Strategic Human Capital Insights

Joanne Flynn

Joanne T. Flynn heads up the human capital advisory group, Phoenix Strategic Performance, Inc. Previously, she was a Managing Director with Phoenix Group International and was Vice President / Director of Global Learning and Development at Goldman, Sachs for nine years. Joanne works with organizations as they face global growth and competitive challenges. She works with her clients to be both externally focused and internally responsive. With her unique background, she aligns competitive strategic efforts with related internal organizational leadership challenges. With the benefit of her career-long focus, Joanne contributes the unique insight of aligning strategy to internal organizational structure and process. She focuses on human capital relative to strategic initiatives, accelerated business growth, value creation, and business development. Joanne holds a Master of Arts degree in Business Management from the University of Oklahoma. In addition, she holds a double degree major in History and German from St. Elizabeth University, as well as certificates from a variety of leading universities and professional training and development organizations. Joanne has recently published her latest book, Accelerating Business Success, The Human Asset Management Strategy.
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Recent Posts

Book Launch: Brand YOU, Brand NEW, a Step-by-Step Guide to Take Your Career to the Next Level

Posted by Joanne Flynn

We are thrilled to announce the launch of Joanne Flynn's co-authored career development book, Brand YOU, Brand NEW, a Step-by-Step Guide to Take Your Career to the Next Level.📚
 

Joanne Toth Flynn and Elyse Flynn Meyer, a mother-daughter team, co-authored, Brand YOU, Brand NEW  from a multigenerational perspective. Through their collaborative approach, they provide a range of universal perspectives to help you optimize your personal Brand YOU. This book takes you through the critical steps needed to proactively manage your brand and your personal development. The goal is to put you in the ultimate career control seat.

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Topics: Women in Business, Human Capital, Soft Skills, Human Asset Management

Is Your Quality Assurance up to the Change Challenge?

Posted by Joanne Flynn


Are you ready to take an organizational Quality Assurance diagnostic?


As organizations move through continual change, the need to stay up-to-date and relevant is now a strategic imperative.  Nowhere in the organization is this more relevant than to a Quality Assurance Department whose function it is to maintain quality, always, despite the change swirling around it.  The challenge for managing quality assurance in a changing workplace is analogous to changing the tires on a car while the car is traveling at 60 miles per hour.  As difficult as it may seem, the goal is to always maintain Quality Assurance.

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Topics: Human Capital, Information Technology, Human Asset Management

3 Tips to Supercharge Your Next Career Move

Posted by Joanne Flynn

 

Have you been feeling “stuck” lately? Perhaps you’re the ambitious type, and you’ve been working in a dead-end job. Maybe you love what you do, but you want to improve your financial situation by going after a big promotion. Or perhaps you have an entrepreneurial spirit and dream of working for yourself while traveling the world or spending time with your kids. Whatever the case may be, there are many ways for women to improve their careers and change their lives all at the same time.

1. Update Your Resume
Whether you want to change careers or apply for a big promotion at work, you’ll definitely want to make sure your resume is in top shape. When updating your resume, try to condense your skills and work experience to one page. That way, recruiters and hiring managers can skim to find your most important skills and experiences at a glance. You might also look online for resume templates that can enhance the professional look of your resume while guiding you through the resume creation process. Resume templates can help you choose the perfect eye-catching color scheme and layout for your resume. They’ll even guide you through the process of entering your work experience, skills, and other information to help your resume stand out from the crowd.

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5 Reasons You Need a Current & Robust Employee Handbook

Posted by Joanne Flynn


The employee handbook may be underestimated, but it is certainly strategic!

Do you really need an employee handbook? This question predictably comes up when I speak with company management, often because the Employee Handbook is considered moderately useful but not on the top of management’s priority list. Why is that? Because often the Employee Handbook:

  • Isn’t current
  • Doesn’t cover the full range of issues
  • Isn’t specific enough to be meaningful
  • Isn’t given to new employees
  • Isn’t used by management


However, one thing is for certain, when something goes wrong in an organization, the following happens:

  • From the manager’s perspective: Managers look to the Employee Handbook for guidance and protection from liability.

  • From the employee's perspective: Employees look to the Employee Handbook for guidance and protection from liability or loopholes created by omission or ambiguity.
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Topics: Change Management, Leadership, Human Capital, Human Asset Management

7 Steps to Build Continuous Employee Improvement Organization

Posted by Joanne Flynn

Take the Job Description, Performance Review and Development Plan Challenge

 

It’s Performance Review time for many organizations. However, with the rate of change accelerating and the rate of skills / knowledge obsolescence increasing faster than ever, can you really only review performance once or twice per year? As managers, how can you even justify that ancient practice? Today, continuous performance improvement has replaced the time-honored, annual Performance Review process, so employees continue to be the appreciating human assets that are always aligned with corporate strategy and goals.  It may seem like an onerous, time-consuming process, but is it really? When viewed through the lens of great management best practices, let’s shift the performance review paradigm to a continuous improvement paradigm where we treat our employees, our human assets, the same way we look at continuous improvement for processes. Why would we continuously improve processes and not continuously improve people? 

