making qbe the best place to work for talent -- ideas on where to start

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Making QBE the Best Place to Work for Talent: Ideas on Where to Start Focusing for further education, exposure, experience and execution in the People Leadership Quadrant Audience: Anyone from the QBE Leadership Academy Alumni wishing to further their development within the People Leadership Quadrant Table of Contents 1) Introduction ________________________________________________________________ 2 2) Reflections on the companies where people want to work and the implications on us __ 3 a. We need to understand the forces that are changing the world we will lead dramatically ________ 4 b. How do we formulate our response to this radically different world? _________________________ 5 i) ACCELERATE OUR GLOBAL LEADERSHIP CAPABILITY AND PERFORMANCE AT QBE ________________ 6 ii) INSPIRE MINDS AND HEARTS TO BUILD PERFORMANCE AND COMMITMENT TO QBE _______________ 10 3) Next steps ________________________________________________________________ 14

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Page 1: Making QBE The Best Place to Work for Talent   -- Ideas on Where to Start

Making QBE the Best Place to Work for Talent:

Ideas on Where to Start Focusing for further education, exposure, experience and execution in the People Leadership Quadrant

Audience: Anyone from the QBE Leadership Academy Alumni wishing to further their development within the People Leadership Quadrant

Table of Contents

1) Introduction ________________________________________________________________ 2

2) Reflections on the companies where people want to work and the implications on us __ 3

a. We need to understand the forces that are changing the world we will lead dramatically ________ 4

b. How do we formulate our response to this radically different world? _________________________ 5

i) ACCELERATE OUR GLOBAL LEADERSHIP CAPABILITY AND PERFORMANCE AT QBE ________________ 6

ii) INSPIRE MINDS AND HEARTS TO BUILD PERFORMANCE AND COMMITMENT TO QBE _______________ 10

3) Next steps ________________________________________________________________ 14

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1) Introduction This paper acts as a thought piece on where QBE might focus on creating itself as one of the best places to

work for talent. It was written for two main purposes:

For the ELP to reflect on in their last meeting of 6-7 May to determine whether they have a role in

creating QBE as the best place to work for talent – and if so, what that role was

To determine the content of a Leadership Academy Alumni collaborative education piece on the

People Leadership that is further described in the paper known as “Leadership Academy Alumni –

How do I continue developing my leadership”.

As such, it is an introduction only on the types of content the Leadership Academy could further develop for

all alumni to focus on continuous development in the People Leadership quadrant of the leadership

Essentials Model. This is the quadrant we have selected first because it is where our Leadership Insights

data tell us that our leaders have the most to develop. In further papers we will write, we will also provide

thoughts on topics that the Leadership Academy could focus to answer the questions listed against the other

three quadrants.

The goal of this paper is to determine the 10 topics that Leadership Academy Alumni could explore

collaboratively in a series of education, exposure, experience and execution.

What else do we need to

learn as Leadership

Academy alumni in the

People Leadership

quadrant that would make

QBE the best place to work

for talent?

What else do we need to

learn as Leadership

Academy alumni in the

Personal Leadership

quadrant that would make

QBE a company that cares

about its people?

What else do we need to learn as

Leadership Academy alumni in

the Business Leadership

quadrant that would make QBE

the most innovative and global

insurance company?

What else do we need to learn as

Leadership Academy alumni in

the Results Leadership quadrant

that would make QBE the

company that customers choose

for its focus on delivery?

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2) Reflections on the companies where people want to work and the implications on us

Where do people really want to work?

The Great Place Work Institute , has published studies that show the 100

best places to work (sponsored by Fortune Magazine) outperformed the

S&P 500 by over two-fold from 1997-2013. These best places to work are

rated by the employees around trust:

o Trust with management because leaders exhibit credibility, fairness,

and respect

o Trust with other employments –“camaraderie”

o Trust that can make a difference through the job that they do

The employees’ trust rating counts

for 2/3/ of the overall rating. The

other third is based on responses to

the Culture Audit, which includes

detailed. questions about pay and

benefit programmes, a series of

open-ended questions about hiring

practices, methods of internal

communication, training, recognition

programmes and diversity efforts

Gallup research shows that globally only 13%of employees are highly

engaged at work – and more disturbingly, 24% are actively disengaged

(leaving 63% “not engaged”).

