Applying Six Sigma Principles to Corporate Staffing Departments

Applying Six Sigma Principles to Corporate Staffing Departments
By Alice Snell

The corporate staffing department performs a critical gateway function in a company, bringing people from the outside world into the organization. As such, recruiting has a huge impact on the quality of the assembled workforce. Attaining quality in recruiting and deployment is therefore a natural aim of an organization. How do you pursue quality in hiring and placement? Let's look to a highly influential school of thought in quality management, called Six Sigma, as a model.

Developed at Motorola in the 1980s and practiced by large corporations such as GE, Dow and Honeywell, Six Sigma is a quality initiative that uses data and statistical analysis to measure business processes and their outcomes. The cornerstone of the Six Sigma methodology is the concept of a defect. A defect is defined as a failure to deliver what the customer wants.

The central principle of Six Sigma is that by measuring the defects a process produces, one can systematically identify and remove sources of error, so as to approach the ideal state of no defects at all. The standards of Six Sigma are very high: a business process has attained Six Sigma quality when only 3.4 defects occur per every one million opportunities. Six Sigma was originally applied in a manufacturing environment, but its principles are applicable to customer service and even internal services such as recruiting.

Six Sigma "Defects" in Corporate Staffing
Following the Six Sigma methodology, the process to be improved must be defined and mapped out. A process map is a graphic representation of the process, showing it broken down into its detailed steps. A process map helps visualize the entire process and identify key metrics for measurement and analysis. Measuring the performance of the process is a data-driven exercise, so there must be steps in the process that perform the critical data capture necessary for measurement and reporting. A thorough statistical analysis of all data endeavors to identify those elements of the process that have a direct impact on the quality of its outcome. Once the source of defects has been identified, an improvement program can be defined and implemented to remove these causes of defects.

What is a defect in internal recruiting? The Six Sigma methodology defines a defect in terms of the expectations of the customer, which in the case of an internal recruiting department is the hiring manager. Hiring an unqualified candidate, a below-average performer, or even an employee that demonstrates a lack of fit to the corporate culture could all be considered a defective outcome of the recruiting process. How can you reduce defects in corporate recruiting?

Screening out Unqualified Candidates
Recruiting can be viewed as a screening process. This is especially true during periods of high unemployment, when the job market is characterized by an oversupply of talent. Under these conditions, the recruiting function in an organization is to eliminate unqualified people as much as to seek out talent. To improve the quality of an overall recruiting process, each step of the process must be designed to maximize the probability that the candidate ultimately selected meets the expectations of the hiring manager. One way to do this is to maximize the chances that an unqualified candidate is screened out at each step. The following are some key areas in which to focus on quality.

Talent Definition
To drive quality into a selection and recruiting process, you must first define what quality is. The selection process must be grounded on the foundation of a proper specification of the requirements of the job. You must articulate the abilities, credentials and experience that will bring about success at the job. Once set, these objective criteria inform all aspects of the recruiting process for the position, from the writing of the job description to the criteria employed by an online pre-screening function.

Employment Branding
The employment brand you project to jobseekers has an important screening role. The corporate Careers website should present a consistent employment brand, and provide visitors with good quality information about the organization, even a realistic portrayal of life working at the company. Cultural fit is as important a factor to the overall quality of hire as the possession of requisite hard and soft skills.

Sourcing Strategy
It is the function of a sourcing strategy to ensure that employment advertising reaches the right audience. The goal is to maximize exposure to qualified candidates while minimizing exposure to unqualified candidates. A job posting appearing in a media vehicle that has too low a proportion of qualified candidates to unqualified candidates will increase the burden on later stages of the selection process to screen unqualified candidates out. A formal sourcing strategy should be informed by actual sourcing yields.

Job Description
The job description for a vacancy should provide the candidate ample opportunity to self-screen. It should describe the role, and the activities and responsibilities involved. Moreover, the job description should describe the abilities, credentials and experience possessed by the ideal candidate. Other pieces of information on a job description that give candidates the opportunity to self-screen are salary ranges and details on logistics, such as the location of the vacancy and the amount of business travel involved.

