Transcript
JOE CAMPA
Project talent is the backbone of organizational resilience. Without it, the best strategies are going to struggle. But by building and maintaining a strong pool of project talent, organizations can position themselves for long-term success and adaptability.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Investing in talent development is a value multiplier. It can boost your organization’s bottom line—and keep team members engaged. That’s especially urgent as employees grow restless and companies push their teams to achieve project success. But how do you do it? What levers will increase your team’s capacity and commitment? Let’s dive in.
In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified®, we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.
This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.
A few years ago, the Great Resignation was at the top of everyone’s news feeds, as droves of workers felt empowered to leave their jobs and seek new opportunities in the wake of a pandemic-driven workplace transformation. But a new motivation for moving on has emerged that pollster Gallup and others have dubbed the Great Detachment. Now people are leaving because they’re just not fulfilled.
The percentage of engaged employees fell from 23% to 21% in 2024, according to Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report. And companies are paying a price for this decline. The report found that falling global employee engagement in 2024 cost the world economy an estimated 438 billion U.S. dollars in lost productivity.
Organizations and project leaders can fix that by investing in their people. Today we’re talking with three team leaders who share their talent development strategies and how their actions are helping team members take their skills and satisfaction to the next level.
But first—if you enjoy Projectified, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your feedback helps us keep making this show.
Now, let’s get to our conversation. We’ll hear from Aimee Cowan, a senior manager in the human capital practice at Deloitte in London; Gemma Konrad, career and performance development director at food and beverage giant Mars, also in London; and Joe Campa, senior manager of the strategic excellence office at Ontario Power Generation in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Let’s start with a high-level framing on talent development: Why this is important to organizations? And then, just speak to some of the benefits you’ve seen from making that investment and trying to strengthen that muscle. Joe, you ready to take this one?
JOE CAMPA
Talent is really going to make or break a project. Your people are the difference between success and failure, and I’m sure nobody here is going to argue that fact. Every major initiative—launching a new product, entering a new market, upgrading systems—relies on skilled project professionals to turn that vision into reality. So the quality of your project professionals, I feel, directly impacts your ability to stay competitive, adapt to changes and innovate effectively.
I’d also add that the demand for project professionals is still rapidly growing. I see organizations taking on increasingly complex, large-scale initiatives like megaprojects, digital transformations, sustainability efforts. So retaining and developing talent really helps address that current talent gap that’s caused by either attrition or industry growth. And it builds a culture of continuous improvement and leadership development. And so [by] equipping your teams with training, mentorship, tools to succeed, you’re fostering an environment where professionals can really thrive and take ownership and innovate. And this not only helps deliver better project outcomes, but it strengthens employee satisfaction and, subsequently, retention—an essential factor in today’s competitive job market.
External hires, they bring fresh perspectives. It’s true, and it’s a good thing. But internal talent understands the nuances of how things get done, the stakeholder landscape, the lessons learned from past projects. That continuity will help drive efficiency, reduce the onboarding time [and] ensure a smoother transition when people move into those leadership roles. So really, it is that retention of institutional knowledge that’s really key.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Okay, great. Thank you. Okay, now Gemma, how about you?
GEMMA KONRAD
A lot of people underestimate the value and the need for project managers. I see lots of scopes of work that are taken on, and people think, “Oh, it’s a technology implementation. I’ll just get the tech guys in.” And it’s really interesting to see, actually, the value that a project manager makes, really getting your arms around everything, bringing it together.
In terms of developing that talent from within—and I think this was what Joe alluded to—external resources do bring that external expertise and perspective. But I think marrying up the skills of project management, the capabilities and the behaviors needed to get projects delivered within a company’s culture really, really does add value. If I look at Mars, we’re very relationship-focused. So being able to influence, build relationships and manage your networks, in addition to having that core project management expertise, is really key.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Aimee, how about you? What are the benefits of internal talent development from a management consultancy perspective?
AIMEE COWAN
From our clients’ perspective, they’re needing to deliver transformation at scale more quickly, more cheaply than ever before. And so the onus is on us to continually bring the best project capability and delivery expertise. It’s all being done in what we like to call and commonly reference a high VUCA environment: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And so the demand from our clients is not only can we bring project talent to them to support and help drive the outcomes of the project or the program that they are taking on, but also to bring in innovation and thought leadership and continuously challenge the status quo in how we are delivering things and the different approaches we are taking.
Another benefit for us in terms of investing in talent is giving people a consistent, solid foundation and platform to build their skillset and expertise so that then we are consistently delivering to our clients and bringing the same level of value. And, hopefully, get them passionate about developing their careers and continuing to grow and develop in this space.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
That’s the importance of bringing up this internal talent. Before you are imbuing your folks with the skills they’ll need to succeed, what is your process for identifying the folks that are worthy of that investment? What steps do you take to identify potential within your organization and your teams?
