Buy or build? Consume or create? It’s a talent conundrum for firms and managers worldwide. Are your emerging needs better served by bringing in high performers from outside – power players with the track record and the skills to spur productivity as your markets shift and evolve? Or are you better off building your talent pipeline from within – developing the specific capabilities and aptitudes, the attitudes you need to power through change and lead your business into the future?
Ask Giampiero Frisio of tech and electrification giant ABB, and the answer is unequivocal: you should be laser-focused on building the talent you need. And that’s because it’s part of your legacy as a leader.
An ABB veteran with more than 30 years of service to the company, Frisio has held an impressive diversity of roles, with expertise spanning laboratory engineering, production management, business unit leadership, and senior management responsibilities in different markets and geographies. A guiding principle throughout his career, one imprinted on him by his first boss, is the imperative to “leave the organization in better shape” – to equip the business with skills and capabilities it needs to sustain growth and success. This is the meaning of legacy, he says.
“I believe your single most important job as a leader is to help create the future of your company; a future built on strong assets. And the strongest asset you have is your talent – your people.”
If I’m hiring for a technical department or R&D function, I’m looking for skills. Say I’m under an extra tight timeline for a technical project with an outcome delivered in three weeks, I’ll go externally and buy in the skills I need.- Giampiero Frisio, President of Electrification at ABB
Specific technical skills can be bought and brought in from outside as needs dictate, he says. In fact, a significant portion of ABB Electrification’s research and development requirements are currently met by an ecosystem of external consultants and software engineers – ready-to-play expertise and hard skills brought in on a case-by-case basis to get projects over the finish line. Buying technical know-how from outside gives the business “options,” but creating talent is something entirely different.
Frisio is adamant that at ABB Electrification, leadership development is a critical investment in the organization’s “staying power.” And for Frisio, the nuance sits between skills and attitude.
“If I’m hiring for a technical department or R&D function, I’m looking for skills. Say I’m under an extra tight timeline for a technical project with an outcome delivered in three weeks, I’ll go externally and buy in the skills I need,” he says. “But if I’m thinking about how to build my organization for the long term and how to secure my legacy, then I’m going to be hiring for attitude. I’m going to be looking for baseline capabilities, yes, but I’m also looking for a certain disposition that resonates with my organization’s culture. This will leave a legacy over the long term.”
Temporary technical support is something I can buy. Skills are fundamental, so perhaps a little more difficult. But the right attitude is something that we prioritize in hiring and long-term development, because attitude creates our culture.
Frisio defines the right attitude at ABB Electrification as “curiosity that drives innovation, a willingness to do new things without fear of failure, and a capacity to level up in terms of thinking” – in other words, to look beyond what is right in front of you and take the “helicopter perspective” for a sense of what is going to happen further down the line. Â
This attitude is fundamental to leadership potential, he says. And it is something that must be identified, recognized, nurtured, and further developed in-house.
For Frisio, spotting the cues and identifying talent markers resides both in conventional and informal mechanisms.
Performance reviews and structured evaluation matter. But he also scouts for the right attitude long before upcoming leaders make it into roles that carry formal responsibility – signs around how people approach challenges early in their career; how they adapt to discomfort and respond to opportunities outside their technical expertise.
Frisio cites his personal trajectory at ABB as one model for building the kind of attitude he looks for in upcoming leaders.
His career began in the laboratory, as a technical engineer in R&D. An opportunity to make the pivot to management came within 18 months when he was hired at 26 to lead the process control department of one of the company’s factories – a radical bet on his own emerging leadership capabilities that saw him suddenly in charge of a 90-strong workforce.
“Moving out of the lab and into the management of 90+ people happened because I had a can-do attitude to tackle new challenges head-on even amidst ambiguity. My boss recognized this and believed I could do it … he believed I had what it took to leave the organization in better shape, so he took the chance on me,” says Frisio. Â
“Of course, it was a huge transition for me to switch from engineering problems to human problems. I was suddenly completely outside of my comfort zone and my domain of expertise, with no experience at all in managing people. But you learn a lot from discomfort.”
Accelerating that potential, building the right attitude means empowering people. “Developing talent isn’t about stepping in with all the answers and telling people what to do. It’s about really internalizing the idea that other people – the people you are managing – have the wherewithal to solve problems, then creating the space for them to get out of their comfort zone, experiment, broaden their experience and knowledge, and succeed.”
It’s a philosophy that continues to shape how he develops talent today. In many ways, Frisio’s philosophy reflects one of ABB’s recently launched Leadership Expectations: “To grow people and capabilities, developing myself and my team to succeed today and be ready for tomorrow’s challenges.”
Frisio remains a strong believer in giving people broad exposure across the organization, encouraging movement across functions, business units, and geographies.
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For Frisio, discomfort is a core and vital part of the development process.
One executive he recently appointed to his leadership team had moved through roles including process responsibility, quality, production, operations management in a turnaround factory in France, global operations leadership, and regional hub management in Germany and Europe before stepping into a division-level leadership role. “These experiences build range, adaptability, and resilience,” says Frisio. “You develop leaders by exposing them to complexity early and giving them the opportunity to grow beyond their original expertise.”
For Frisio, discomfort is a core and vital part of the development process.
“I’ve moved around many, many times in my life and it’s something I encourage among the people who work alongside me. In my division, I’ve just hired a new C-suite executive who’s held super diverse roles in the organization, from product management to head of business units and finance. I believed she had the attitude, and she’s doing great,” he says.
“Sure, I could have gone outside and looked for someone external with great experience in innovation and leadership, but I’m confident that the people we have here, those who’ve moved around inside the company, have the range and breadth, the diverse skills and the attitudes that we need.”
Betting on attitude has paid off for Frisio and for ABB in general.
While research suggests that one in two leadership appointments fail within 18 months – that failure often creating a ripple effect of disengagement, performance issues, and even executive attrition – and where the overwhelming majority of CHROs report they don’t have the talent to step into critical roles, ABB is bucking global trends dramatically. Â
Frisio’s three-decade tenure with the company is by no means exceptional, he says. Retention, engagement, promotion, and talent density in the business are remarkably robust. Building attitude is a philosophy, he says, that paves the way seamlessly for progression and succession within the organization. And it is the philosophy that has seen him consistently assemble high-performing internally developed teams throughout his tenure at ABB.
“This is the principle I’ve held my whole life. It’s your responsibility as a leader to prepare other people – they may not end up being your direct successor, but there should be one, two, even multiple people who can step into your shoes the moment you exit your role. Because if you can take yourself out of the equation and the team is succeeding and thriving, you could really say that you did a good job.”
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