Shortlist
Even an informed sourcing strategy and a carefully crafted job description will not prevent the unqualified from submitting a resume. The selection process must be armed with systems and procedures that ensure these unqualified candidates do not make it to later stages of the internal recruiting process, where costs increase.

Historically, the next check for quality in the recruiting process was the resume screen. Screening on the basis of a resume is a highly subjective process, wholly unsuited to bringing consistency and quality to an organization's workforce. Resumes are candidate-driven and generally do not contain information sufficient for a recruiter to assess a candidate's ability to do a job. Furthermore, there are no standards for resume content, meaning that the information common on all resumes received by a recruiter is insufficient to make an accurate ranking of candidates. At best, all a recruiter is able to do is look for an indication that the candidate may move forward to the selection next step, such as a phone screen.

iLogos Research found a small but quickly growing number of large companies in 2002 (9% of the Fortune 500, for a year-over-year growth of 104 percent) turning to the interactivity and self-serve environment of the Web to place a significant pre-screening function on the corporate Careers Web site. A pre-screening function using a questionnaire on the corporate Careers Web site provides the recruiter the opportunity to pull standardized data from candidates on predefined criteria related to job performance, which can be used for automatic analysis and comparison of candidates. An online pre-screening function on the corporate Careers Web site gathers from candidates at the initial point of contact the information needed to narrow the initial applicant pool.

Focusing on Quality from End-to-End
Dow Chemical has been measuring Sigma for its staffing processes on a global basis since 2000. In order to improve its processes and yield higher productivity, Dow Chemical has implemented staffing management technologies globally in more than 60 countries. Dow Chemical's Human Resources Information Technology Global Director Jon Walker states, "Best practices and proven methodologies are key to improving the staffing process enterprise-wide. Since we've been able to engineer new processes and staffing management technology, we have achieved an increase in Sigma by at least 50 percent." He added, "An increase in Sigma will typically result in bottom-line efficiency and cost reduction of five percent or more. As it relates to staffing management, we attribute our productivity gains to finding quality candidates faster, faster-time-to contribution and a reduction in cycle-time by forty percent."

Six Sigma may be viewed in terms of accuracy: a process that has only 3.4 defects out of one million is one that achieves its goal 99.9997 percent of the time. The function of a selection process is to predict who will be successful at a job. Unlike the raw materials and steps in a manufacturing process, people have an element of unpredictability, so it may be asking too much of a program of continuous improvement of an internal recruiting and selection system to attain a high degree of accuracy in the prediction of quality of fit for a job. However, the fundamental goal of Six Sigma—to strive for process perfection through continuous improvement—is eminently applicable to the processes of corporate staffing departments.

Nine Tips for Executives Involved in Knowledge Management

Nine Tips for Executives Involved in Knowledge Management
by Carla O'Dell

1. Get smart. Understand knowledge-sharing behaviors and support systems. Read. Benchmark. Get feedback.

2. Start planning. Assess just where you stand on the KM learning curve. Identify your business strategy component in need of support. You need to know where you are now and where to go before you embark on any change efforts.

3. Set the guiding principles, and define the need. Your involvement in this step will mitigate resistance and change management questions. Executive involvement and periodic meetings ensure you know any risks or issues that come up and react accordingly. The "right" knowledge management approach depends on the context and the need.

4. Find the processes and projects that support your value proposition, inform the rest of the organization, and demand a solid business case.

5. Select pilot projects that give your organization a good chance of early success and a testing ground for techniques and methods.

6. Follow tried-and-true principles of design, such as employing a multidisciplinary KM core group and sound change principles. Get buy-in and understanding in the organization.

7. Guide the implementation and launch of your projects. Ensure employees are properly trained and results and lessons are accurately documented.

8. Apply what you have learned from the pilots in an expansion strategy that embeds KM into every area of the organization.

9. Sustain your improvements, and plan to scale up.

People Developing People: The Move to Mentoring

People Developing People: The Move to Mentoring

by Agatha Gilmore

When times are tough, we often look to our friends and colleagues for support. That human connection and sharing of knowledge is an invaluable tool for navigating a crisis - and now, it's an economical one, too.

According to Bersin & Associates' Corporate Learning Factbook 2009, the U.S. corporate training industry shrank roughly 4 percent between 2007 and 2008 - "the greatest decline in more than 10 years," the report stated. Yet perhaps more interesting, this decline was accompanied by a corresponding uptick in the interest in and use of mentoring solutions.