Our QBE pulse data indicates that:

39% of our people are inspired by our vision

45% of people believe that ONE QBE values and behaviours are demonstrated by their team

40% of our people believe senior leaders role model our ONE QBE values and behaviours

Deloitte Global Human Capital Research just published shows that only 8%

of large companies feel they have programmes to help employees adapt to

the new world. This survey included 2,532 business and HR leaders across

94 countries and all major industries

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Reminding ourselves of some of the trends that we covered over the year now that 2014 that has arrived at our

doorstep, let’s determine how we might respond as an ELP cohort with over 655 alumni of a Leadership

Academy. We are determined that the academy be much more than a static set of courses that soon lose their

memory, experience and relevance.

a. We need to understand the forces that are changing the world we will lead dramatically

2014 a Turning Point: A turning point when global recession ends and business

puts plans in place for a new wave of growth BUT meets a workforce that has

significantly shifted from the following changes:

Globalisation: In 2013, the developing countries contributed 50% of the world’s

GDP, which will grow to 55% by 2013. Leading companies source talent globally

– and constantly move their talent around for development, innovation and

inspiration

Mobiles, social, cloud: At the start of 2008, there were only 3 million Apple

iPhone mobile devices in the world. At the end of 2013, there were 1 billion

smartphones and more than 420 million iPhone mobile devices. Facebook had

a million users in 2004 and now has 1.23 billion users. This has transformed the

world of recruiting, education, analytics and the way we work. We are online

24/7, relentlessly flooded with information, messages and communications.

Companies must learn to absorb technology change while simultaneously

making it simple.

Mind overwhelm Beware, however, of the “overwhelm” of people now though in

this new world!! Research is showing us some worrisome trends – people

looking at phones 150 times a day; people spending 41% of their time doing

tasks that offer little value to the company and could be done much more

competently by others. We cling to email answering because it makes us feel

we have achieved because we feel busy and thus important while we are

missing the real thinking that we as innovation creators really need to do

Diversity, inclusion: Millennials ARE different in the way they prefer to work

and their ambitions, and they will make up 75% of the global workforce by 2025.

They want to feel like they are running their own businesses, and they want

accelerated career growth. They don’t trust current leaders to deliver what they

want (only 20% of them trust leaders to make ethical decisions; 61% believe that

management is the biggest barrier to innovation) Baby boomers want to stay,

too – and are extending their careers. We will have the most multi-generational

workforce in history and the most multicultural.

Shift in our view of pure capitalism: The rise of “conscious capitalism” is

making new demands on businesses, with social and community concerns rising

to new levels of priorities. Regulation is increasing. The concepts of mission

and purpose that have real meaning to employees is becoming important as the

world grapples with an increasingly worrisome trends in statistics: in the US

100% of the wealth of the world went to 20% of the households; 50% of it went

to 4%. See interesting readings in Conscious Capitalism and Firms of

Endearment See Arianna Huffington Third Metric – beyond just money and

power.

Technology changing how we work and skills we need: Collaborative

technologies, when used well, open the world up for companies to connect,

innovate, easily accessing expertise within and outside the world. New skills in

analytics, machine-assisted manufacturing, and the services industries are

booming

I don’t want a

career; I want an

experience

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b. How do we formulate our response to this radically different world?

In the pages that follow, we have started a list of areas we might start to investigate as a collective ELP

leading a collective Leadership Academy alumni through education, dialogue and practice– if there were

interest.

