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Reporting to the Depot

Author & Date: Martin Booe, 1/05
Publication: Workforce (Quick Sign-Up Required To Access)
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This article brings focus to a huge and often un-tapped labor market. The US Military turns out over 200,000 veterans who transition into civilian life every year making them a huge source of employees. In the military people are taught to both lead and follow. They are taught a lot of practical skills; how to work very hard under extreme conditions. There is a lot of potential to partner with the government and utilize ex-military personnel in construction.

The article also makes some fantastic points about leadership development and how well the veterans work out in their leadership programs. I believe that the military teaches the use of standardized systems and that is something that many smaller and medium sized contractors have difficulty implementing. If you start to implement Process Documentation and Improvement you should also think about how you are going to approach hiring new people into your organization to make sure they will follow, maintain and improve the systems you are trying to implement.

It should also be noted that a lot of the reasons for Home Depot's success under CEO Robert Nardelli is that he came from General Electric and puts a lot of stock in Human Resources. Shortly after arriving at Home Depot he hired Dennis Donovan to lead the HR effort and made him the second highest paid person in the company - that definitely made a statement about how highly Home Depot ranks HR and personnel development. Is your HR Manager the second highest paid person in your organization? What do you think the impact of hiring an HR Manager of that caliber would be? There is nothing as important for your success as the talent you surround yourself with.

Don't treat HR like an administrative function.

Posted by David on February 19, 2005 05:22 AM|Permalink

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