The Chapman Consulting Group Launches Global HR Leader Networking Series

​As many of our established HR contacts know, The Chapman Consulting Group conducts frequent HR networking meetings around the world. Historically, our Asia schedule covers the major regional growth markets. These interactive briefing sessions cater to local country and regional HR leadership in locations such as Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Japan, India, Indonesia and Korea, with discussion addressing topical HR issues to that audience. In 2012 we are enhancing the program with the addition of a greater number of industry and discipline focused sessions. (e.g. Banking and Financial Services HR Leaders; Regional C&B forums).

A change for us is that in 2012 we have formalised the Global HR Leader Series, which is taking place across Europe and the United States throughout the year. This will also soon move to Asia, given the increasing numbers of global HR leaders who are frequently traveling to that region. These forums, designed for HR professionals with global leadership responsibility, enable the participants to join either in their home markets or as they travel the world. This not only gives global HR heads a chance to connect with peers from their home regions and cities, but also allows them to enjoy networking opportunities in their key growth markets — with globally experienced HR professionals who bring a very different perspective and set of experiences than may be commonly found in their HQ locations.

In these global leader sessions, Emerging Markets has been the greatest area of common interest. Emerging markets have their own unique challenges from an HR perspective. Since the ability of many companies to achieve desired levels of business performance relies on the effective penetration of rapidly growing emerging markets, this topic generally features at or near the top of most multinational CHRO agendas. Within emerging markets, since critical opportunities and the most capable talent often do not reside in the same geography, lively discussion often takes place around fast-tracking local Leadership Development; Mobility and C&B issues; as well as the difficulties facing Talent Acquisition professionals in situations where talent is short and budgets are limited. We are finding that even the most sophisticated HR organisations are challenged to keep up with the emerging markets driven growth, whilst at the same time being financially constrained by the performance of struggling larger economies. Particularly in very ‘hot ’markets (e.g. China,India) no issue is higher profile among HR leaders than talent retention, where organisations are working hard to find ways to retain their top performers through better use of non-financial incentives. Career development and flexible working opportunities that are effective for local markets have been areas for recent discussion and experience sharing- on both a high level/strategic and practical basis. In this month’s sessions in Europe, we anticipate discussions around the ability of HR leaders to decentralise ‘real’ decision-making to Emerging Markets.

Global HR leaders have told us that for the most part, the transfer of knowledge between global and regional headquarters is no longer a one-way process. Therefore, companies need to be committed to growing stronger emerging markets leadership than ever before. This need has generated a lot of lively and focused discussion in our discussions with Global and International HR Heads. We are finding that rolling out the Global HR Leader Series is proving to be extremely rewarding. These sessions allow us to participate in a meaningful way in helping leaders to tackle critical global HR industry issues – which in turn helps us to more effectively understand and build our HR community to better serve our global contacts. We are looking forward to keeping our network informed of upcoming session dates and locations for the remainder of 2012.