now I heard about Nordstrom's in the 1980s. I was sitting outside the office of my boss, and he was the president of a portion of the company that I worked for. It was a division of about 35,000 people, and I was his HR leader at that time. But he was never late for a meeting. And there I sat, ten minutes past the time that we were supposed to have started. Now, I looked at a secretary and I said, Joanne, where's Don? And she looked at me and she said, well, he's with his Nordstrom's lady. And I crinkled up my face, I'm sure and I said, Nordstrom's Lady, what's a Nordstrom's Lady? She told me the story that on Saturday he had gone to Nordstrom's, this new retail store, and he had been looking for some shirts. And they didn't have his precise size, or fit, or whatever it was. And there she was, the woman who waited on him on Saturday in his office with his shirts. And they were even monogrammed with his initials. Now I'm sure some of you have heard stories like this about a person who went to Nordstroms to return tires. Nordstrom's doesn't sell tires, but they took them back. For me, my Nordstrom's shoe person knows the trouble that I go through in finding navy blue high heels. Yes, this is a first world problem, I know. But every time there is a pair of navy blue heels that shows up at Nordstrom's, I get a text. And yes, I usually buy them. I'm hooked. So, what positions will drive customer intimacy? It's that salesperson. What capabilities does that salesperson need? They need high levels of interpersonal skills, they need connectivity to their customers, the desire to connect with people. They need insight into what customers want, and the ability to form true relationships and partnerships with their clients. First you identify the strategies that will grow and sustain your company or your team. Then it's critically important that you identify the positions that will create value in the company. You select the positions before you select the people. So, what types of positions will add value and drive the strategy in your team, or your department, or your company right now? What skills and abilities do the people who fill those positions need to have to add value, and help your team meet its strategic priority? Now is the time for you to do some analyzing and posting in the discussion forums. If I were to do this assignment, if I were to answer these questions, I would be thinking about a team that I lead quite a long time ago. I was charged with moving people. 7,000 people out of 17 different buildings, moving them to the new headquarters of my company. Our team was to create a new culture of collaboration and openness, one where everyone could work together in a new lean environment. A lean office environment that was fun, where everybody wanted to be. I had to find an architect who understood people well, who understood that the environment you set as to support people, can support people in driving value and strategy. I had to find a person that could see the vision I had for collaboration and affect an amazing space. Create a space that attracted people, not scare people from going to the new headquarters. I really look forward to seeing what your posts look like, what strategies you are working on, what kinds of positions that will drive your strategy forward, as well as what capabilities your team members need to have to fill those positions.