Take this list as a start. We have provided a description of each area that we think is worth

investigating. In summary, the list of areas is ten:

ACCELERATE OUR GLOBAL LEADERSHIP CAPABILITY AND PERFORMANCE AT QBE

1. Broaden, deepen and accelerate leadership development at all levels

2. Radically rethink what we are teaching in leadership and culture

3. Build workforce capabilities that are global and can deal with a VUCA world

4. Re-energise corporate learning by putting our employees in charge of their own

growth

5. Redesign performance management’s archaic practices

INSPIRE MINDS AND HEARTS TO BUILD PERFORMANCE AND COMMITMENT TO QBE

6. Develop innovative ways to attract, source, and recruit talent

7. Inspire passion and purpose in each person

8. Move from diversity to inclusion

9. Help the overwhelmed employee deal with the flood of information and

distraction in the workplace

10. Involve everyone in formulating strategy and driving innovation—not just the

Top 50 or the Top 200

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i) ACCELERATE OUR GLOBAL LEADERSHIP CAPABILITY AND PERFORMANCE AT QBE

1. Broaden, deepen and accelerate leadership development

at all levels across the organisation as a daily mission– especially at the first-

level and mid-level transitions. While the Leadership Academy has started this

– we know that the shelf-life of courses without practice is very short. We must

find ways to develop leaders consciously on the job continuously that is

reinforced by modern feedback mechanisms – crowd-sourcing sources of talent,

paths of learning, paths of careers, thus truly identifying our leading stars, who

might be found at all levels.

For the next evolution of the Leadership Academy, we are looking at ways for

people to build their awareness of the leadership gaps they are closing

throughout the day – providing crowd-sourcing ways (like Amazon does) for

people to collect feedback, find mentors, find courses that would suit their

ambitions and find career trajectories that would suit their desires. This will be

based around our Leadership Portal – a combination of collaboration; courses,

experts and mentors identified based on your profile of skill and ambition;

succession ideas that are not only thought by the “black box” of succession

planners but now actually crowd-sourced by people who can see potential in

others that the central succession planners cannot see

2. Radically rethink what we are teaching in leadership and strategy

Skim the article in Forbes on “The Management Revolution” and the following

month’s “How to Lead a Flat Army.” The opening paragraph for this article

shows that we have a lot of rethinking --- that needs to be done together:

What on earth is happening to management? Formerly self-evident truths are being cast aside. The sacred goal of maximizing shareholder value is now “the dumbest idea in the world”. The search for the holy grail of “sustainable competitive advantage” is now recognized as futile. The “essence of strategy” seen as “coping with competitors” is obsolete. The uni-directional value chain—the very core of 20th Century management thinking—is now a problem, not a solution. The short-term gains of large-scale off-shoring of manufacturing are recognized to have caused massive loss of competitive capacity. Supposed distinctions between leaders and managers have collapsed. To top it off, a slew of recent management books suggest that today’s organizations represent a failure so deep and pervasive that there are hardly words to describe it. A veritable revolution in management is under way.

Gary Hamel reminds us that: “Tomorrow’s business imperatives lie outside the performance envelope of today’s bureaucracy-infused management practices… Equipping organizations to tackle the future would require a management revolution no less momentous than the one that spawned modern industry.

At QBE, we need to create dialogue now that takes us far beyond the hierarchical thinking that only the top 200 can think about strategy – and at the Leadership Academy, we have the collaborative tools now to have this “dialogue” – “creating meaning through word.” We can write, we can video, we can create jams – which are virtual conferences held for a few days across the

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world. Let’s be creative around this. As our Forbes author writes:

I like the author of “Flat Army”, Dan Ponefract’s thoughts: a “flat army” might perhaps be regarded as an oxymoron: armies have historically been—and mostly still are—quintessential models of steep hierarchies that frustrate everyone by their mindless application of rules regardless of context, and by their overriding respect for authority over competence.