JOE CAMPA
I’d look for a few things. First, problem solving. Who’s stepping up when things go sideways? Who’s thinking ahead instead of just reacting? Secondly is the leadership piece—and I don’t mean just people that are in formal leadership roles. I watch who others naturally turn to for advice or guidance. Also, [I’m] looking for people who are curious. Who’s asking questions? Looking for ways to improve? Wanting to learn? To me, that’s a huge indicator of potential. And I also use a talent matrix [to] assess where people stand in terms of performance and potential. The high performers with strong potential, those are your future leaders. Solid performers who need some development, maybe focus on giving them the right growth opportunities. This matrix really helps me be intentional about where I invest my time and support, and, ultimately, it’s about matching the right people with the right opportunities to build a strong, future-ready project workforce.
The key is also to be transparent and have critical conversations with your team through those one-on-ones, and listen to their goals and aspirations as well. They may be great at something that no longer satisfies them, so you need to understand that balance as well.
GEMMA KONRAD
I think for me it’s about identifying the potential in people what I would call core project management skills: good planning, organizing, ability to get work done and deliver on time. And then also the core behaviors and competencies. We use a standard competency framework at Mars, and I think Joe’s touched on a few of these, but problem solving, for us, plans and aligns, managing stakeholders and being able to manage ambiguity and build relationships.
So it’s really about that potential that people have, and then just identifying, “Is there an interest?” once you’ve identified those individuals. And often that comes from your year-end reviews, where people talk about their best next moves or skills they want to develop, but really enabling them through ongoing mentoring support and really helping them deliver. And then I think you’ll ultimately get to a stage where, actually, do they just want to do some basic project management as part of their role, or do they actually want to move into a more fully fledged project management role? And then you can look at more formal training.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Great. Aimee, anything to add?
AIMEE COWAN
We recruit from high school and university graduates through to experienced hires. And I think the first technical skillset we expect varies depending on level. But one of the things I wanted to highlight was, like, the power of the combo of technical project management skills and those softer traits. Both Joe and Gemma have spoken about a couple that they find particularly relevant. For me, I had personable and confident, ability to build really good rapport with a varied stakeholder group, super structured.
One thing I’ve noticed—it can be really powerful—is when people can bring simplicity and structure to really technical environments, to really carve through sort of next steps and planning and understand the “so what” of some of the technical challenges that a project or program might be delivering. People that are continuously open to innovation and continuous improvement and changing the way that they’re doing things, and also rapidly applying lessons learned.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
So now we’ve got our pipeline. What are your processes to push those identified folks forward to the place where they’re ready for the leadership that you’ve targeted them for? Is there a program you have in place, or particular strategies or innovations you use?
AIMEE COWAN
In my particular area of Deloitte, which is called major programs, it’s like a dedicated capability for project and program delivery. We actually start with our graduates and analysts going through a six- to eight-week induction program where they get to learn all of the foundational basics about delivering projects and programs from a Deloitte perspective.
But then we supplement that by a formal training program, including working with PMI on the CAPM® (Certified Associate in Project Management) training and some other formal training opportunities. And that really helps to level out the skillset of our early talent that’s coming up through the ranks and make sure they’re all starting from a similar platform. We have an opportunity to tweak and tailor that training every year so that it includes some of the latest digital thinking, ability to use different tool sets, so that they land successfully in client projects. And then we offer them specific learning pathways. We break it down into those that specialize more in strategy, more in digital project delivery, some that specialize more in the human system design of programs and projects. What people are passionate around. And they can build their growth and their ongoing development in that space. Our general ethos is to ensure that learning and development is a continuous thing.
JOE CAMPA
It sounds like, in a way, what we do here at Ontario Power Generation as well, having some individual development plans and, through your one-on-one discussions with your employees, your team, really trying to have them capture and write down where do they see themselves? What do they need in order to get to that next level? What is the training that they’re missing that they need to do? And not all training is internal. There’s external ones. And as a manager, that’s where you can really encourage your team to go out and get that on your own. I really am passionate about that, with myself having five certifications through PMI. My team is looking at it, say, “Hey, how did this help you?” And it drives those conversations. An individual development plan really can help each individual plot out their own journey or their own path on how they want to move forward in the organization.
When I see people that go out and get those certifications, it shows me a level of engagement, motivation for them to grow within their roles. That they’re not sitting back and just waiting for an opportunity to be handed to them on a silver platter. They’re going out and trying to build their journey of excellence. How do they get to the next level? When I see somebody with their PMP, I already know that they have a certain level of knowledge. There’s validation there. They’re not afraid to invest in their own journey.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Gemma, how about you? Anything on that sort of development plan angle.
