Canadian Pacific Railways Builds Bench Strength Through PDI-SuccessFactors Development Solution

The Challenge

Like many mature, established firms, Canadian Pacific Railways (CP) has to maintain its competitive edge and achieve business goals while at risk of a knowledge-drain as older workers leave. As a leading North American railway shipment provider, CP employees are highly engaged and committed to the organization. As a result of its success, CP has a workforce that is approximately five years older than in other industries, with a need to replace 600–800 people every year for the next five years.

CP has been leveraging strong Board and CEO support to address primary business growth, profit, and risk mitigation through waves of succession planning and bench strength building from the CEO level down through its entire executive team. Having worked in partnership with Personnel Decisions International (PDI)—a global leadership and talent management consulting firm—since 2003, CP had been strengthening its leadership talent by selecting and making a highly successful transition to a new CEO and other senior roles in early 2006. Additionally, CP rapidly advanced its senior leadership team up the talent management maturity curve over the past five years with a focus on skill building in areas crucial to strategy success including:

  • financial acumen,
  • how to do leadership development and use it as a retention tool, and
  • communicating vision and strategy.

As it realized success with its succession management planning process at the top, CP came to recognize a pressing need to rapidly build its bench strength at the level of mid-level leader and below with a robust, yet scalable and affordable solution.


The Solution

In order to address these challenges, SuccessFactors—a leader in on-demand performance and talent management software solutions—and PDI came together to help execute CP’s vision of superior leadership strength at all levels of the organization with a technology-enabled solution. During the vendor selection process, CP found out about PDI’s partnership with SuccessFactors which had been formed in 2006 when PDI and SuccessFactors had created a SuccessFactors edition of competency models known as the Performance Framework. For CP, aligning development efforts throughout the organization could only be done with a foundation of mature competency models housed in the SuccessFactors system. The solution was PDI’s Performance Framework: SuccessFactors Edition, to be used within SuccessFactors’ Succession Planning and Career Development Planning modules.

The SuccessFactors/PDI solution at CP is aimed at a broader swath of employees than the original top-of-the-house work done with PDI. The idea was to utilize competency-based talent reviews and development plans into the CP Succession Planning efforts to find and develop its emerging leadership talent.

SuccessFactors provided CP with the ability to get a view of its future leadership talent below the mid-level manager level within the organization. Having this information allows CP to more effectively develop and retain its up-andcoming talent. PDI’s partnership adds robust competency content to the technology, including writing assistant, coaching opportunities, and a learning library.


Result

CP was able to surface initiatives to solve management issues that were not previously apparent. The streamlined solution allows CP to more confidently implement risk-taking initiatives such as removing barriers to working across organizational boundaries while improving the quality of its bench strength as it prepares for the future.

Efficiently maintaining accessible development data had not been possible before. Having this data provides a higher probability for success in enabling a ready supply of the right leaders moving up in the organization. With this information at their fingertips, managers have the ability to more effectively develop and coach direct reports. The next step is building manager awareness of how to use the data. Building stronger CP teams can now be a practice in every day life. As CP continues to build its development culture, it will have the advantage of providing an attractive
work environment that will foster loyalty while operating in the North American market.

Preparing for the future also means cultivating the past. Creating a master system of record for its employee base allows CP to have an increasing knowledge exchange. Goals for CP’s future includes compiling employee experiences and ambitions to provide a picture of CP’s talent as it is now, and what it could be in the years to come. As workers retire, CP has confidence that it will be able to plan ahead so as not to lose critical company knowledge.