Dan told me that he is using “army” in the sense of “a group of people who share similar aims or beliefs”. The word “army” derives from the medieval Latin term of “armata” which loosely means a flotilla of vessels moving together. A “flat army” is thus an organization (or a team) that works together to achieve a business result – a corporate commonality. It is part situational hierarchy, part heterarchy and part common purpose.

How do we as leaders of QBE create an organisation that is part situational hierarchy, part heterarchy, and part common purpose – and what should our purpose truly be?

How can we be more creative around strategic thinking in ways we have never been taught to do? This might be the focus of a Leadership Academy that not only focuses on people and personal leadership, but also on business and results leadership.

3. Build workforce capabilities that are global and can deal with a VUCA

world

If we are going to continue to expand globally and think globally, we need people

who have the world as their context, can see things without being overwhelmed

by VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity), and can move from one

country to the next easily – through the global mobility they can easily find through

our integrated and transparent global opportunities.

Through its global programmes of Executive Leader Programme and Senior

Leader Programme, the Leadership Academy is assisting people to really get to

know each other, understanding the way each other thinks – and allowing people

to create connections that make innovation and collaboration easy. We can’t

afford to fly everyone around the world, but through the video technology that is

built into the Leadership Academy portal, we can build virtual connections of

people interested in various aspects of strategy and leadership development who

can meet virtually and see each other in a much greater presence than any audio-

webinar could ever hope to achieve. We would like this to be our next efforts,

which would be seen simply as an extension of learning in the classroom.

4. Re-energise corporate learning by putting our employees in charge of their

growth –

We need to find ways of ensuring that our people find multiple, transparent and

easy-to-find ways to develop their talent and their career globally. Global motility

is essential. The great places to work allow people to move from job to job

without fear of failure. At the moment, only 3% of the companies that Bersin by

Deloitte studies deliver strong mobility programmes, yet this is one of the

strongest drivers of engagement and continuous learning. Companies like

Facebook, Dropbook, Twitter and LinkedIn offer their companies continuous

learning and career growth – every year asking their employees what they want

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to do next in order to expand – and the great companies are getting their

employees to design their own job descriptions – which change constantly to suit

the strategy of the business. These organisations meet Daniel Pink’s call for

autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Our QBE people will require open access to seeing opportunities around the

world (which may not always be described by a detailed job description) and an

understanding of what capabilities are require and how to develop these

capabilities -- if not today, then tomorrow. Our people need to have access to

assessment tools that help them rate their own capabilities against opportunities

that interest them – and then provide them with the results that link them to the

development that would be easy to access in any shape/any time of the day/from

any platform ......and that is recognisable and reward-worthy of their efforts. Our

hiring processes must be transparent – so we provide our people with interview

guides and give them the feedback they need when they both win the job and not

win the job. There is always another way to improve and get better – and it’s

worthwhile for the time.

Over the next year, QBE’s Centre for Excellence, Talent & Leadership will start

building career portals that employees can use to do just that assessment and

development. Our Leadership Portal will have open courses and references to

Mass Open Online Courses that leaders can take to plug the gaps they want to

plug. We are also working with other parts of the business to begin developing

expertise for our specialists – for example an “Underwriting Academy” under the

sponsorship of the GUDF.

5. Redesign performance management’s archaic practices.

Our employee performance does not follow a bell curve and we shouldn’t grade

by the curve. Performance systems of today create agonising problems with

employee performance and happiness. The bell curve creates a system of “rank

and yank,” forcing managers to reward a small percentage at the top and keep a

large percentage in the middle. What happens with the old 5-point rating is that

we ration the number of high performance ratings, we create losers at the

bottom, and we keep the bulk of our population known to themselves and the

organisation as “average.”

Research by Boyle and Aguinis on researchers, entertainers, politicians and

athletes found that performance in 94% of these groups did not follow a normal

distribution. They fell into what is called a “Paretian” or “Power” distribution

where there are a small number of people who are “hyper high performers,” a

broad swath of people who are “good performers” and a smaller number of

people who are “low performers.” This curve has very different characteristics

from the average. In this curve only 10-15% of the population are above average

and most are below average – the concept of average becomes meaningless. In

fact, hyper-performers in the innovation era can be multiples of more productivity

than their peers – 10x in software engineers, for example.

