The 2009/2010 Human Resources Report

Only a company that attracts talent like a magnet, secures its loyalty and carefully nurtures it, can be sure of a permanent supply of inventiveness, innovative strength and entrepreneurial spirit in all the areas in which it operates.

Talent 20|21 Performance & Potential Review: The heart of HR development. For a number of years, the feedback and development meetings held as part of the PPR have served as a tool for the uniform, cross-country performance and potential assessment of our executives within the context of STEP up!. A number of business units are already using the PPR process in a modified form, for example to conduct performance and potential checks of opera- tional executives such as store managers at the Telekom Shop Vertriebs- gesellschaft, or as an entry ticket to an expert career. Since 2009, we have continued to gradually roll out the new competency model as the basis for all feedback and development meetings. Uniform Group-wide performance, competency and potential assessments create a sound basis for talent and succession management. In 2009, for the first time, the PPR process for our executives was supported by a dedicated IT tool. The data from this tool provides a foundation for the development of succession management. Mobility instead of “career tunnels”: Professional development needs new perspectives and a breath of fresh air. As well as being used to offer attractive career opportunities to key top performers with a view to securing their loyalty early on, succession management also serves to keep their career paths alive. At the same time, we are also keen to inject a breath of fresh air into One Company via exchanges between national and interna- tional units, between different functions and different businesses. This will lead to broader horizons, greater scope for action and development, a trans- fer of knowledge, and “revitalized” careers. With the same objective, paral- lel to this, we are also stepping up our international exchange program for experts. In order to encourage mobility as a development criterion, we are aiming to achieve an annual exchange of around 20 percent of all manage- ment positions, and to limit the time spent in any given position to a maxi- mum of five years. “Irreplaceable” top specialists will, of course, be an exception to this rule. Telekom X-change: International HR development initiative. Since Telekom X-change, an international exchange program focusing on spe- cific project tasks, was introduced in January 2009, it has become estab- lished as an attractive way of gaining international experience, particularly for our top performers in international subsidiaries. In its first year, 57 inter- national placements were made within the Telekom X-change framework: 25 from Germany to another country, 23 from another country to Germany and 9 between countries outside of Germany. Roundtable for internal appointments: The Executive Search Council. In keeping with our principle of identifying the very best candidates for man- agement vacancies and ensuring that nepotism and cronyism have no place in our company, we have created an internal “roundtable,” the Executive Search Council (ESC), which compares the requirement profiles of vacan- cies with the skills profiles of potential candidates. The ESC’s involvement in the appointment of top management positions is currently around 90 per- cent. The growing importance of the ESC as a neutral, objective and purely business-based HR tool is illustrated by the fact that all appointments to top executive positions within the framework of our reorganization to One Com- pany (an internal merger which has been highly sensitive from a psychologi- cal and corporate culture viewpoint) were based on the recommendations of a dedicated ESC set up especially for this purpose. Leadership Excellence Programs: International leadership schemes. STEP up! and Go Ahead! provide defined career paths, while the PPR process is the process for career assessment and positioning. Like a string of pearls, target group and level-specific development programs are de- signed to complement “on-the-job” development. In this way, we support executives in the initial phases of a new management position and help them to get to grips with their complex leadership requirements. Uniform Group-wide and centrally conducted “Leadership Excellence Programs” (LEP) have differentiated content that is tailored to the specific manage- ment level within the Group. The aim is to encourage Group-wide network- ing between managers, to strengthen and support them in their new roles and, in this way, to ensure that their entry into a new management level gets off to a flying start. On a Group-wide basis, in the period under review, a total of 473 people – 74 women and 399 men) attended the LEPs. 349 ex- ecutives came from Germany and 124 from international units. This program actively promotes our leadership philosophy, which aims to utilize the Group’s diversity to the best possible effect for all involved, based on a shared cor- porate mission statement for customers, employees, managers and stake- holders (for more on the Group’s revamped diversity management, see page 28). 2010 will be a year in which we internationalize these programs further. Professional programs safeguard state-of-the-art technical expertise. Deutsche Telekom offers special, function-specific advancement measures in an international context. Examples include the Professional Programs (PP), which also offer the option of studying for a Master’s degree within the context of Bologna@Telekom (see page 18). The relaunch of this modular training program, taught entirely in English, took place in late 2009 with 36 participants in PP HR: 28 women and 8 men; 23 from international units and 13 from Germany. Additional PPs in the areas of marketing, finance and IT will follow. Since 2006, some 200 experts from the Group have already participated in the PP. Contents