According to the Factbook report, "[some] online training hours were replaced by coaching, collaborative programs and other less-costly methods." In fact, coaching is now incorporated into 30 percent of all training programs.

"When you're talking about a decrease in training budgets, it's not just the workshops themselves, but it's the actual [number of] people that are responsible for it and able to implement it [that is decreasing]," explained Judy Corner, a subject-matter expert in mentoring at Insala, a provider of talent management software and solutions. "Even with an economic upturn, that's probably one department where it's not going to go back up. Your IT will go back up, so will other areas of the organization - product development or manufacturing. But chances are the training function will not go back up. How do you get that type of development out to people without increasing that head count? Mentoring is that. It's a way for people to get development without having to go to a training class."

While mentoring can't fully replace traditional classroom-based training and e-learning programs, it can help reinforce them and provide much-needed one-on-one support.

"Like it or not, people still need people," Corner said. "Employees are saying, 'As soon as this economic upturn begins and I'm feeling comfortable, I'm out of here.' What organizations are suddenly realizing is, 'Uh oh, we'd better be careful, and we'd better let our employees know that we really do care about them and we really want our good people to stay.' Mentoring's a great way to do that."

Another advantage of mentoring is the potential for highly customized, just-in-time learning.

"Oftentimes there isn't a specific training class to be able to address whatever that person's immediate need might be," said Morgan O'Brien, Insala's vice president of business development for North America. "For example, if I'm working for an organization that's just expanding to creating and entering global markets, there may be someone I can tap into in my organization with a question or to help reflect on a specific issue, but the training department might not have any kind of formalized structured curriculum to assist with those kinds of situations."

Although measuring the cost savings from using mentoring versus traditional training methods might be difficult, Corner said learning executives can point to the end result as proof.

"[It's] the fact that people have gotten the development they needed without the expense of going through a training function - whether it's a workshop or a course or whatever it might be," she said.

That said, organizations must be very careful and deliberate when turning to mentoring to supplement training.

"The biggest pitfall is the fact that if you don't make sure that you've got good mentors, bad habits can get passed on," said Corner, who added that learning leaders should consider offering mentoring training for business managers and other would-be mentors. "The quality of your mentoring initiatives is highly dependent on the quality of your mentors."

O'Brien added that another crucial factor to consider when implementing a mentoring program is setting the right expectations, both for mentors and mentees.

"Oftentimes mentees have a perception that their career is going to be skyrocketed by participating in this program. It needs to be clearly stated what the expected outcomes and results are going to be," he said.

[About the Author: Agatha Gilmore is a senior editor for Chief Learning Officer magazine.]

Motivate Your Workers

Motivate your workers

By DATIN T.D. AMPIKAIPAKAN

Passion for what you do is not something everyone has. Doing what you really want may not happen too. In such cases, employees are obliged to take whatever options that are open to them and therein lies the trouble.

Many take on jobs that do not stir their imagination. Many more handle jobs that are routine and have no meaning in their lives. This is complicated by the fact that the supervisors do not care about challenging or motivating them, neither do they tell them what relevance their work is to the big picture.

Even worse is the fact that among the managers, many do not see the big picture and send wrong signals about what the CEO wants. All this creates what we complain incessantly about - bad attitudes, lack of motivation, no interest in learning new skills, inability to accept change ... the list goes on.

What does an organisation have to do to create this synergy with its employees? What does senior management have to do to create the atmosphere that allows employees to believe that they are in the "best" place of work?

What will create the "sync" between the organisation and staff?

The following are some of the suggestions by employees and management that I have received. Do they work for your organisation?


a.. Create trust and learn to respect everyone without considering his or her status or position.
This validates the fact that "Everybody who is employed is important" and implies that the CEO deserves the same respect as the office assistant, notwithstanding the fact that the CEO is responsible for the success and failure of the team.


a.. Ensure that the organisation's mission and success is priority, and that every employee understands that and works towards that goal.
This is the big picture. Unfortunately not every employee understands or appreciates the big picture because personal ego comes into play and they tend to goof up team synergy. A good example is what happens within two departments.