Look for hyper-performers who start companies, develop new products, create

amazing advertising copy, write award winning books and articles. For the rest

of your people, however, don’t call them “average” – find ways of collaboration,

professional development, coaching, and empowering to get the performers

towards the right of the Power curve.

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We need different models – Bersin’s research cites all the evidence that is

proving what we already know about bell-curve grading, with the biggest finding

that company performance actually dips after performance management

processes:

1. No one wants to be rated on a five point scale. Reducing a single year work

to a single number is degrading, creating a defensive reaction and definitely not

encouraging people to improve. Performance evaluation should be continuous,

focusing on what to build on in strengths

2. Ultra-high performers are actually incentivised to leave and collaboration may

be limited. With a bell curve, most of the incentive money goes to the middle. If

you get “4” or a “3” you’ll probably feel under-appreciated even though you may

be paid well relative to performance. Most don’t believe that getting a “5” is even

possible so they don’t try and they don’t trust each other to collaborate given that

they are competing against each other to get a limited place in the “5”’s

3. “3” performers are not highly motivated to improve – you may be a frustrated

high performer who wants to improve but you could also be happy to stay as you

are, never striving to go past mediocrity. Without informed and tailored feedback

that challenges each person to move from where they are, a “3” just keeps

people safe, and in many cases “safe and angry.”

4. Compensation is inefficiently distributed – a bell curve does not reflect

accurately how people contribute because performance is not a bell curve. We

actually need higher variability in pay – basing it on value add, market wages and

scarcity of skills and not tenure and history

5. Incentives to develop and grow are reduced: Under a bell curve system,

people hang out in the 80% segment and don’t strive to be a high performer.

Companies with a 1-5 bell curve process are also companies who don’t have

anywhere to go for a person striving for high performance.

We need to get as analytical and psychologically insightful about performance as we

do on our customer’s analytics. Whilst the Leadership Academy does not have any

intentions to reformulate performance and reward, we would be happy to provide

education and forums for our leaders to reflect on the type of performance they want

to build for the future – looking at what other companies do and how other

companies think .

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ii) INSPIRE MINDS AND HEARTS TO BUILD PERFORMANCE AND COMMITMENT TO QBE

6. Develop innovative ways to attract, source, and recruit talent

“Talent acquisition” and “recruitment” are not the same. Talent acquisition is

much more sophisticated these days – and it starts with business strategy –

sometimes following it, and more and more driving that strategy – see Booz &

Co, now PwC-owned Strategy &’s work on Capability-Driven Strategy. Talent

acquisition also incorporates employment branding, candidate relationship

management, selecting, hiring, onboarding, metrics and analysis.

What is QBE’s Employee Value Proposition to the external talent world? Why

would people want to work for us? If we can’t answer this as an Executive

Leader of QBE with a few powerful stories, then we need to work more together

to do this. Our EVP should be a clear set of propositions that differentiate QBE

in the market of attracting talent – showing provocatively what employees can

expect from QBE . . .and what QBE expects from employees --- the “give” and

the “get.” Brand alignment between customer and employee is essential in this

equation.

What do you think our internal and external brand alignment is? How would you

describe it by way of story?

And how do we attract people through the hundreds of channels that exist now

for people finding employment? Our talent systems must have direct links that

are automatically updating our presence on portals like LinkedIn, Broadbean,

Monster, TalentBin and Hire Right. It must be easy for prospective talent to find

out about us, our careers, our opportunities, and our culture. In reverse, it must

be easy for us to find about them as well. We need a portal where they can

keep us updated on their own careers, how they are developing, a portal where

they can take our online assessments to find out about their skills, their

technical match with our needs, their behavioural match with our culture, and

how they would fill any gaps if they had them. We need to be able to talk to

prospective employees by video, and we should never, never lose track of

prospective employees even if they don’t fit right away. It’s kind of like losing

track of a customer. Never ever.

