Finding and nurturing the truly talented among us

Hellmann Worldwide Logistics has 8,500 employees and 8,000 agents in 160 countries around the world.

Recently, having identified just 19 of those men and women as having the greatest potential, the $6 billion German company brought them to Miami, the second of five cities the group will visit for stays of between 10 days to two weeks. They came from every continent and a wide variety of jobs.

Among their assignments: Take Hellmann’s five biggest challenges, split into sub-groups and find solutions, a seemingly fitting task for the wunderkinds.

Ken Finneran, chief people officer for the company’s Latin America operations, spoke about the new program and other talent identification and retention ideas at WorldCity’s HR Connection’s event this week. Hellmann worked with a German university to design a program specifically to fit its needs, as the largest private, family-held logistics company in the world. Its U.S. and Latin America headquarters is in Doral.

HR Connections, sponsored by the University of Miami School of Business Executive Education Center, is an event series held every other month specifically for human resource directors at South Florida’s 1,100-plus multinationals. Past topics have included surveying the level of “engagement” within the organization and “work at home” programs. Speakers have represented Diageo, Royal Caribbean, Western Union and Olympus.

The meetings are open discussions, but generally with a theme. The theme this week was focused on nurturing and retaining leadership, with the springboard being the program Hellmann is now instituting, having identified the talent.

SAP, Nokia, Olympus, Siemens and Club Med human resources directors for Latin America were among those who attended and indicated they had similar programs for those identified as having the most potential and highest performance. But there were wrinkles among the programs — differences in approach, number of candidates selected and the selection process itself.

One of the first steps is picking the candidates.

“Who in the organization is willing and able to take foreign assignments? As of the middle of last year,” Finneran said, “we didn’t know them. We lost good talent (because of that).

“Most of your managers know who the talent it,” Finneran said. “It’s more a selection process than a discovery process.”

But winnowing down the list from those nominated is not automatic. Hellmann had about three dozen names initially, before dropping down to 19.

SAP’s Marcelo Carvalho said “our margin of error should be small.”

At SAP, “our margin of error should be small” in picking the right people, said Marcelo Carvalho, human resources business partner for Latin America, because the company has a application sheet that is “four pages long.”

But what happens, Carvalho wanted to know, when a manager changes, and a person previously identified as having great potential is no longer identified that way?

“If you change positions, your performance might be affected but your potential shouldn’t be.

Karinna Rojas, director of Corporate Human Resources for the United States and Latin America for Siemens, had an answer. “In our case . . . we want to know what happened to the person. If only the manager changed, then the manager is the problem.” Siemens has about 465,000 employees worldwide. Rojas lives in South Florida but commutes to the ofice in Iselin, N.J.

Nokia’s Sonia Bento said employees work for company, not region.

Nokia’s Sonia Bento, Human Resources and Development Manager for Latin America, also had an answer. “The employees belong to the company, not to the region.”

SAP has about 10 percent of its employees in a talent-related program, with about 8 percent identified as high potential and 2 percent the top talent. Nokia, a Finnish company with about 50,000 employees, has about 5 percent of its employees in such a program, said Adriana Andretta, a human resources manager.

Club Med has about 5 percent of its employees in talent management program, said Howard McCarly, Corporate Human Resources director. Unlike some of the other programs, Club Med put those in the program together by functional responsibility.

Olympus, which has a future leaders program for employees deemed to be ready in one to two years and a emerging leaders program for those viewed as needing three to five years, stumbled upon a different situation, according to Diane Vento, who oversees human resources for Latin America.

The employee who was happy right where he was.

“We found out they loved their jobs and they didn’t want to be developed,” she said. But then they discovered something else about these employees. They loved being mentors to younger, less experienced employees.