Engaging HiPo’s: Creative ways to engage your top talent: with Cornelius Chang

The Frazer Jones team were honoured to facilitate an engaging and insightful panel discussion hosted by Bloomberg LP‘s Vandna Ramchandani around ‘Engaging HiPo’s: Creative ways to Engage your Top Talent”. The panel consisted of both HR and business leaders; Emily Draycott-Jones and Vandna Ramchandani (Bloomberg), Cornelius Chang (Grab), Sunita Kaur and Tess Mackean (Talent Trust). In attendance were 60 HR leaders from across industry who actively engaged in the lively discussion. As part of a weekly series, we will be sharing each of the presenters take on the topic. This week we will be sharing thoughts on talent from Cornelius Chang, Head of People and Organisational Development at Grab. 

As a disruptive tech organisation, Grab is right slap bang in the middle of the talent war and being so high profile has its rewards and well as its challenges when it comes to talent engagement as the expectations are so high and innovation is supposed to be the base line.  Cornelius is passionate about diagnosis of business issues and after 11 years at McKinsey & Company so has a wealth of insights to share. Cornelius addressed the question as to how companies can get more creative in the talent space? 1. Ideas for identifying talent 

• Most organisations are moving away from the traditional ‘9 box grid’ model; as it is too simplistic and static a model. 
• Instead, three ideas to share on identifying talents; 
  1. The first is to proactively hunt for talent using externally available and often more up-to-date data than internal HR systems
  2. The second is to ‘bait talent’ to have them identify themselves. For example in Grab, we have our Grabtitude awards where Grabbers identify and celebrate others who demonstrate our 4H leadership principles of Honour, Humility, Hunger and Heart
  3. Finally, make sure you look beyond extroverts; with big data and people analytics, HR now has the ability to look past traditional biases towards the most visible and charismatic employees for talents that might be otherwise hidden. 

2. Developing & retaining talent

• Instead of treating talent as a whole, see and treat them as individuals – giving them control and personalized options; for example using technology to allow talents to explore different roles and pathways towards those, and provide them clarity on the development required towards those aspirations. Also recognize that different talents might desire very different things; with some looking for recognition, others wanting bonuses, and yet others driven by a purposeful career 
• Push them out of their comfort zones; for example some companies second high potentials to another company, have them apply their skills in a new context, and come back with new ideas
• Develop a learning mindset, so that they stay humble and continue to learn and grow, instead of becoming complacent in their own current performance and capabilities

 We hope you enjoyed reading this snippet from the event, please follow-us to hear about future events we have planned throughout the year. Stay tuned for the next pulse-article from another of the panel shortly!