And did we mention globally integrated talent acquisition?

7. Inspire passion and purpose in each person

How do we move beyond the target of “retention,” which sounds like a bit like

a jail term? How can we create meaningful work and leadership that we can

trust?

If only 45% of our people believe that ONE QBE values and behaviours are

demonstrated everyday in their team, why do we think that is? Are our

values meaningful – can our people remember them and relate to them?

Companies that are great places to work have values that are live, constantly

reflected on, and gathering constant stories momentum around them. We

were particularly inspired by the company Zappos and the way it displays its

values and talks about them with real live language, employees and

examples. They actually have the audacity to focus on happiness.

Apparently, they start all meetings at Zappos with a story about how a value

was demonstrated, and these values are provocative:

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1.Deliver WOW Through Service

2.Embrace and Drive Change

3.Create Fun and A Little Weirdness

4.Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded

5.Pursue Growth and Learning

6.Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication

7.Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit

8.Do More With Less

9.Be Passionate and Determined

10.Be Humble

Are we as leaders of QBE attracting the trust from our people today and are

we demonstrating our values clearly? Gone are the days of the hard-

nosed, profit-obsessed leader. People expect leaders to work hard, but they

also expect leaders to provide a mission that matters – and to demonstrate

the values of trust, consciousness and soul. They want leaders who balance

their work by also taking care of our health, our families, and our health.

This means focusing on self-awareness, exercise, sleep and mindfulness.

It is well worth us as senior leaders of the organisation to start the dialogue

around passion, purpose, and a better way to manage ourselves. Building

our commitment to the community has been a fantastic initiative as a start,

but we cannot forget that we have a community within QBE we must nurture.

8. Move from diversity to inclusion

QBE’s first global Diversity Council presented some powerful insights and

statistics in March. We present these here –both the statistics that the Council

could gather without a global Human Capital system as well as the findings they

agreed upon

Gender: o While QBE’s gender composition is females at 56% overall, our

gender gap begins at level 4 and widens significantly from Level 3 and beyond (to a 90% men and 10% women at Level 0). This under-representation of women from Level 4 and beyond then also directly affects the diverse composition of ‘feeder’ talent pool. In our expertise with other organisations, this gender gap starts much earlier in our organisation than that of other organisations

o With new hires – again, we hire more women in at the junior levels

and then it flips to hiring males from Level 3 and beyond.

o Promotions by gender indicate that men are proportionally promoted consistently higher at all levels

Age: o Age profile indicates that the highest proportion of our workforce is

aged 25-34yrs for both male and female, they are also the group that dominates the roles at Level 6 and 5. Interestingly they too are the cohort that makes up the largest group of voluntary leavers in QBE -

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stated reasons for leaving is primarily lack of career opportunities – challenge and promotion.

Barriers to an inclusive culture at QBE (with variations across Divisions/Regions) were identified to the Council as follows:

Attitudes – bias in the way decisions are made No consequence management – i.e. when wrong behaviour is displayed

lack of willingness to change Lack of information/opportunity to educate oneself Culture does not encourage open expression Lack of proactive executive sponsorship Need for transparent and fair recruitment and promotion practices Work/Life integration – poor support of the utilisation of flexibility Need for clearer employment policies and processes Greater awareness – more communication and marketing of what we are

doing, why and success stories across ONEQBE

This means that if QBE is to realise the business benefit generated from a diverse and inclusive workplace and facilitate ONEQBE and drive higher engagement and productivity, then we need to focus on the following priorities:

Strong pipeline of diverse talent – offering all employees the opportunity to develop and progress their careers - removing any diversity related headwinds to attract, retain and optimise the best talent

Diverse leadership and 'inclusive' capabilities - foster inclusive, gender balanced leadership teams. Develop cultural dexterity and people agility to effectively manage differences and different ways of working

