Talent management

Ross Woods, 2014

Somebody once said, "The most plentiful quantity on the planet is wasted talent." High-performing organizations have a system for identifying talent and developing it. Supervisors and HR managers create a climate for new leaders to emerge. They identify areas of talent in employees, and provide opportunities for training, coaching, and promotion.

The organization has a pool of better, proven, more loyal people than it could recruit on the open market. The benefits are huge:

• It builds morale by making promotions available to those who earn them.
• The organization has enough people to grow.
• It gives people incentive to stay. People are more likely to stay longer if they are promoted in the organization and can expect further promotions. Retention is important; most people nowadays stay in their jobs for only three years.
• You can put square pegs in square holes. People will be far happier and more productive if they can move into jobs for which they are well suited.
• Your organizational performance will improve if you can retain the best people and get more value from them. This is especially the case where the organization is growing, or intends to grow. Your organizational performance will suffer if you keep losing your most talented people and can retain only mediocre people.
• You reduce business risk by having a larger pool of people to depend on. (Being highly dependent on a small group of people is high-risk.)

 

Your development program

Have a system. The system should be open access and non-prejudicial; it recognizes ability and does not only look at existing qualifications. You should have a system for asking supervisors about new talent. In many organizations, its a simple matter of the HR people knowing the supervisors, and the supervisors being willing to talk openly about their staff.

In other organizations, however, it is not as simple as it sounds. The system breaks down if a supervisor can become gate-keeper and control the process. It's too easy for supervisors to nominate people they like or play power politics. In the worst cases, supervisors deliberately hold people down if they don't personally like them, feel threatened by an emergent leader, or are predjudiced against a particular social grouping. In a few cases, the emplyee needs to pay a bribe to get a recommendation.

Create career options. In some cases, the obvious pathway is promotion to supervisor, foreman or team leader and then to management of regional operations. Not everybody is suited to management, and some might fit better is a specialist role. Don’t worry too much if you don’t have lots of positions for them. For example, a branch of one international corporation moved its up-coming people to other locations in the world, and then became the corporation’s major supplier of middle managers around the world. As another example, you can use the supply of talent to fuel growth. In fact, if this is your major way of keeping them, most of your training will be how to grow the organization.

Monitor closely and often. Each employee needs to know that you are interested and following what happens in their careers. Monitor job satisfaction with questions like: "Do you enjoy what you are doing? Are you still learning?" If you invest in good personal realtionships, you will be better placed to get honest answers.

Track career trajectories. Monitor how each employee is going and the direction they are taking. Check that it makes best value of their strengths, minimizes the effects of their weaknesses, and avoids any fatal errors. Check that your training regime is working for your people.

 

Handling common objections

"But training is expensive and often doesn't make any difference." It's true that some organizations waste their training budget by sending people off to do a course that makes no difference to actual performance. You can do better. First, integrate training into workplace activity so that it results in improved performance. Second, make training profitable. You should be able to count the dollar value of the Return On Investment (ROI) for your training. Training should result in improved systems, improved performance, and profitable projects. It’s quite reasonable to expect a course that costs $5,000 per student to generate $10,000, and sometimes $100,000 or more.

"But our staff expect too much." Some people expect a promotion (and pay rise) every year. They become unsatisfied and leave if don’t get it. If they deserve promotions and pay increases, you could give them in smaller increments. You can also give people other kinds of jobs that they perceive to be better.

"But we don’t have much talent." A few organizations struggle by with mediocre staff. Some other organizations advertise for creative people who will show initiative, then hire them and penalize them for showing creativity and initiative. The employees then lose their enthusiasm and do no more than is required of them. These organizations have a cultural issue that prevents new leaders from emerging. You need to change the organizational culture, although your middle managers will probably be a barrier.