GEMMA KONRAD
Yeah, and I think it’s probably similar for us. All of our associates, which we call our employees, will have a 70-20-10 development plan, and that’s very much focused around the 70% what you learn in the job, the 20% learning from others and then 10% is more formalized learning. And so this very much aligns with their development objectives and business objectives. And then we upskill really in a number of different ways. So as mentioned, it can be what you learn within the course of your job, learning from your peers. We have a very strong mentoring philosophy at Mars, very much whether that’s a formalized mentoring-coaching relationship or just, “I need to engage with someone more experienced.” And then we do, obviously do formalized learning courses as well.
One initiative that we’re trialing at the moment, we launched an internal talent marketplace a year ago. It’s effectively like an internal LinkedIn, but using AI so it’s surfacing personalized development opportunities to our associates based on what their need is. And really, that’s driving I think what Aimee alluded to—development does need to be driven by the associate. And we always say that, actually, they’re the ones driving the car. The line manager is really there to support. So it’s around creating that mutuality of you drive and own your career, and we’ll give you the support and the tools to get there.
The talent marketplace is giving us greater visibility of the skills we have, the skills we don’t have. And then it’s enabling you to link in, well, actually, three years from now, what am I going to need? What are the projects, transformations I’m going to be working on? So it enables you to actually think, “This is what I’m going to need in the future, and this is what I have, and this is where I need to spend time.”
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Is there a success story you can mention of where this strategy enabled an individual or a cadre of folks to level up that, ultimately, provided some value to the organization?
GEMMA KONRAD
The talent marketplace project that I just referenced. What we’ve really seen a big uptake in is on gigs. So gigs are development opportunities completed within your core hours. They’re unpaid, and what’s been really, really interesting is the amount of cross-segment, across function moves.
So one of the challenges that we have at Mars is we have very distinct segments—so Mars Snacking, Petcare—and it’s often very difficult to get talent to move across the organization. Either they don’t know what the opportunities are, or, I think, we do have some talent hoarding. And what we’ve actually seen through the talent marketplace and gigs is that people are able to share their skills across different segments or build new skills. Of all of our gigs filled, of which we filled 180 in 12 months—that’s a population of six and a half thousand, so it’s quite small—we’ve seen 42% of those being filled cross-segment and cross-function. What we’re anecdotally hearing is it’s giving people the opportunity to try before you buy. So try a team, try a particular function, see what they think, build their skills before they can move. And that’s, for us, a great way of accessing internal skills and talent building and developing without going externally.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Aimee and Joe, any specific examples of upskilling programs you’d like to share?
AIMEE COWAN
If we took any analyst in our cohort at the moment, they’ve gone through this induction program where they learn about our clients, the challenges that they’re facing and the value that they can bring in the project work they’re doing. They go through some formal training certifications, but then what we do is we give them a safe space to test what they’ve learned. So we invest them in a client project for, sometimes it can be between three and six months, where they basically join a project team and get to see in reality what their technical training or their formal training program has taught them in terms of what it means to deliver a project with our clients.
JOE CAMPA
I really like both the responses there from Aimee and Gemma. With Ontario Power Generation, a few years back, I created a new grad program. In the area with the amount of growth that we’re seeing, project professionals are in demand, and sometimes, it’s very difficult to find those experienced project professionals in the volume that we’re looking to hire. So the program for a new grad—to get them fresh out of university into a large organization with many different business units, managing projects—this opportunity has so far really kind of produced a lot of benefits to the organization and to the new grads themselves. We’ve hired over 50 over the past three years. This is really taking that junior-level role to what Aimee was mentioning and really kind of building that out.
For us, it was over a two-year span of this program, and every six months, the individual is going to be rotated into a different business unit with purpose. So they might start out in nuclear project management on a delivery team. And then after that, they might move into a different line of business, like renewable generation or the hydroelectric facilities because they have different ways of managing their projects. From that, they might go from a project management side over to the project control side, working within a PMO. Really branching out and giving the opportunity to the individual to understand more holistically the different facets or the different areas of our organization. It helps them to understand maybe where their strengths are or what they enjoy and where they want to be. From the very start, [it] was a little bit difficult to get those hiring managers to buy into the process. But once they’ve seen what we were able to do to get them up to speed, getting them all to a certain level or a baseline of knowledge within project management, and then growing from that, now the hiring managers across those different business units, they want more of these new grads because they see the benefit, the value that it provides.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Let’s talk about the effect on project performance. How can you translate what you’re doing in terms of everything we’ve talked about, from identifying talent to investing in it, to seeing that upskilling take place? How has that translated into actual project performance improvement, value delivery and so forth?