Teamwork and collaboration - Harness diversity of thought for greater innovation through collaboration - facilitate networking, knowledge sharing and structuring of diverse cross divisional teams

Customer connectivity - Develop cultural dexterity and people agility to sell effectively across diverse customer groups. Understand and meet diverse customer and consumer product needs and preferences

Higher engagement of all talent - create a fair, inclusive and respectful place for all employees irrespective of their gender, age etc Ensure high commitment, loyalty and performance by valuing diverse backgrounds and perspectives

9. Help the overwhelmed employee deal with the flood of information and

distraction in the workplace

We need help! Starting with you and the Senior Leader Programme alumni,

we are building an awareness of daily habits we can build with our bodies,

minds and emotions to build minds that can think much more innovatively

and leadership that can establish trust, kindness and presence.

We would like the Leadership Academy to be of assistance to you as you

find your own quiet minds – and will help you access to the ancient wisdom

we have managed to forget in our rush to get ahead --- witness the rise in

mindfulness and the practical leadership techniques of “doing more in far

less time”

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I think there is far more development that needs to be offered in both the

people and personal segments of our leadership capability – but this is

development that has to be practised daily – one behaviour at a time. We

would like to work with our leaders in a daily way in which we encourage

stillness at least 5 minutes a day, reflection at least an hour a week, and

community reflection at least once every two weeks. We wish to encourage

the humility it will take for us all to become lifelong learners – where minds

are more and more open to a world that no longer will resemble the world we

thought we understood as experts. The beginner’s mind is the mind in which

we will thrive – and it is not a mind harassed by lack of sleep and constant

bombardment of technology.

10. Involve everyone in formulating strategy and driving innovation—not just

the Top 50 or the Top 200

We have the technology now to connect across many more people than the

lucky few who get to fly into a world capital city together. As we formulate

customer value propositions, look at ways we can improve our core

businesses, increase our operational excellence, drive growth in our

emerging markets, build more financial stability and develop our leadership

and talent – we can access so much more if we can create ongoing dialogue

amongst our people to garner their ideas. In turn, they feel like they are

contributing, that they are part of something much larger than themselves,

and that their opinions are heard. Strategising through the Wisdom of the

QBE Crowd is going to get us moving faster and smarter – and much more

passionately. Check out how the world is moving towards the wisdom of the

crowds with this article.

More and more companies are using their internet collaboration tools to

harness strategy and innovation. In our efforts to further the business and

results leadership quadrants of our Leadership Essentials model, the

Leadership Academy would propose that we use our integrated Leadership

Academy portal to drive these types of dialogues – through company-wide

jam sessions on strategy, on innovation and on culture, through ongoing

cross-border dialogue on our discussion boards, through education available

24-7 on any of our topics, through our leaders getting on video that is always

available sharing their ideas and thoughts about directions.

We challenge the ELP to drive this strategic dialogue. through a global

QBE-wide leadership dialogue jam that could be started by you as ELP

members. The term “jam” was coined by IBM in 2001 and is defined as a

mass, global on-line collaborative experience that could last for days – and

could be focused on anything – product ideas, customer value ideas, or

culture improvements. We could establish the lead up to such a jam

(perhaps in 2015) by providing a series of online dialogue, exploration and

education sessions for you to lead the rest of the Leadership Academy

alumni.

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Making QBE The Best Place to Work for Talent -- Ideas on Where to Start

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3) Next steps Log on to the Leadership Academy Portal if you are registered and make yourself a member of “QBE:

The Best Place to Work for Talent” group and write your opinions of this or write to

[email protected] if you are not registered yet on the Portal. Let us know what you think

about:

The ten topics we have selected that require further exploration

Your ideas on how we could work with a group of Leadership Academy Alumni who want to

explore these ideas further

Your own ideas on what requires exploration from what you have seen

Your interest in becoming part of an exploration group over the next 12 months