With Easter a distant memory and Anzac day looming it’s easy to forget the fact that this is our first newsletter for the year. And what a year it’s proving to be. Our focus continues to be with management teams across a range of industries as organisations work to align leadership capability with business performance. We are increasingly involved in assessing talent at all levels using a range of contemporary tools to help organisations identify the right people for the right roles.

Quarter one also saw our consultants heavily engaged with a global bank as the CEO and top leadership team began the process of building leadership capability as they face the challenges of business transformation in a competitive banking landscape. Our work with these leaders involves implementing talent management initiatives to identify and develop capability at the senior leadership level. This has been an ongoing project for the last 18 months.

Our executive assessment practice continues to add value to a high profile publicly listed organisation as we conclude a senior executive assessment project and begin the process of rolling this down to senior management levels. This long-term project involves assessing executive talent and establishing preliminary research into what characteristics define success at senior levels. Our target group also involves the assessment of graduates using the same diagnostics as senior executives. In this project we are comparing aspects of personality and cognitive-like abilities with executive performance over a two to three year time period. The preliminary results are indicating certain personality factors and cognitive-like abilities contribute to executive effectiveness at senior levels.

In the last three months we have also continued our work with Qantas as we deliver change management solutions to support the Catering and IT businesses. Our projects here involve working closely with executives and their direct reports as they align expectations and behaviours with major change initiatives.

For the first time in our five year history we now have programs pre-booked throughout 2008. We have also won major leadership program rollouts for National Australia Bank as well as regular requests for our signature programs like Intelligent Leadership™ from the pharmaceutical industry. Finally, our conference presentations continue to be in demand with two events delivered for the Australian Defence Force in February and a Public Sector Leadership conference scheduled for early July this year.

Please take some time to read a little more about what we have been doing in 2007. You may find the section on High Performance Organisations of particular interest at present as many of our clients are facing renewed pressure to deliver sustainable results through harnessing the potential of their people. This brief article describes the research supporting cultural transformation and the results that have been achieved by companies pursuing high performance agendas.

On an organisational note, the team at Talent Solutions has expanded since our last newsletter with three new people joining the company in as many months (see in focus for more details). In addition to more people joining, we have also taken on additional projects with some major leadership development work with the Australian Bureau of Statistics as well as expanding projects in the Oil and Gas sector with two Australian companies engaging Talent Solutions to assist in cultural transformation as they tackle the challenges of operating in a global environment.

Michael Collins
Managing Director