Stephen Cunningham started his career in sales and line management in financial services. Having led increasingly large teams through several mergers and change programmes he joined one of the management consulting firms, HAY group. At HAY he established an education business focusing on the leadership development needs of the 25,000 schools in the U.K. He then went on to be the European practice leader for HAY Group’s talent and capability practice focusing on talent and top team effectiveness. In 2008, he joined Vodafone as the Group Talent Director and is responsible for the talent, performance management, resourcing and diversity & inclusion approaches for Vodafone globally.

U-turn Journey

Vodafone Turkey has gone through a significant U-turn with an increase in the revenue market share from 18.6 to 28.3 in 2,5 years, enabled by around 30% YoY revenue increase for six quarters consecutively. The journey of the U-turn started in early 2009 after a long-lasting market share and revenue decline, which had slowed down the strong momentum to build the equity of the Vodafone brand as an Employer of Choice. One of the key enablers of the U-turn success has been an exceptionally diligent and focused talent management process that has been pursued against the challenge of the slown down around the employer brand equity built in the local market. The biggest lever of the success has been the cultural shift around how the organization worships talent as well as how much it raises the bar to identify and calibrate and then take risk to appoint the talent to stretched roles for the acceleration of their growth.

Vodafone Turkey has vitalized an inclusive talent management culture, where all the people managers are involved in the talent identification/mapping process as well the succession planning discussions. The organization welcomes talent management as an integral part of the line management accountability, well sponsored by top management. Human resources team never positions itself as the owner or the controller of the process, but merely the consultant and coach of an end-to-end seamless execution. The game changer that has enabled the shift was the inclusive approach to the talent process that boosted the ownership and dedication of the top and mid-level management across the board.