Margaret O'Hanlon

In addition to her role as a Compensation Cafe contributor, Margaret is founder and principal of re:Think Consulting.  She has decades of experience teaming up with clients to ensure great Human Resource ideas deliver valuable business results.  She has worked with early-phase and Fortune 500 companies, as well as universities, non-profits and local firms. 

Before she founded re:Think Consulting, Margaret was an Principal in Total Rewards Communications with Towers Perrin, a global human resource management consulting firm.  Early in her career, Margaret was a Faculty Advisor at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

Margaret started her undergraduate work at NYU, and finished with honors in English at Indiana University, Bloomington.  Continuing her studies at that campus, she also earned an M.S. and Ed.S. in Instructional Technology.

You can reach Margaret via email at mohanlon@rethinkconsulting.com.

Comments

[Alanna]

This is great! I share DNA with this woman! I will be checking in often!

Alanna :)

[Nancy J Hess]

Your thought resonate with my own. Recently, I posted a blog article, "Coaching Toward Competencies"http://twurl.nl/6c28ow in which I talked about how competency modeling is highly relevent for leadership coaching today. Like you, back in the 90"s I saw tremendous shifts occur in organizations that committed to a ground up process of competency modeling. Employees became engaged, the culture was shaped by a shared language which developed out of the process and the link between compensation and competency development felt revolutionary in some important ways. So, what happened?

I have clients who report to me that their competency programs are alive and well. So, for some it has become a way of life in the organization. For others, I am not so sure. When leaders change, a competency program may seem, to the newly inducted, well, foreign.

But also, I think to some extency, competency development simply evolved and became embedded in the ways we think about pay. For instance, when I develop performance and compensation systems for clients, I explain progression through the pay range in terms of competency development and use words like "accelerate" and "de-celerate".

And finally, I also think the long term commitment required to develop a competency mode is out of sync with the short term focus of organization's today. I find that I must present competency concepts and ideas in chunks in order to make it attractive. This is not ideal, and if we can generate new energy and re-investment in the process, we will go a long way toward improving employee engagement in organizations.

Nancy