The Sum of Many Talented Parts

Holding company Marsh & McLennan Cos. has roughly 50,000 employees globally and is composed of four different operating organizations: Marsh, an insurance broker, Guy Carpenter, a risk reinsurance specialist, Mercer, an HR consulting firm, and Oliver Wyman, a management consulting firm.

As vice president and global head of talent management, Arturo Poire runs talent strategy for the entire enterprise. He said the systemic use of development and performance management practices, workforce analytics and a new focus on social media tools are helping to create coherence between the companies and expand communication between all of its leaders.

TM: Describe your company’s approach to talent management.

Poire: We are basically four companies in one, and our strategy has to account for that. There is a good level of decentralization that goes on, so each operating company has its own model when it comes to talent management. At the same time we have a large umbrella because we are an intellectual capital company, so there are certain processes and programs that run across the company.

Our company focuses on performance management and talent to a very big extent. We have a very strong performance management process that cuts across all the different operating companies. We make sure that we have consistency in terms of language, we share the same systems and platforms for that process, and in the past few years we’ve been working very hard on talent reviews, succession management and leadership development. We have meetings with the enterprise CEO once a year to review the top talent across the organization. We also have meetings with top functional leaders, CFO, head of HR, head of legal, head of technology, to look at the functional talent across all of the operating companies. That’s what I’m building now, programs that cut across the enterprise in terms of leadership development and managerial skills with a common language and approach for talent management. Much of what I do is leverage what we have internally, learn from each other’s best practices and try to reuse things that have been developed in other companies. You have measurement processes — performance management, talent review — then you apply the action — leadership development and learning strategy.

TM: How are those different performance measures linked to strategic objectives?

Poire: We have a common set of competencies, which have been designed with the strategic objectives in mind. What we’re building heavily now is workforce analytics, the tools and instruments to measure the impact of all the actions we are taking, the evolution of our workforce effectiveness and efficiency, and we’re trying to create consistencies in how data is produced, analyzed, and how we gather information through different processes such as our colleague survey, internal labor market analysis or our talent reviews. We try to analyze and combine all of those to make sure we link the behaviors we ask our colleagues to exhibit to the actual results.

If you take a 10-year cut of our history, you’ll see this is a company that was extremely successful. [We went] through a period of crisis around 2004 with some regulatory problems and then into a little bit of a tailspin. If you look at the past three years, which coincides with the tenure of Brian Duperreault, our CEO, you see a steady improvement in every single measure, and that coincides with a strong focus on our main asset, our human capital. When you put our financial performance side by side with the investments we’ve made in talent management strategy, you’ll see those two lines coincide.

TM: What other challenges impact talent at Marsh & McLennan?

Poire: Our structure is a big challenge — that we are four different companies — and that’s a very important part of our culture. I am driving for coherence, for common language, but I have to be careful to respect the individual businesses’ strategic objectives and the company landscape that they face. I have to allow them to do what they have to do to achieve goals. Of course, the fact that we’re a global company with more than 100 countries also creates its own dynamic. Probably for the first time in history you have the emerging markets being very healthy, growing very fast, enjoying the benefits of progress, and then you see the more developed world struggling with financial problems. How you structure your colleague-value proposition, how you design your compensation strategy needs to adjust for that new world.

The other challenge we’re facing that I see as one of the hot topics is engagement. We’re putting a lot of effort, focus and money there. We’ve started doing colleague surveys on a more regular basis. When the other companies are at the top and then go through a crisis, it impacts the morale of your colleagues. Making them feel that they belong to something bigger, something positive, it’s worth making sacrifices. The benefits will come, but it’s tough. What’s happening now for many companies, ours included, is the economic slowdown in the world has made it more challenging for companies to reward colleagues the way they want. Typically you end up asking your colleagues to do a lot more with less. I’m spending a lot of my time trying to [figure out], what is it you can do to motivate your colleagues in the right way? The fact that you have multiple generations of workers sharing the workspace makes it a little bit more difficult because what motivates Generation X is not the same thing that engages baby boomers, and it’s definitely not the same thing that will engage your Generation Y or millennials.

TM: How does the company promote workforce performance?

Poire: Learning and development is a key aspect, but it’s not the only one. For example, in the insurance services side our business is very, very regulated. You need to have a robust learning strategy and structure because you need to satisfy regulators because of licenses and all of that. Then you have technical learning. When it comes to leadership development, our companies are at different areas of evolution. Some, like Mercer, have done amazing work to create a strong curriculum that goes from first stage manager to becoming a leader, and I’m trying to leverage that for some of the other companies. Oliver Wyman also has a very strong focus on leadership and management behavior. The other companies are following suit.

Our learning strategy is tied to our objectives, but we’re also trying to find other ways that you develop leaders. It’s not just by participating in a classroom. That’s why the talent review process is key. We’ve launched 360-degree feedback, multi-rater reviews for all of our leaders across the different operating companies where they can actually get feedback on their leadership style, and we’re looking at that to create common trends and then to see what kinds of tools and solutions we can create. In addition, we’re creating a program that will allow colleagues to have more on-the-job-type development through assignments and working on cross-company projects with colleagues and leaders from other parts of the organization. They can not only make connections and learn about other parts of the company but also learn new behaviors by looking at how others behave.

I recently did a survey of our talent management philosophy with leaders of my organization and one of the things they said loud and clear was one of the strongest ways to develop leaders is by having them have experience through special projects or assignments and giving them the opportunity to receive feedback. Our talent management strategy is moving to make sure we are aligned to that, that the solutions we design are more about real application of learning versus the more theoretical approach you see in other places. Lastly, we are using social media to communicate with each other, share ideas and teach each other in a more effective way. Through that we expect to get more real-time information on issues, concerns and feedback for the leaders of our organization. We’re trying to attack this from multiple points.

TM: What does your social media use consist of? How does it play out exactly?

Poire: We are investing in a new platform. One of the operating companies, Marsh, is leading the way on this. That platform, which is up and running right now, is a lot more than a LinkedIn. Imagine a virtual university where you enroll your leaders to become teachers, create online classes, colleagues can attend those classes, share feedback and have real dialogue with those teachers. We’re expanding that technology to the different operating companies.

We have also revamped our intranet to enable more real-time conversations with our colleagues. We want companies to be engaged in advancing the company’s strategy not only by doing their jobs and doing them very well but also by leading in something that goes beyond day-to-day work. We’re going to create message boards, which we’ve done in the past, where we ask colleagues for cross-company goals, ideas to advance the company strategy, and based on the recommendations we’re going to bring them back to our colleagues so they can incorporate the goals into the annual planning process. It’s all about leveraging technology, but also changing the mind-set in terms of how you communicate with colleagues in a more fluid and active way.

TM: What’s next for Marsh & McLennan’s talent efforts?

Poire: The focus for this year goes back to this emergence of different types of conversations with colleagues. We’re going to invest more in that as well as in social media tools. My focus will be to continue building organizational coherence and making sure we have processes that are aligned to talent across the enterprise. The other big one is workforce analytics. We’ve done a lot of work in the last two years to improve the quality of data and the depth of analysis, and we are working more on that. Our company’s growing. We’re turning to new markets, new segments, so things look very bright. To be successful our talent strategy has to be at the center of it. ?