For more than 70 years, Liebherr has stood for a wide range of sophisticated products and services. Their technology and design are based on practical application requirements around the world. Constantly growing innovative power and uncompromising quality thinking ensure maximum customer benefit in all product areas.
Based on this attitude, the almost 50,000 employees play a key role in shaping technological progress in many industries and are already devoting themselves to the challenges that customers will face tomorrow. The management of the group of companies is still in the hands of the Liebherr family.
The Case
The ongoing digital transformation of all businesses accelerated by the pandemic has become an unavoidable factor that has forced many organizations to rethink their work processes, especially in the field of talent management. This was exactly the case with our partners at LIEBHERR. The challenges they had to overcome in this area were related to outdated internal practices for organizing, interpreting, and analyzing data about the company leaders' activities for developing their team members. Scattered paper-based leadership reflections, huge and complex Excel files, and slow data consolidation and analysis from an HR and organizational perspective were just some of the issues HR professionals and team leaders/department leaders have faced. LIEBHERR had an internal need for digital transformation of the talent management process and a high necessity for predictive analysis that can allow their leaders to manage employees efficiently, whether remotely, hybrid or on-site and develop and retain them successfully. They turned to LS-S Leadership Support to help their leaders build strong and effective teams focused on employee development. So, we’ve started a pilot project in LIEBHERR Monterrey with the idea to spread the good practices across all divisions of the company based on the positive results. On the other hand, LIEBHERR Monterrey was quite appropriate for this pilot because they had a huge challenge from an HR perspective, and the executive management was ready to provide full support. In addition, the factory had a smaller headcount suitable for a pilot, their IT department was independent, and all the leaders were tech-savvy enough to take advantage of the solution without extra efforts.
The Solution
The first and most important thing we had to do was to provide LIEBHERR’s HR department and management team with a data-driven analysis covering their leaders’ day-to-day obligations concerning employees, company's development actions, HR risk classification, positioning of each talent in a matrix according to their performance and potential, the activity of the company leaders, plus additional data for succession planning and risk forecast.
The easiest step in accomplishing this goal and providing them with a clear structure to analyze their talent portfolio quickly was our free Talent Portfolio App since all the team leaders/department leaders in the company had smartphones, and its interface was really simple and user-friendly. Testing the Talent Portfolio free version, leaders could create their team profiles, regularly reflect their employees by 12 pre-defined factors, and receive Classic Portfolio reports divided into 9 groups based on their performance and potential. In addition, the app also provided them with information on situational leadership, leadership ambition, collaboration, HR risks, successors, and possible development actions for each talent on their team.
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After 2 iterations with the free app, it appeared that the HR and management teams needed all the division leaders' data consolidated so that it could provide deeper analyses on the talent distribution in the 9-box grid, the situational leadership, and the retention risk forecast based on the data collected from the whole division. So LIEBHERR Monterrey decided to move to the full web-based version of Talent Portfolio, which provided them with more options.
Within the web-based version, team and department leaders could track the dynamics of the reflections of each talent over time in all the reports available on the individual radar (classic portfolio, leadership ambition, team collaboration, risk management, etc.). In addition, they could track all the development actions, applied in previous periods for all their talents and rate the effectiveness of every action, based on pre-defined success criteria ratings.
The full version of Talent Portfolio enabled LIEBHERR Monterrey's HR team to organize digital portfolio conferences that allowed them to easily invite team leaders/department leaders to evaluate employees and also monitor how many leaders were involved in the process, how the process was going, and how engaged leaders were in developing their talents. In addition, the HR and management teams were given access to summary reports and data from the classic portfolio and all other dynamic reports and charts compiled on a company level with the option to filter the insight by different criteria easily.
The Results
The implementation of the Talent Portfolio app followed by its web-based version helped LIEBHERR for rethinking and clarifying the division's organizational structure, especially in LIEBHERR Monterrey, which then improved the reporting and analysis capabilities based on positions, departments, organizational functions, responsibilities, etc. The flexibility of the Talent Portfolio allowed LIEBHERR to redefine the 9-box grid matrix based on their reporting needs, dividing it into 4 categories fitting their strategic guidelines for reflection of employees' performance and potential. Plus, every executive leader of the company could monitor the talent portfolio of their team and company, how active the managers are in developing their talents, and when they need a reminder, support, or mentoring. Management was informed about the most popular development actions among leaders and which ones bring the best results. Based on actual data, LIEBHERR’s management was able to create a clear vision of the individual employee’s potential in the different departments of the company and track their development over time.
