4 posts tagged “talent management”

For many businesses one of the biggest risks to their future success is having the right talent in place as and when key people leave the organisation.  

While finding good people may be less difficult during a recession, the demand and competition for talent will increase over the next few years because of a number of factors:

• The global economy will recover.
• Companies are operating more and more on a global scale and can attract the best from around the world.
• Changing demographics means that it is estimated that one in four of the working population is over 45.
• A change in working culture and the choices people make mean that young people are more likely to move jobs.

All of this provides a number of challenges for businesses who wish to find and retain talent.  At first glance it may appear easier to hire talent from the outside, to bring in “fresh blood” or someone with a “different perspective”, but is this really the right thing to do?

Certainly with competition increasing, this will become a more time consuming and expensive process.  It has been estimated that it “costs” between 1-2 times the salary before a new middle management recruit becomes effective.  In other words, if you hire a manager on £60,000 p.a., it could cost the company between £60,000 -£120,000 before that person starts to be effective.  However, this money might be better invested (and less risky!) in identifying and developing “in house” talent.  

However, what techniques are available to assess the capability and talent internally?

The first assessment that should be made is how an individual has performed previously.  While previous performance is no guarantee of future success it is a good guide to how the individual is likely to perform in the future.  However, there are also other factors that should be assessed such as:

• Undertaking an assessment of an individual’s critical thinking, numerical and verbal reasoning will provide an indicator of their thinking capability and innate intelligence.
• Psychometric profiling instruments can assess an individual’s personality traits, likely communication and leadership styles. How do these fit with what the business needs?
• Giving an individual specific business or organisational problems to resolve will provide valuable assessments of their business acumen and problem solving skills.
• 360 degree feedback tools are valuable for assessing an individual’s performance and behaviour in the workplace.  This assessment will provide a broader view than one simply based on the line manager’s assessment.
• Asking the individual to lead a challenging business improvement project that will take them out of their usual work experiences, will provide a valuable assessment about how they handle new and unfamiliar challenges.

Some of the above techniques can be blended with others (such as formal presentations) at an assessment/development centre.  How each individual deals with such a pressurised and stressful situation will provide additional evidence of their future potential.

While the assessments described above will not guarantee the identification of those with the greatest potential, they will provide the business with vital information on which objective decisions can be based.  As the marketplace for talent becomes even more competitive, it is vital that businesses meet this challenge and establish their own assessment and talent management programmes – after all you don’t have to scour the world for talent if the potential you need is right under your nose!

There is a big difference between having a talent, for example, being able to do mental arithmetic and being considered as “talent” by an organisation. This is because the definition of talent has two aspects to it. Firstly, a talented employee can only be talented if they apply their “talents” in a useful way, and secondly talent has to be considered in the context of an organisation. For example, a doctor may be a talented surgeon but put him/her in a garage and they will probably struggle to repair a vehicle that has broken down.

Context is therefore a key part of defining and subsequently identifying talent. Some organisations use the criteria “being capable of working at two grades above their current role” as a simple means of defining and identifying talent, while others use more complex means.

Whatever definition an organisation chooses to use, it is vital that it has a system in place to identify and develop talented staff for its own future success. With declining birth rates, there will be a huge shortage of people to replace current management roles within the next 20 years. To protect themselves, organisations must have a clear strategy of finding and developing the replacements for their key managers. Those that fail to do this will ultimately not survive.

Racing people call it “training on” and it’s precisely what doesn’t happen to many individuals who are identified as “talented” or “having potential”.

“Training on” is the process of turning promise into achievement, turning immaturity into maturity.

In horses and in people, the process is similar, it is as much about internal mood, nature and temperament as it is about skills and knowledge. A horse that trains on changes its view of the world, settles down, becomes more confident and assured and more effective at the business of producing its best on the racetrack.

So how should you help your talent to turn promise into achievement?

· Provide them with a mentor who can give feedback and guidance on how they can improve their performance and effectiveness.

· Find both on and off the job opportunities for them to gain specific experiences. For example, can they lead a business improvement project, or alternatively a local community or charity activity? Generally people learn most from being taken outside of their comfort zone.

· Offer opportunities for secondments to different parts of the organisation and/or different countries to broaden their horizons and experience.

· Encourage them to network with people from other businesses and organisations to gain different prospectives.

By providing your talent with the right opportunities, guidance and support, will enable them to “train on” and turn promise into real achievement.

However, it is important to continually monitor their progress, as some may choose not to use their experiences to help them change and mature.

A wise man once said “If a man is no different at 50 than he was at 20 then he has wasted 30 years”.

Over the past thirty years businesses have had to continuously improve what they do and reduce how much it costs them to do it. The result of this is that many large businesses have much flatter organisation structures, with managers who have much broader roles and many more demands on their time, than previously.

Because of this, managers sometimes want to hand over Talent Management to ‘specialists’ in HR. If this is combined with a Chief Executive who believes that Talent Management is an HR agenda, responsibility can soon slip away from line managers and managing talent becomes a ‘tick box’ activity.

While HR have an important role to play, active Talent Management needs an engaged Chief Executive with line managers who are prepared to take the long term view about the skills the business needs in the future and those who are best placed to meet them.

HR needs to provide the appropriate processes and frameworks to enable Talent Management to work effectively, but it is line management, who are ultimately responsible for identifying, nurturing and developing talent. After all, as a line manager, do you not want a say in who your successor will be?