It is hard to imagine an industry more competitive than the medical technology sector. New and improved devices are at the heart of this booming field. Hiring, keeping, and growing talent may be one of the largest challenges. Edwards Lifesciences, a world leader in products and technologies to treat advanced cardiovascular disease, is the number-one heart valve company in the world. Headquartered in Irvine, Calif, Edwards focuses on specific cardiovascular disease states - including heart valve disease and peripheral vascular disease, as well as critical care technologies. Edwards has more than 5,700 employees worldwide, selling medical technologies in more than 100 countries with 2006 sales of $1.o37 billion. Learning Executives Briefing spoke with Rob Reindl, corporate vice president, human resources, at Edwards, and the person responsible for developing and maintaining the company's workforce - a critical element for innovation and growth.

Learning Executives Briefing: What is Edwards Lifesciences doing to find, develop, and keep the best talent?

Rob Reindl: We developed a very robust companywide talent management process that we have been engaged with since 1997, and we have made it better every year. Each year, the entire executive leadership team performs a talent review on their respective teams - a bottom-up review. The CEO, Mike Mussallem, and I then sit down with the head of that business, region, or function and conduct 15 talent reviews. In these reviews, we look at the strategic imperative in each of those units and the organizational design. We also cover critical jobs and performance of individuals in critical jobs, as well as identify potential successors for critical jobs, high-potential employees and key talent.

The differentiation between high-potentials and key talent is that high-potentials are those people we see getting into a critical job in the next five to seven years. Key talent we identify as someone with more technical or specialized skills, who we may not see as supervising a lot of people - or even wanting to do that - but having technical ability that is so critical to one of our business units that we would hate to lose that person. When we talk about critical jobs, we identify those as jobs that are essential for the execution of our company's strategy. As the strategy evolves, the critical job list can change. We have approximately 70 critical jobs across the company right now, and we try to fill those critical jobs with the very best talent that we have.

LXB: In a growing company like Edwards Lifesciences, how much additional pressure comes about due to a general lack of talent available in the market? If that is indeed the situation.

Reindl: I agree with the notion that there is a lack of available talent out there. The talent pool is shrinking. The "war for talent" that McKinsey & Company talked about back in 1997 has become a reality. We are seeing baby boomers leave the workplace, but the trend has an even greater impact on us at Edwards. We are a medical technology company in a highly specialized industry that requires employees to have certain technical expertise that can generally only be acquired through work experience.

LXB: How are the needs for learning and training different for a company like Edwards as opposed to other kinds of manufacturers?

Reindl: Like other companies, we have talent needs in areas like marketing, manufacturing, and sales. However, our more critical needs are different because we are in medical device manufacturing in a very innovative environment. Our greatest competency requirements are in the areas of engineering, clinical, and regulatory affairs. These functions are particularly important in the clinical trials of new and future technologies. Our focus is meeting unmet patient needs, and we do that by successfully delivering innovative products to the market. Clinical, engineering and regulatory are the three areas that drive that effort.

LXB: Is it fair to say that competition in your business is intense?

Reindl: In terms of talent, yes, it is a very competitive environment.

LXB: How is Edwards building and improving its clinical workforce?

Reindl: We continue to build and recruit for our clinical function. It's a very difficult area to recruit because there are not a lot of seasoned clinical people out there to begin with. These people often require technical skills that we can't always develop from within. It's challenging to have a nontechnical person become successful in a clinical role. We look at a lot of lab technicians and nurses who have clinical expertise to come in and fill those roles.

LXB: Once you have those people on board, what kind of learning path do they follow?

Reindl: We have two different career paths at Edwards: one is technical and the other is a management career path. There is a possibility that a clinical person might want to choose the management track so we have learning and development assigned to that track. More often than not, people who are really technically oriented move up the technical path. Not only is there learning and development associated with that technical career path, but also rewards, recognition, and incentives. We treat our technical career path as important as our management career path because of the importance it plays in our ability to bring innovative products to market.

LXB: Can you tell us about some of the metrics you use and how you establish those benchmarks?

Reindl: Benchmarks fall into two different buckets for us. We have companywide aspirations and we have performance-management objectives. Our aspirations are longer-term, company-wide goals that we might look at every five years. Our performance-management objectives, or PMOs, are individual metrics that are reviewed annually.

Our aspiration of maintaining a turnover rate for employees in critical jobs and high-potentials is to keep it below 3 percent. Our experience is that it is a bit higher than that right now. But looking down the road we say, "Wouldn't it be great if our turnover in top talent was less than 3 percent."

Similarly, our objective to fill critical positions in less than 50 days is an aspiration, and that one is really difficult to meet. We would hate to have jobs filled just to meet that aspiration. We also assess our hiring success at six months after the hire, and ask the hiring manager how the employee is doing on a scale of one to five. If we see the performance index dropping because we have an aspiration of 50 days, we know we have the wrong behaviors happening. But we do want our people to treat these job openings with a sense of urgency, so that is why we created the 50-day target.

We established that 50-day goal from benchmarking best practices, not from within. The turnover rate was an industry average and we chose to go even lower than the industry number.

LXB: We have read that Edwards Lifesciences encourages what it calls "creative debate" to bring about a higher level of employee engagement. Is that policy actually written down someplace?

Reindl: Yes. This is an evolving concern in many organizations - to allow younger people to speak up to more experienced people, for peers to challenge peers in meetings, and to enable middle management to speak up to top management. We decided to take a couple of approaches to institutionalize this in our company. First, we established a course within our Edwards Lifesciences leadership program. It's a module within our four-and-a-half day program for the director and above level. It focuses on the skills and techniques associated with the dynamics of debate. Secondly - and this may sound a bit corny - but we have a three-inch high icon on the desks of management and in our board and conference rooms to remind people about the effort. It's a heart on the bottom with a storm coming out of the heart inside the icon. It's a reminder to all of us that we need debate. Out of debate come creative ideas. And creative ideas are what drive innovation - and innovation is what's critical in medical devices. Lastly, we have made "creative debate" a competency in the organization that people are evaluated on in their performance reviews.

It's not the thing we are best at - yet. We started this about four years ago, but I would bet that we are better at it than most companies because we are willing to deal with this issue openly. Continually improving employee engagement is absolutely critical to our success, so we will keep increasing the pervasiveness of open and creative debate companywide.