Say the marketing people go out to seek business. Once they find a new client, they would promise to deliver proposals and documents to clinch the deal but this effort requires the assistance of another department where the staff could be upset that they were not consulted when the promises to deliver were made. It boils down to "territorial issues" and heads of departments get indignant and feel insulted when they are have not been told certain things. Very few realise that there is a big picture and the reason they are employed is to see that business transactions flow smoothly between departments so that the customer is satisfied and the image of the organisation is enhanced.


a.. Create an environment where management and employees like one another, appreciate the team spirit and feel that the organisation works for the benefit of the staff and vice versa.
I saw this happen in a bank branch once where the branch manager made it clear that the stuff learn to like each other.

If anyone has a grievance, it needs to be sorted out. He saw to it that everyone took turns to chair staff meetings (including the office assistant) and created an atmosphere where organisational goals helped their personal goals.


a.. The management should strive to create a balance between work and home. This is something managers need to understand and practise. Many employees poke fun at managers who think that if the staff stay back late, they are working hard. I have had employees tell me that they stayed back just to impress the boss and get their bonuses. Not much work actually gets done. Experts who talk about a balance between work and home, have done research into productivity and work efficiency. Employees do get burned out.

a.. Choosing the right team leaders is vital so that employees will respect them and like them.
A good team leader has to be a good coach and an even better mentor. He or she is expected to be a motivator, a challenger of spirits and have the ability to get the staff emotionally involved in things that matter at work.


a.. Find the right person for the job.
How can you possibly select a moody person or one who is reluctant to smile to be in charge of customers?


a.. Mind your manners.
You may think that courtesy may be trivial but it affects your employees deeply. There are three basic things that create the best atmosphere at work: politeness, friendliness and kindness. People who work for you are entitled to respect, civilised behaviour and a great deal of dignity.


a.. Show appreciation for what is being done.
Give credit to the team when it deserves it. Managers who feel threatened will be reluctant to let someone else take the credit.

Their egos just cannot allow that. Just face it - no team leader can achieve anything alone. An unhappy team has low morale and productivity suffers.

The people you have in your organisation will tell your story, whether it is one of success or not. If you have employees who work hard, are disciplined and focused on achieving success, you have created the "sync" between the staff and the organisation. The sky is then the limit!

Turning Workforce Talent into Business Success: Six Imperatives for Getting it Right

Turning workforce talent into business success: Six imperatives for getting it right
By David Clinton

Mired in a global economic downturn, are companies finding that the "war for talent" is over, at least temporarily? Not if they are seeking long-term competitive advantage. In fact, as executives are forced to make difficult decisions about headcount reductions, remaining employees are under increasing pressure to improve performance, add new skills and take on increased responsibilities. And this means the importance of people continues to be a constant that demands attention.

According to a yearlong research initiative sponsored by Accenture there is still pain out there when it comes to developing a high-performing workforce and linking that performance to enhanced business value. The study found that attracting and retaining the best people are still at or near the top of just about every executive's agenda. Even the slowing economy has not changed the fact that competitive advantage is based on the performance of a company's people.

Yet there is cause for concern beneath the apparent support for improving the quality of workforce performance. Human performance strategies are still a source of puzzlement for many executives. Too many companies either are investing inadequately in key human performance areas or are not investing at all in the broader range of programs necessary to truly link improved workforce performance to profitability. If they are to remain competitive, companies must make some significant changes to how they recruit, develop, measure and reward their workforces.

Creating a high-performance workforce
Why is a high-performance workforce a source of competitive advantage? Perhaps the most important reason is because a company's culture cannot be as readily imitated as its products and marketing strategies. Several companies are getting many parts of the human performance agenda right, as the Accenture research initiative uncovered.

What, after all, sets high-performing companies such as General Electric, Nokia, Microsoft and Sony apart from their competitors? A variety of things, of course, but these and many other global companies today consistently follow six imperatives that can create a workforce with sustained high-performance levels.

