Business Times, CEO Column - The battle for talent

Business Times - 06 Sep 2008

FROM THE DESK OF
The battle for talent

To hold on to their high performers, companies must offer job variety and a personal touch

Chua Sock Koong
Group CEO
SingTel

I AM proud to be part of an institution whose heritage can be traced back almost 130 years. Since joining SingTel 19 years ago, I have had the privilege of participating in its transformation into Asia's largest multi-market operator.

We have a presence in 19 countries and over 198 million mobile customers through our strategic stakes in Optus and six leading regional communications companies. Nonetheless, I am the first to admit that SingTel is still a 'work in progress'. We are endeavouring to move beyond our present business model of providing basic carriage services to become a higher value-added multimedia company.

Our ability to bring about this next stage of transformation depends on the talents in the company because we operate in a highly competitive industry where products and infrastructure are easily commoditised. At the same time, good talents need good leaders.

Vision is the key

To me, leadership is the ability to have a vision, share the vision, and inspire and engage others to work together towards that vision. This is how leaders bring about extraordinary outcomes.

As the Group CEO, I work closely with my leadership team to communicate our strategic objectives to all our people. And we constantly need to engage our people's hearts and minds. This starts from Day One. As soon as new hires walk through our doors, buddies are assigned to ease them into the organisation, help them understand our corporate culture, show them the ropes, and introduce them to key contacts.

One thing I insist on is my 'Meet the New Hires' tea sessions, where I set aside an hour to meet with about 10 newcomers at a time. Over tea, I hope not only to share my vision for the company but also to motivate the newcomers by sharing my experiences when I was a young executive. Through this, they get to hear about how the company has transformed over the years from a 'nine-to-five' statutory board to a flexible, empowered and market-driven organisation.

Ensuring continuity

Leadership is also about building the next generation of leaders and ensuring continuity. This is something I take very seriously.

To nurture the next generation of leaders, however, we must first attract and retain the best talents. There is an ongoing regional war for talent, and to win it, companies need to meet the demands of high-performing, high-potential talents by providing job variety, career acceleration, and a personal touch.

For this reason, we treat our people as valued individuals, not as mere statistics. When our talents sign up with us, they know that they will be able to connect with the organisation and grow with it throughout their career with us.

I am also deeply involved in developing our leadership programme. Besides on-the-job training, we have formal training programmes targeted at different levels of management. These include our in-house management school as well as external training with leading educational institutions like Insead.

We also have a development centre that assesses future leaders through a simulation exercise called 'A Day in the Life of a Vice President'. This exercise involves five to six high-potential leaders assuming the role of a vice-president. They are asked to solve people management issues, address operational and strategic matters and deal with difficult customers. We also observe how they deal with people of different levels at discussions, presentations and brainstorming sessions. The job simulations are highly realistic, to the extent that they are bombarded with lots of e-mails during the course of the day.

These are examples of what we are doing to build the next generation of leaders.

The people factor

I also believe that an organisation cannot focus solely on financial success. To deliver sustainable results, it must have leaders who measure their success with people.

Given the increasingly complex and inter-related nature of our businesses, the group needs people who work well with others. We are trying to build star teams rather than individual stars.

We recently started a Teamwork Grand Prix Leadership Program to enhance leadership attributes and build high-performance teams. So far, more than 1,700 people managers are involved in this Teamwork Grand Prix.

Every leader in our organisation knows that he or she has to be a mentor. I had good bosses who guided my development, and I benefited tremendously from their mentoring. It is now my turn to pass my knowledge on to my mentees.

There is no place in the company for leaders who deliver on financial key performance indicators (KPIs) but are not good people managers. So we have made it compulsory for every member of senior management to include people KPIs, on top of their business KPIs.

At the same time, we make the effort to recognise our great people managers. To this end, we have introduced the SingTel People Manager Excellence Awards based on the 5Cs: Core Values, Communicate, Collaborate, Coach and Challenge.

On to the next level

SingTel has come this far under the leadership of Mr Wong Hung Khim, our first CEO who oversaw our corporatisation and subsequent privatisation, and Mr Lee Hsien Yang, the architect of our regional expansion.

The time has now come for my leadership team and me to take the group to the next level. We are competing with other players who, like us, want to be Asia's leading communications company.

I have every confidence that we can achieve our vision because we have a team of dedicated, passionate leaders - leaders who not only deliver business results but also believe that future success depends on developing future leaders.

With this, BT kicks off a new column in which top corporate personalities share their insight and views

Credits: Business Times - 06 Sep 2008, CEO Column