Creating a Sense of Community

At Whirlpool, the best talent wins. David Binkley, the company’s chief human resource officer, is well versed in how best to promote a successful, disciplined talent management system that is not only always on, but is as rigorous as any of the organization’s other operating systems.

TM: Describe Whirlpool’s approach to talent management.

Binkley: We refer to it as always on, 24/7, and it is a core business process. When we put the system together, starting about a decade ago, it was our intention to really build this like any other operating system in the company. We manage it like we manage market share. Leaders are held accountable in their performance, and ultimately their pay, for the execution of our talent systems. It is operationalized through a calendar that starts with our strategic planning process and gets deployed into annual goals. There are hard metrics for everything, and it’s a board approved process, and the board is very actively involved in the whole system.

TM: What kind of challenges impact talent at Whirlpool?

Binkley: There are several. It starts with the fact that we’re a global company. Talent strategies are incredibly different as we go across the enterprise and around the world. Growth rates in the U.S. and in Europe are moderate, and the talent challenges that go with that of retention, investment and development, making sure that you have appropriate flow through the organization are very different than the challenges we have in Brazil, India and China. There is more turnover, incredibly fast growth. There is clearly a war for talent. The talent strategy itself may not be different, but diversification and the differences going on in the markets drive different execution, different speeds of execution and different focus depending on where you are in the world. Competition for the best talent is very intense, in every market, and that’s at the intake level, the university level, or at the professional level when we need to go to market for unique skills or leadership talent.

TM: How do you deal with those talent challenges?

Binkley: To answer that let me tell you a story. When I was in New Delhi a couple months ago, we hosted a breakfast for HR and business people at other large, multinational companies to understand what kind of issues they had in the market and to create goodwill and a sense of community. We talked about the biggest issue going on in the markets right now, and we talked about hiring. It’s explosive because these are very fast, high growth markets. To add, train, equip the staff to be able to deal with the growth opportunities, we concluded over the next three years, just those 12 companies were going to hire a quarter million people, and we’re all competing for the same people. We need to have a very compelling brand proposition in that marketplace. We need to be recognized as a leader, as an employer of choice. So we have put strategies in place to tell the Whirlpool story, creating our reputation in the marketplace, making sure we have a distinctive offering in India, Latin American and China. Once in the system, given double digit wage inflation, etc. to retain people requires high levels of engagement and great jobs. We make sure people can have great jobs early in their career. We spend a lot of time on employee engagement, and we understand the drivers of engagement in each market so we can drive retention, business performance and a winning culture.

TM: What role does culture play in your talent strategy and how you build it?

Binkley: The culture of the company is highly engaged. At the performance level and the leadership talent assessment level we drive very deeply our spirit of winning, diversity, no right way of doing the wrong thing. Our values that we drive, teamwork across the organization are very much embedded in all of our performance tools. It’s a culture of teaming, it’s a culture of winning, it’s a culture of pay for performance. We have a highly differentiated pay for performance system that allows the best performers in the company to earn well above market pay. It’s a very values based culture.

TM: How do you handle succession planning?

Binkley: There are a couple of answers to that question. We have a board level succession. Our entire August board meeting is devoted to talent management, which will get into talent broadly, but also get very specific in the top 100 vice president level globally, and then executive level, C-position, executive committee, chairman, etc. If I take it down a notch, we go through a process every year, our strategic planning process, where we set the company’s priorities, including the people priorities, for the next three years, with a focus on the next year out. Through that process we identify the top 10 succession gaps globally through regional talent reviews, and those get a lot of attention. The action is to close them out. Then twice a year we have CEO talent reviews. Throughout the year we have two executive committee half days during our strategic planning process devoted to nothing but talent. The focus there is next level talent, next generation leadership and succession. It’s very hard work and never done. Once you think you’re done, something could change in the market, business conditions in another part of the world, unanticipated retirement earlier than planned. Things happen. It’s an always-on process.

TM: How have talent management activities contributed to Whirlpool’s bottom line?

Binkley: We start out with the premise that whoever has the best talent wins. It’s obvious in emerging markets where you have this fast growth that you want to make sure you get more than your fair share of — when we put the best team in the market, we outperform our competitors. Unfortunately the reverse is also true. We’ve had cases where if we didn’t have the most compelling leadership talent you didn’t win in that particular market. We have a lot of different financial and talent metrics to measure that. The other piece of that would be where we decide we’re going to start up a new business where we’ve been recognized as one of the most innovative companies several years in a row.

When we decide that we’re going to go into something that’s not in our core and we put new next-generation talent in place on those teams, the growth rates as opposed to the growth rates you’ll see in some of our core business areas, are absolutely phenomenal. When you start looking for real hard, quantitative numbers where you did x and you got y, that’s a little harder to prove out. the other aspect that I would add is diversity is very important to Whirlpool, and not only because it’s the right thing to do. There’s no question that as we try to drive innovation in our company, in our products, there’s no question when we have the most diverse terms, diversity in the broad sense, that we have a more compelling, innovative outcome. We can show diversity linkages with the innovation and business growth also, which is real core to our talent strategy.

TM: How do you integrate talent practices?

Binkley: When we built our tools over a couple of years, they were built intentionally to integrate. The intention was to create a core business process, a management system as opposed to a one off system. It’s a highly integrated set of tools; it’s been operationalized to our corporate calendar. This is not episodic. These events are embedded into the core of how we run the business, whether that’s our employee engagement survey, our management skills survey, our ongoing talent assessment and development plans. It’s not hard to integrate them once you establish them as part of your core business process, and we have enabled these practices through technology. And, if we’re going to innovate or add onto the system, we try to first get better faster every year. We also innovate from the core as opposed to changing the core and adding new systems and tools and processes. These are very well established, they link together very well, and they’re very well understood.

TM: What’s next for Whirlpool in terms of talent management?

Binkley: The next step is data and analytics. We use a lot of data and analytics to understand our talent population around the world. We’re pushing that further, and getting smarter about that every year. We’re into the [second] year of a three-year process, a very deep look at our global director population. There’s 588 of them; we understand the demographics, performance, anything you would want to know, including those who we believe need accelerated investments; we manage them as corporate assets. We’re also one year into a three year on over 3,000 managers — same work — to understand how can we segment that population, who’s in it, how healthy is it, how can you take that population to the next level? We’re segmenting the talent pool to get different cuts, areas of emphasis, priorities.

If I had to leave you with one big thing it would be how we’ve operationalized and embedded this just as part of our business system and a management process in the company. My boss Jeff Fettig, the CEO, said a number of years ago when we started this, “Dave, I want you to make this inescapable in the company,” and I would say that we have achieved that.

Kellye Whitney is managing editor of Talent Management magazine. She can be reached at kwhitney@TalentMgt.com.