The launch is now done! Thank you to all that have shown encouragement and interest.

In Stockholm I participated in the CEB SHL Link event with over 150 HR Executives. My presentation was called: "Driving 1000 Sales People Towards Impressive Results" and it explains how we've assessed and developped our sales people at NSN.

The day was at the same time a rebranding of SHL to CEB SHL Talent Measurement Solutions, as a step in the integration of SHL and CEB (www.executiveboard.com). The story of a connection between SHL and CEB started with the Challenger Sale model. My own connection to it was that having read the story in HBR about "Sales is not about relationships" (Thank you Robert Fonteijn for forwarding it to me). I got in touch with Matthew Dixon. The story made sense to me and I could see that many of the buildingblocks of our Competence Development solution were adressing "Become more Challenger-minded". A month or so later Matthew Kiel and Patrick Swords of CEB wanted to meet when in Helsinki. We did so in my office and I suggested CEB, NSN and SHL would work together on developing the Challenger Sale profile mapping to SHL's OPQ profiles. Logic being that the 5 distict Seller profiles are distinguishable through OPQ. SHL had at that time over 80 million OPQ:s done, many of which are for sales people. CEB and SHL could jointly pitch corporations where part of the salesforce already has been profiled. NSN wants to develop and could serve as pilot for both companies to verify approach. The project didn't get off the ground even though I asked about it through both channels, but 6 months later CEB bought SHL.

Getting back to the LINK event:

There were presentations on boardroom view of talent management. It's about making sure you can deliver the expected 20% productivity increase.

A key message was to ensure the Networking Performance of individuals is crucial. As functions and teams are already effective, the next level of effectiveness comes from interaction across. Look into how you observe, measure and improve your talent on it.

Another key message was ensure HR understands the strategy and involved in what challenges need to be addressed. As HR professional you need to understand the strategy better than most to provide value on the LT. Your key value is likely to come from what people in your organizations will have to do differently to implement your strategy. Change through people.

A third key message was to use the data you have available to yourself, and the benchmarks that CEB SHL can provide you with, to answer key questions. HR has huge datasources and can potentially answer questions databased rather than guessing-based.

The presentations of the event are on the microsite created for the event behind registration at this link. http://www.shl.com/link-nordic/resources/. Should you want just my presentation, without registering, send me an e-mail and I will send it to you.

If you have questions or comments, please use any of the following options:

A) you can comment on our LinkedIn - posting

B) you can comment on our Facebook - posting

Or

C) you can send me an e-mail

We haven't yet enabled a commenting possibility on our internetsite, should we?

Carl-Magnus "Calce" Cedercreutz

carl-magnus@cedercreutzconsulting.fi