Where to Start?

Let’s take the performance management processes out of the HR department and place them squarely under the responsibility of managers since employee performance management is one of the prime job responsibilities of managers. Where do you start with this strategic and holistic approach?

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Topics: Organizational Alignment & Effectiveness, Human Asset Management, Performance Management

Is Being Loyal to an Employee a Good Thing?

Posted by Joanne Flynn


Both employee and manager loyalty has always been considered a good thing. So what’s changed? When does being loyal long-term, at all costs, go from a virtue to a liability?

The concept of "change" has changed everything. When companies grew at normal rates, and change was incremental and predictable, manager and employee loyalty could keep pace with each other and with the direction of the organization. Now, however, when organizations are growing fast and adapting to new technology, new processes and methods, increased customer demands, and additional new employees, the predictable static environment that many employees are comfortable with, have morphed into chaotic, change-driven, unpredictable frontiers where the old rules and controls have evaporated. Increasing, the latter describes today’s work reality. 

Here are some important questions to consider when thinking about manager loyalty:

  • What does it mean for the employee who is attached to the old rules and controls and is having real issues adapting to the new work reality? 
  • What does it mean for new employees who don’t know the old rules and controls and don’t really need to work under those constraints since that work environment has shifted?
  • What does it mean for the manager who must manage these two conflicting and competing employee needs?
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Topics: Change Management, Leadership, Human Capital, Human Asset Management

4 Tips for Technology Leaders to Deliver Value to the C-Suite

Posted by Joanne Flynn

Members of the C-suite are becoming more and more aware of how critical information technology is to an organization.

In the tech industry, C-level leaders have different levels of education and work experience. Over half of the tech leaders in the hardware, software development and other online businesses have a bachelor's degree, while less than 40 percent in each of these disciplines have a master’s degree and less than 12 percent have a PhD. A recent JWC partners’ survey, as it relates to information technology, found that C-suite leaders are the most concerned with the following: cyber security, digital disruption, and innovative technology advances.


Technology leaders are now making more appearances before the C-suite to discuss the company's IT strategy and technology direction. For any technology leader, delivering insight and intelligence to help C-suite leaders better understand the value for their IT investment and IT team is imperative, but this is unfortunately easier said than done. If you are looking to deliver value to the C-Suite at your organization, here are 4 tips to help you get started:

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Topics: Information Technology

Why Job Descriptions Need To Be a Strategic Management Tool

Posted by Joanne Flynn


Take Up the Job Description Challenge
Can a simple and often overlooked job description really safeguard your organization? They should if job descriptions are used to strategically align organizational goals and results with the employees' individual efforts. To achieve this alignment, you need to review the following Job Description Checklist to assess:

Job Description Checklist

  • Are your current job descriptions as robust and strategically focused as they should be?

  • Do you and your employees clearly understand their jobs and accountability at a detailed level?

  • Does your organization have a robust and honest employee assessment process driven by the detailed job description? The assessment process should align with the job description and be used accordingly. If not, what are you assessing employees against?

  • Is your organization committed to managing and monitoring the job description, assessment, and employee development process to ensure all efforts are aligned, optimal, and focused on strategic initiatives?
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Topics: Human Asset Management, Performance Management

Are You Ready to Take the Organization Chart Challenge?

Posted by Joanne Flynn


Have you ever thought, heard or said the following?

  • Organization charts aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on?
  • Here is the organization chart, but, let me tell you how it really works!
  • Why do we need organization charts anyway – they only reinforce bureaucracy which is counterproductive?
  • We can’t figure out how to put together an organization chart that makes any sense

 

Why Should We Even Bother?
Why do organizations spend so much time putting organization charts together, and why do they rarely display how the organization really works?  Because we desperately need to rationalize how the organization works, recognize how work gets done and define how accountability is managed.  Without a visual depiction or starting point, we are disorganized around chaos where people are busy (but busy doing what and for whom?) and where accountability is elusive because no one really knows who is responsible.  This describes a state of disorganized chaos which is hardly an efficient and effective way to run a business and is frustrating for everyone involved, both managers and employees.

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Topics: Leadership, Organizational Alignment & Effectiveness

Why Ignoring the ‘Busyness Challenge’ Could Ruin Your Vacation

Posted by Joanne Flynn

As managers, facing the vacation season always proves challenging. When the first person approaches you with the request to take off a day or two for a long weekend, or another employee is planning a one or two-week family vacation, the stress of ‘how is the work going to get done’ begins. 

Have you ever asked yourself one or more of the following questions:

  • How did the plan you had to provide backup for everyone on your team not get executed?  Where did the time go?
  • How are you going to get the right people trained up with the right set of skills and competencies to get the job done right
  • How can you tell some employees that they will need to reschedule their vacations due to a lack of backup
  • What is going to happen to employee morale
  • What is your boss going to think of your planning skills
  • How did this happen again? 
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Topics: Human Asset Management, Performance Management

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