AIMEE COWAN
Our teams see improvements in client relationships and then also project delivery, whether that’s time, cost, quality. We also see a lot more flexibility in the way that our teams deliver. And when I say flexibility, I mean once everybody gets up to speed with the foundations of project management and has the underlying skillset and know-how. Some of the value is being able to support and strategically steer project and program leadership to focus on the outcomes rather than strictly following the day-one plan. Being able to apply your experience and offer that strategic leadership, I think, is something that you really get to see once you’ve invested in project talent and capability within an organization.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
What do you do to promote engagement, and what do you do to arrest disengagement, whether it’s a performance drop off, or there’s kind of warning signs that they’re going to look elsewhere and so forth? What steps do you take to keep team members engaged, and what do you do if they’re becoming less so.
GEMMA KONRAD
The first thing for me is regular connections. So with all of my team, we have weekly connects where we go through what they’re working on, what are the challenges. And I think listening is really important. I always check on their capacity—how you feeling, how you managing the project? And I think it’s a balance, because you want to empower people to run and deliver projects, and you want to be able to delegate, but you also need to know when they actually do need their manager to support, be on calls. So I think it’s about open dialogue, providing that safe space, giving them feedback on where they’ve done really well and actually areas for development. And noticing if you think they’re stressed, if you think they’re struggling. Sometimes they know the answer—you just need to help them get there. Or sometimes they need you just to help them be in a call. So I think it’s regular dialogue, listening to them and having that emotional safety that they can be honest with you.
JOE CAMPA
I think Gemma said everything that I wanted to say. Maybe the only thing I would add, as a manager, as a supervisor for a team, look at being fully transparent as much as you can be, allowing your team to really be open and honest with you. So my team can approach me. They know that I’m fully transparent. So if they feel stuck, if they start becoming checked out, this is something that I want them to come to me [with]. If they’re looking for additional work, if they’re looking for a change in scenery, trying to get down to the underlying cause. And I really try to be intentional about showing people the impact of what they’re doing and how their work connects to the bigger picture. I know it sounds easy just to say it, but I’ll admit sometimes it can take a lot of practice as well.
AIMEE COWAN
I really liked the last point that Joe mentioned there, around making sure you’re communicating the impact that people are having. I feel like I’m going to add that to my repertoire.
A couple of additional builds from my side: We try really, really hard—and I’m sure other organizations are in similar boats—to offer, like, a flexible working environment. So we talk about being in-person for moments that matter, and I think that sort of balances the need for flexibility and working virtually when appropriate, but also really highlights the value of in-person connections and learning.
The other thing that we sort of roll out in our project teams as well—which has been really great to foster connection and belonging in teams that might come together just for a short period of time to deliver a project and don’t necessarily know each other inside out—is tools that help you work out how you best like to work and how you should best work with other people. And then also just those one-to-one close development conversations, I think, is essential. We have the people leader construct at Deloitte, but I know every organization has a similar sort of mentorship or coach-type relationship model, but that’s really critical because we often have people leaders that are slightly independent from our day-to-day work, and so [they] can really coach and help navigate next steps, not only in your day-to-day but also your career goals and your development and what’s next in your learning pathway.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
That’s great. I love the breadth that we got there, too.
What’s your advice to other project or organizational leaders who are sold on the importance of building a talent pipeline but are unsure of how to do it or are struggling? What’s some advice that you’ve acquired along the way and could pass on?
JOE CAMPA
I would say when it comes to investing in your people, be intentional. And I know I maybe sound like a broken record about the intentional piece, but don’t just assume that people will grow on their own. Create opportunities for them. Give them real challenges. Trust them with responsibility and support them along the way. Make talent development a part of your culture. Learning shouldn’t be just a one-time event. It’s got to be embedded in how you do your work. And most importantly, trust your people. If you want them to step up, give them the space to do it. And you’d be surprised what people can accomplish when they know that you believe in them. So doing this, I feel like, is going to build the stronger leaders and a more resilient organization. It won’t happen overnight. These shifts take time, and you may have to pivot a few times, but never, ever give up on that process.
GEMMA KONRAD
I completely agree with everything you’ve said. I think identify the core skills and behaviors you want, because they’ll be the project management skills, but obviously what’s relevant to your culture. And think about the experiences. Make it mutual. Think about how you can support them, whether that’s mentoring, potentially formal qualifications.
The one other thing I would say is encourage them to work with others—other project managers across the organization who are in different sort of stages of development—because sometimes it’s easier to talk to your peers than necessarily your manager, and just saying, “Oh, I’ve had a problem with that. How did you resolve it?” We find it’s really, really powerful, and it makes people feel supported.
AIMEE COWAN
For me, echoing what’s already been said, it’s about fostering continuous learning expectations in your teams. So it’s not about doing a single project management course early in your career, and then you are done. For someone in the early stages of the career, it’s about doing that and getting the foundations right and getting exposure to different experiences. But then for the senior, more experienced members of your team, it’s about adopting new thinking, innovation and becoming part of the approaches of the future. Applying lessons learned from all the experience that you’ve had. So yeah, for me, it’s really about that continuous learning expectation.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
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