Personal Development
The word talent is heard more often than ever these days. But what does it mean to be a talent? Is there even a universal concept of talent? No! Because the talents at Swisscom are just as diverse as the interpretations of the word. But they all have one thing in common: the drive and spirit to make a significant impact on the Swisscom world.
Swisscom's talent programmes comprise three different streams. The Step up programme is tailored to employees who want to focus on leadership and take on a leadership role in their career. Employees who want to develop professionally are on the SCALE programme, which allows them to develop in a different professional direction. And last but not least, there is the Talent Pipeline, for those who already know that they want to make a skills change in the direction of Business Engineering or Process Management. The latter already have very clear ideas about their job profile, the lucky ones 🙂 - while the others are still in the evaluation phase. But that's exactly how it should be.
A sophisticated talent construct that will definitely ensure Swisscom's competitiveness in the future!
And those who actually make it onto one of these programmes are given the privilege of taking an intensive look at themselves and their own career for 12-24 months.
The first summit meeting took place in March 2017. We were allowed to withdraw from daily business for two days and arrived in Montmirail in Neuchâtel. Montmirail is a quiet, peaceful oasis where the local people live in a kind of commune. Everything belongs to everyone, everyone helps everyone else. Very fitting for a meeting like this, one of the aims of which was to establish a sense of community within the community. As a preparatory task, everyone had to take a poster of their personal life and the events that shaped them. The rule was not to use numbers or letters. A challenge for some, but one that resulted in a high degree of creativity. 🙂
This was a nice and very personal start to show a completely different side of themselves and to get to know each other in small groups. Full of self-confidence, everyone talked about the events that made them the people they are today. We were allowed to spend the whole day analysing ourselves as personalities with certain values: Who am I? What is important to me? Where do I want to go? And what qualities do I actually have? Dr Eckert von Hirschhausen's penguin theory helped us with this:
A penguin is ten times more streamlined than a Porsche - with the energy from one litre of petrol, it could travel over 2500 km! Penguins are perfectly suited to swimming, hunting and playing. But if you look at a penguin without this knowledge, you might think that this animal is a misconstruction. Wings that are too short to fly. Hardly any legs to move forward on land. What a misjudgement! But what does that mean?
We all have strengths and weaknesses. Many endeavour to iron out weaknesses. If you improve your weaknesses, you become mediocre. If you work on your strengths, you become unique! For this reason, we focussed on our personal strengths on the first day.
After a rather reduced night, we dedicated the second day to business. We worked intensively on the Swisscom strategy in cross-talent programme groups. Our Swisscom strategists and our Head of Innovation took the time to give us a lot of information about topics such as transformation, growth, operational excellence and our mission statement in a question-and-answer session.
We also looked at the Swisscom Leadership Model and assessed ourselves in terms of the key skills that are relevant to our company. The self-reflection allowed us to become clear about our effectiveness and leadership skills.
All in all, very relevant and inspiring topics that we were able to deal with during these two days. And that was just the beginning. We learned a lot and are already looking forward to the next summit in summer 2017. At this point, a big thank you to the organisers Daniela, Christoph, Pieter, Rennie and Anna 🙂
Talent Relationship Manager
Find the job or career world that suits you. In which you want to help shape and develop yourself.
What you make of it is what defines us.
