Episode Synopsis "#10 – Bret Larson – Developing Talent"

INTRODUCTIONER – Hello and welcome to the Audrey McGuckin Leadership Podcast. This podcast is dedicated to providing helpful insights, from some of the industry’s best and most respected leaders in the Human Capital space.ER – I’m your host Erica Richey the Chief Client Officer at Audrey McGuckin, Talent Solutions and today we’re joined by our CEO Audrey McGuckin along with Bret Larson the Director, Talent Management & Analytics at Emerson, a 125 year, Fortune 500, focused industrial company.INTERVIEWER – Bret before we get started here – why don’t you share with our listeners a little yourselfBL – I joined Emerson around 8 years ago and have worked in Dubai and expanded Middle East and Africa for Leadership Development and Talent. I’m now at HQ and cover the entire spectrum of Talent Management. My favorite country is where I’m at during the time. The trick is to do what the locals do.ER – Audrey tell us about how you and Bret know each other.AM – I’ve worked with David Weller who lives in same area as Bret and David works closely work with Bret. As part of the work I do with The Conference Board I had honor of curating their Succession Management Conference – we had the pleasure of meeting each other in NYC last year – Bret did an outstanding job of delivering on Succession Management workshop.BL – my biggest takeaway from that conference was learning from othersER – Lets dive into this, shall we? We have found the biggest problem that our clients have is bridging the gap between their stated strategy and getting the promised value of that strategy – we know that 9 out of 10 companies fail to execute their strategy and that the majority of the time it comes down to leadership and talent. We also know that when you develop leadership strategies to connect to the business strategies, we see large impact. This is something Emerson has excelled in. But for Emerson, like most companies, it was a journey to strategy alignment. I know our listeners would love to hear from both of you on developing this work within companies.ER – Bret, let’s start with you. What are specifically some of the challenges that Emerson have faced as they have been on their journey?BL – 2 main areas where we look at challenges. The first is the talent landscape and companies have to remain adaptive enough to address those and have vision for the future – it’s not unique to Emerson. Demographics is something we considering. We have to be ultra competitive. The pure bandwith of our company is a challenge and then of course speed. Because of the market shifts and geo politics. The other side is that sometimes we get in the way of ourselves. We have repositioned ourself in the market. These opportunities offer a chance to reposition ourselves.ER – Audrey, what are some other challenges you are seeing as you work with clients?AM – One thing that struck me around your insights – the business challenges and leadership challenges are inextricably linked and you have to go with that. The other thing we’re seeing is speed of change and agility of leaders. One of the things we believe is that there is a way to develop fast agile leaders.ER – Bret, how is Emerson tackling these challenges? What have been some of your approaches in the last year?BL – We stick to tried and true methodologies that have worked for us. The first thing for us is that we use our management process ourselves to generate our future leaders. We put our leaders into those experiences. We personally have the philosophy of putting people into key roles. The process itself we’ve been running for many decades. We trust our leadership process that will allow growth in our leaders. We also rely on ‘leaders teaching leaders. We find a leader looking another leader in the eye that’s a critical component you can’t lose out on.

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