1. Do not just hire skilled workers; hire "skillable" workers. Successful companies are going after particular kinds of people today:
• Able to learn: Leading companies hire not just those individuals with the "skill du jour" but those who are good learners—people who will be able to adopt new skills as strategies change.
• Diverse: With business increasingly being played on a global stage, workforce diversity—not only of race and gender but also age, language, thinking style, religion and culture—is critical.
• Technology-savvy: Companies need employees who understand the strategic value of IT and who not only can envision the new technological future but also can help make it a reality.
• Flexible: Organizations are increasingly concerned with how "nimble" they are—and need people who can quickly change to meet new strategic demands
2. Match talent with the right opportunities. A principal reason why many companies have trouble retaining key talent is that they hinder people's mobility within and across the organization—and therefore limit their opportunities to grow. Companies that make it easier for employees to find and take on new opportunities within the organization are better at enhancing overall workforce performance. They also excel at keeping key individuals loyal, motivated and engaged longer than companies with rigid advancement and staffing policies.

Many companies try to boost retention simply by throwing more money at key performers. But the fact is that most research on job satisfaction and retention, including the Accenture study, shows that such a tactic may actually undermine the culture and the performance of the organization. What employees really want—besides a competitive compensation package—is the opportunity to grow and develop, both personally and professionally.

3. Measure and develop talent in real time. The traditional approach to performance management rarely provides for real-time feedback about how people are performing right now. The only way performance management can truly influence the behavior of employees is if feedback comes very soon on the heels of the actions a company wants to reinforce (or discourage).

Today's leading companies recognize that their measurement and development models must operate in real time and support a geographically dispersed workforce. To accomplish that objective, an increasing number of companies are taking advantage of new technology-based performance management tools. In essence, these bring the same type of analytics and tools to human performance management that has been available to supply chain managers for years.

4. Use adaptive goal setting. A frequent charge levied by employees against their managers is a simple uncertainty about expectations. This lack of clarity hampers the performance not only of the employees but of the entire company. Research has shown a clear increase in shareholder value by companies that can successfully focus their people on the right strategy.

A number of innovative tools and approaches have arisen to address this need. The same performance management tools discussed above, for example, also are helping set and achieve goals by enabling managers to communicate objectives and expectations to their workers in real time via a personalized Web portal. As a result, team members can change direction more quickly to align actions and behavior.

5. Link workforce actions to strategy and results. People cannot execute a strategy if they do not know what it is. One way to broaden the horizons of workers is to get them more closely involved with corporate strategy. In some parts of the world, employee participation on the board has been not only effective but even mandated by law. A less formal approach, through focus groups or employee forums, may be more appropriate for other kinds of companies. Involving people in strategy development gives them a higher commitment to their tasks and a sense of being a part of the overall organization's performance.

Using "causal maps," a graphical communications method, can help companies spell out exactly what the relationship is between their business strategy and employee behavior. These sorts of approaches are helping management and employees work together toward common goals and for mutual benefit.

6. Focus resources and new techniques on building skills and competencies. Once a company has effectively communicated goals to its employees and vendors, and it has implemented tools and programs for measuring performance, it must resolve any shortcomings in the entire "talent network" of the company, which may include not only its employees but also workers from external consultants, vendors and other companies with which it does business.

The most successful companies make available a wide range of learning, training and knowledge management programs to their entire talent network. And because knowledge becomes obsolete more quickly than ever before, companies need to take an enterprise-level approach, continuously refresh their training and knowledge management content, capabilities and infrastructure so that people always have access to the most up-to-date information. Because of these needs, which are also felt among a more global workforce population, new e-learning methods are revolutionizing training and development by providing solutions that are both more effective and more efficient.

The war for talent may be easing but good people—meaning those who excel at what they do, whether it is crafting corporate strategy, reading a spreadsheet, maintaining an aircraft engine or interacting with customers—continue to be in demand. Following these six imperatives will help company leaders ensure that their recruiting and retention practices acknowledge and encourage people's desire to learn, develop and grow.

The Art of the Apology

The Art of the Apology

by Holly Weeks

Done right, an "I'm sorry" can enhance both reputations and relationships. Done wrong, it can compound the original mistake. Here's how to make sure your apology hits the mark.

Most of us were taught that offering an apology, any apology, when we make a mistake will take care of most offenses. But offering the right apology, particularly in the corporate world, is not as simple as saying, "I'm sorry."

Done right, an apology can enhance both reputations and relationships. Done wrong, an apology can compound the original mistake, sometimes to disastrous consequences.

