Berman Leadership

Corporate Talent Management Strategy Group - The CTM Group met in April to discuss talent metrics – what they are, how they should be used, what the business executives really want to see. What the group concluded – it's relatively easy to measure talent acquisition and employee engagement. The real challenge comes in measuring talent development and succession. No matter how well you measure the succession process, if the right person isn't available to fill the right role at the right time, succession won't be seen as successful.

Crisis Management – Professor Glenn Marchi at the University of Connecticut Business School taught a class this semester on Crisis Leadership. For the final class of the semester, Glenn set up a capstone class that put the 30+ students in the same room with local and national experts on crisis management, and ran a tabletop exercise to plan for the City of Stamford to manage multiple simultaneous natural and man-made disasters. Included in the Subject Matter Experts were representatives from the Mayor's office (Chris Munger), Stamford EMS (Bill Ackley), the Stamford Police and Fire Departments, the CT Army National Guard (Col Robert Knapp), The Bridge Foundation (Drew Hannah), corporate crisis managers from Diageo and UBS, representatives from FEMA, the FBI, Financial Dynamics, American Red Cross, and the University of Connecticut. This was a unique and incredibly powerful learning experience for both the students and the subject matter experts! New

Books – Daniel Pink's book, Drive, has created quite a stir in both talent leaders and in business leaders. It is the first time people have begun to think about how to motivate and inspire people without focusing on compensation. Several business execs have commented on this to me recently. You can get a quick down-load of his thesis - just click here.

Hot Blogs – Amy Gallo contributes regularly to one of the Harvard Business Review's blogs on Best Practices for Leaders. Her most recent post talks about an area most people think executives have in spades – confidence. She provides some interesting insights and suggests that true confidence may be in shorter supply than we think.