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Insight

Published September 2009

VF Corp.: Career Development Goes Global

 

  Kellye Whitney

With brands such as The North Face, Vans and Nautica under its umbrella, VF Corp.'s catch phrase "fit for life" makes sense. The organization also sees the value of adapting this phrase to its talent management strategy. Susan Larson Williams, vice president of human resources for VF Corp., took time out from her work managing 46,000 associates worldwide to share some of the company's strategies to develop its workforce, from new hire onboarding through senior-level development, on a global scale.

TM: Describe VF's approach to talent management.     

Williams: We have a holistic approach to talent management [that] is about five years old. We talk much broader than just training or development. Talent management includes acquiring talent in the right way and onboarding talent appropriately so they get a good, broad orientation to the company, possibly over several months. Then we watch the individuals' performance. We do assessments for high potential, provide as many real-life experiences as we can beyond classroom learning, and then go all the way to the appropriate rewards.

TM: What processes or programs have you established to improve workforce performance?    

Williams: We have always had — and I've been here 26 years — a very performance-driven culture. Therefore, we've had talent — especially leadership talent — that really drives for results. Surrounding that, we've always had a culture of integrity, respect and learning. We like to give people opportunities to have different roles, but in the early years we just had basic training programs. About 2004 or 2005, I realized my team had good trainers, but I didn't have any professional organizational development (OD) people. A big period of change and momentum for talent management started at VF, and I hired a vice president of organizational development. I got support from the CEO to make sure our talent was looked at not on a business-unit basis, but globally — that our top talent was VF talent, not Wrangler talent or North Face talent. We look at associates differently. We have individual contributors, middle managers, directors, vice presidents, presidents of businesses and ultimately coalition presidents who run a collective group of brands. We try to have a curriculum or at least fundamental programs for each of those levels. You wouldn't want to have the same offerings for a middle manager that you would for a brand or coalition president. And if someone gets higher up in the organization, we try to provide them with more unique experiences.

VF has been wildly successful [since] those years, and I believe talent development is a big part of it. We've had record earnings year after year; we've grown sales by a couple billion dollars. We've expanded globally, organically and through acquisition. We have a robust pipeline of talent as a result of our renewed process, and they're successful.