Consider, for instance, a senior member of an executive team who became angry when a junior vice president opposed him in a meeting and refused to change her position. He lashed out at her in front of the group, sarcastically questioning her intelligence and her commitment to the company in difficult times. When other members of the team told him he should apologize, he balked, thereby making matters worse. "I'm sorry she's upset, but I didn't do anything wrong—she's got to learn to take the heat," he declared.

When the offender is embarrassed and worried about losing face, this kind of sidestepping can take place. But, in fact, offering an apology is not a sign of weakness, nor does it amount to backing down. On the contrary, offering an apology can be a potent reputation enhancer.

Apologies matter for two reasons. First, they mend relationships. When an offense has torn the fabric of a relationship, an apology is a stage in its repair. Second, apologies mend the transgressor's reputation. Following an offense, some people—not just the offended but all who know about the affront—may have concerns and doubts about the transgressor and even question his character. An effective apology can reassure people that the transgression is understood and not likely to be repeated.

Too often companies, as well as individuals, miss the opportunity to reap the good that an apology can provide. In early 2002, NSTAR, a New England public utility, admitted it had improperly moved nearly 24,000 of its electric customers to the "default" service category—a much more expensive service option—without those customers' knowledge. NSTAR apologized "for any inconvenience."

But were NSTAR customers, and the public, really concerned about inconvenience? Of course they weren't. When the story became news, customers and the public saw doublespeak and deceit, and NSTAR's credibility fell. The misdirected apology the company offered only sent the public's opinion lower.

Mending fences is not only the right thing to do on a personal level, it also makes good business sense. So why do so many people and institutions fail at it?

To start with, most people find being in the wrong to be embarrassing. And when they are embarrassed, they may go into denial and try to minimize the offense, as NSTAR did. In other cases, the offender may try to blame the victim, as the senior executive did with the junior vice president.

Even if an apology is offered, it may be unrecognizable as such because the embarrassment or anger of the person giving the apology distorts it. This can be a disastrous mistake; credibility, once lost, is very hard to gain back.

So how do you build a good apology? Apologies involve three elements: Acknowledgment of a fault or an offense, regret for it, and responsibility for the offense. You can put them all together, but a sincere, effective apology need not necessarily express all three; whether it should depends on the circumstances.

Because we don't separate out acknowledgment, regret, and responsibility, we are often at sea, finding it unnecessarily painful to apologize when it would actually be reasonably easy to do so. Instead of getting caught up in blame, we can acknowledge another's anger or dismay, or regret an offense, even when we don't feel responsible for a wrong.

Dos and don'ts
1. Find words that are clear and accurate—not provocative. A good apology should make the person wronged think, "Yes, she understands." Often what the offended person wants is accountability and vigilance; he wants to know that it won't happen again.

2. Don't apologize for the wrong thing. People and institutions tend to apologize for what they find forgivable, as in the NSTAR example. If there is no clear relationship between what the offender is apologizing for and what the offended experienced as the original wrong, the apology actually exacerbates the problem. At best, the offender will seem blind to the problem; at worst, he will be perceived as intentionally distorting it.

That gives the offended two problems: the original offense and the sense that a similar offense is likely to occur. The offended party thinks, "How can I accept this apology? It makes me appear to be complicit in allowing the problem to happen again."

3. Consider the angle of approach. Decide whether it will be easier for you to apologize position to position or person to person. If you are angry with the person you've got to apologize to, it may be easier to frame the apology in terms of your respective jobs or ranks.

For example, while the senior executive remains angry at the junior vice president, he can't offer a sincere personal apology. But he could apologize to her as a senior administrator to a more junior colleague, from his position to hers. Example: "We both work for a good company, and, as your colleague, I should try harder to see past our individual differences. I'm sorry I spoke harshly."

Such an apology is likely to resonate favorably with both parties, even when anger between them remains.

In other circumstances, a person-to-person apology is easier to offer. For someone who equates an apology with loss of stature, for instance, the person-to-person apology can appear to be a magnanimous act that does not diminish her. Example: "I can't agree with the stance you are taking, but I like you and want us to work well together. I'm sorry I spoke harshly."

