Video Quick Take: Verizon’s Christina Schelling on Evolving Your Company’s Talent Strategy for Increased Agility and Performance – SPONSOR CONTENT FROM VERIZON
2025-05-01T15:30:00Z
Sponsor content from Verizon.
Todd Pruzan, HBR Welcome to the HBR Video Quick Take. I’m Todd Pruzan, senior editor for research and special projects at Harvard Business Review. Today we’re with Christina Schelling, who is chief talent officer at Verizon, to get her valuable insights into how companies can evolve their talent strategies to increase agility and enhance performance. She’ll talk about the critical connection between strategic talent management and long-term business success to show how thoughtful approaches to workforce planning can drive growth for both employees and companies. Christina, thank you so much for being with us. Christina Schelling, Verizon Thank you. It’s great to be here. Todd Pruzan, HBR Christina, how did you decide where to start with your journey to modernize Verizon’s talent strategy? Christina Schelling, Verizon Our talent practices were really solid to begin with. Our people, or we call ourselves V Teamers, have always been core to our business and our culture, so it’s always been a focus for us. The opportunities were really around modernization, leveraging new technology, AI, infusing data to really keep pace with a rapidly changing world. We also needed to be a bit more proactive and predictive and apply an external lens to the way we guide our overall talent strategy. At the same time, we had a large number of leadership shifts and also knew that capabilities very critical to our performance and growth were a real top priority for employee development. With all of those factors, we decided to really take a combined top-down-and-bottom-up approach, focusing on leadership and succession from the top of the house and then internal mobility and skill development for the broader employee population. Todd Pruzan, HBR On the note of succession planning, what were some of your biggest changes? Christina Schelling, Verizon We had a pretty traditional succession practice to begin with, so by no means were we starting from the beginning. Like many companies, however, our succession process was very internally focused, and we wanted to change that. Now, with the help of AI, we begin our annual succession process from the outside in. We study our competition and best-in-class benchmark companies to really understand the leadership strengths, qualifications, skills, and attributes of their leaders. We can then compare our internal succession slates against their external peers, and it helps us steer our workforce plans much more strategically. Our mindset now is that every career move, every scope expansion, and [every] development investment for our existing leaders should really support creating the most competitive leadership bench. And we also learned that, in some cases, we needed to hire externally for additive capabilities. Because of the data in our analysis, we knew we could do this almost surgically and keep a constant thought about not just what solves for the current but also what we need for the future. In fact, last year almost 100% of our external executive hires are on succession slates now. We also really wanted to increase capability and add some cross-industry experience and in-demand expertise to our succession pool. Skills like data science, customer experience, content, and creative marketing were really important for us to add to our already pretty solid foundation. Finally, we wanted to make sure that we had some additional rigor around our retention efforts and [understand] the importance of retaining our highly qualified leaders and protecting the depth of our succession pool that we invest so much in. Again, with the help of AI, we created a poachability study that measures internal and external factors that increase the risk of attrition. It assigns a poachability score to our leaders and helps us assess market demand and how attractive a leader is, combined with the likelihood that he or she will leave. The score also helps us confirm we have the right financial and other retention incentives in place to make sure that we keep our critical successors. Todd Pruzan, HBR That sounds like a great system. Christina, what is your advice to leaders who are just starting to build out their skills infrastructure? What should they consider to set the right foundation for their future? Christina Schelling, Verizon Be clear about what you’re solving for. In our case, it was to make sure we have the right people in the right roles for today and also tomorrow. To do so, we aligned our skills strategy with our business goals and growth strategy. We wanted a better understanding of our collective skill strength and gaps for workforce planning. Additionally, we really wanted to break down some organizational silos and enable our employees to move more easily across the organization and navigate their individual careers in a much more personalized and real-time way. I would say [that] if you’re just starting your skills journey, my advice is to focus on the foundation. Sometimes the not-so-fun but extremely necessary [work is] the most important to set you up on the right journey. Make sure you have a clean job taxonomy. We created 10 unique job family groups and decreased the number of our unique jobs by 80%. You need this clean data in order to have the broadest opportunities and outcomes. I would also say invest in data all along. We invested in matching our skills to jobs and then skills to people, and with that, the opportunities were much greater as far as where we could go from here. Finally, I would say a skills strategy is iterative. Push for progress over perfection and directional data over precise proficiency. If we waited until we had everything exact, we would still be at the starting line. Todd Pruzan, HBR That sounds like great advice. Christina, what else should we know about the future of talent management? Christina Schelling, Verizon Talent management is not static, and you’re never done. We must continue to evolve, and to do this, we really need to embrace new technology and lead with data and talent intelligence. So much of what we were able to do at Verizon in modernizing and enhancing was possible because of AI. As business leaders and HR practitioners, I think it’s really important to remember that it is our job to help reinvent and reimagine the business and build a culture where the most enviable talent choose every day to stay. Todd Pruzan, HBR That is great. Christina, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today about talent development and retention. Christina Schelling, Verizon Thank you. Appreciate it. To learn more about Verizon for your business, visit https://www.verizon.com/business/. You can also read more from Verizon about how to Future-Proof Your Business with Smarter Talent Strategies here. Christina Schelling is SVP–Chief Talent Officer at Verizon.
Auto-posted from news source
About The Author