Choose the approach that is easier for you to do well. That will save you from making an apology that is so grudging that it fails.

4. Don't think in terms of an "expression of regret." Instead, your goal should be actually communicating your regret, that is, getting it across to the other person. Expression is one sided—as though one were getting an apology off one's chest. Communication, however, occurs between people, and an apology needs to work well for the other person to be effective. Take the focus off yourself and keep it on your counterpart and the three elements of an apology—acknowledgment, regret, and responsibility. That protects you from sounding defensive, and your apology will be better received.

5. "I want to apologize" is not an apology. It's no more an apology than "I want to lose weight" is a loss of weight. Do the work. Deliver a clear, direct apology; don't hide behind vagueness, circumlocution, or clichés.

You may not be able to control whether your apology is accepted, but you can control its quality. So make every effort to control what you can. This will increase your chances of feeling good about what you have done with your apology—instead of feeling bad about having to do it.

Holly Weeks, based in Cambridge, Mass., is a consultant and writer specializing in communications issues.

Benchmarking Your Core Competencies?

Benchmarking Your Core Competencies?
By Bernard Marr

In the 1980s companies such as the Xerox Corporation, LL Bean, Texas Instruments, and AT&T were the first who pioneered benchmarking projects. Organizations started collecting data and measures regarding markets, sales, products, production costs, or processes of competitors. Companies then moved on to look for best practice examples outside of their industry; so that maybe FedEx would copy the delivery processes from Pizza Hut – or vice versa, all in the search for best practice.

With an advance in the strategy theory the emphasis has shifted from the ever increasing need to improve efficiency -- driven by the need to respond to market demands, to a richer understanding of an organization's core competencies and key value drivers. In today's transparent and truly global business context, best practice is easily observed and communicated. This means that any competitive advantage or superior performance gained from applying best practice is in fact transient, as it can be realized by all competitors in the same way.

This new view of strategy complements the external view of the firm -- one in which organizations (often viewed as a black box) respond to any changes in the demand, to a better awareness of what the firm is actually good at. This new view is supported by the resource-based theory and the competence-based view of the firm. Its proponents argue that firms can only gain a sustained competitive advantage from increasing those assets, resources, or competencies that are inimitable, not substitutable, tacit in nature, and synergistic. Companies such as 3M or Hewlett Packard have demonstrated the ability to focus on their core competencies to create a diverse range of products for different markets.

Taking this resource-based perspective many people now argues against benchmarking. The question often raised is: Why would firms want to benchmark their core competencies with competitors? Opponents of benchmarking might argue that firstly, it will expose companies to the risk of giving away their competitive advantage. And a second and more substantial claim is that firms can only gain sustained competitive advantage from increasing those resources or competencies that are indeed difficult to imitate, hard to substitute, and synergistic in nature. It therefore may be questionable as to the benefits accrued from benchmarking core competencies. This argument is made even stronger witch comments such as "if core competencies are no longer unique, then organizations lose their right to exist and merge into the crowd, where profits are minimal at the best".

Does this mean benchmarking as no place in today's business context? Not quite, the strategic benchmarking of core competencies has its place, but companies have to be aware of the pitfalls and maybe need to be a bit more careful when trying to benchmark core competencies. In order to execute any benchmarked processes and practices, organizations need to understand them on an operational level. However, the knowledge of existing and successful processes or practices is often embedded in complex realities and inherently difficult to transfer. Often even experts fail to fully understand why some practices do work in the first place and others don't. For this reason any attempt to benchmark core competencies or even best practice needs to be understood in its context. If this is done, practices must be replicated as exactly as possible in order to be successful.

For anything considered essential to deliver a competitive advantage it is the embeddedness and idiosyncrasy which delivers this advantage. It is therefore crucial to recognize this embeddedness, the interaction with other competencies, and the context, in order to understand the core competencies. It is this knowledge of context and embeddedness that makes it difficult to externalize why processes and practices are successful, and even more difficult to transfer from one context to another.

In various research projects carried out by the Centre for Business Performance we were able to prove these dynamic interactions between processes, practices, resources, and context. Unless we use tools and techniques to understand the dynamics of business performance, and understand the limitations this context puts on transferability of knowledge, it is difficult -- if not impossible -- to benchmark.