How’s Your Bench Strength?

As the football season begins, many teams are taking a look at their depth charts, evaluating their chances to make a run for the play-offs and hoping that they have enough players on the bench to carry the team in case of losses due to injuries.

Similarly, as the Baby Boomer generation reaches retirement age, organizations in many industries are facing a loss of skilled and experienced employees that pundits are calling “an unprecedented brain-drain”.  According to study done jointly by AARP and the Society of Human Resource Management this spring, 72% of HR professionals believe the loss of talented older workers will be “a problem” or a “potential problem” for their organizations.

Clearly in successful organizations, leaders must manage their talent pool as proactively as they manage every other business asset.

What is Talent Management? First, what talent management isn’t: it’s not a fad or a quick fix. It’s not “something that HR does.” It involves the entire leadership team in an organization.

Talent management starts with identifying your business strategy: your vision, who you are as a company, how you are different from your competition, what your customer value proposition is, and how it differs you. It involves a systematic approach to attracting, developing and retaining qualified, engaged employees. This process ensures that the right numbers of people with the right abilities are in the right place at the right time to achieve your organization’s objectives today and meet the challenges that your leadership anticipates tomorrow.

 What does it take to Successfully Manage Talent?

• Identify your talent needs. Based on short-term projections and long-term plans and goals, determine your organization’s current and future talent needs.
• Clarify the essential competencies and organizational fit factors required for employee’s to achieve effective performance in each “key position.” (Some small and mid-sized organizations will find that all their positions are “key positions.”)
• Project your staffing needs over the next three years to meet your business goals as well as production/service/delivery requirements. Factor in estimated turnover, promotions and transfers to project your total hiring requirements.
• Develop competency profiles for all contributing positions. Use these profiles as benchmarks for future hiring, development, coaching and rewards.
• Design a process to assess external and internal candidates. Determine the assessment tools that will provide the information you need to select new employees and develop current employees. Integrate these assessments into selection and career pathing decisions for all candidates and employees.
• Create resources for individual career development. These may include on-the-job learning experiences, in-house “classroom” learning, off-site programs, certifications, vendor training, coaching and mentoring. Create a “menu” of career development options and resources.
• Prepare employee “owner’s manuals.” Based on each employee’s assessment, work experience and career goals, prepare a development plan that individuals can use as a career map. Supervisors can use this “owner’s manual” to support and coach employees, with special emphasis on high-potential workers.
• Position leaders as talent managers. Prepare supervisors and managers for their new role by providing training and tools for performance management and coaching. Make sure that talent management stays on your leadership agenda.
• Create a culture that values developing people. What do you want your company’s signature strengths and reputation to become? What do your people need to drive organizational performance? Remove any barriers that cause supervisors to resist allowing high-performing employees to move out of their departments for promotions or transfers while creating recognition and rewards for leaders who develop people.
• Transition HR from administration and compliance to talent management. To facilitate talent management, an organization’s HR focus must shift from administering transactions such as filling job openings, completing benefit enrollments or updating employee information to functioning as internal talent management consultants and members of the strategic leadership team. HR needs to understand an organization’s business issues and strategy as well as employee development and career plans to make the shift to leading talent management.

 How long does this take?
The typical transition time is 18-24 months from a traditional company model to a comprehensive approach to attracting, retaining and developing a workforce that performs at the highest level of its capacity. It takes at least this amount of time to build a culture that values and rewards developing people on a day-to-day basis.

 Career Detours
A lot of what causes people to plateau in their careers isn’t their lack of technical skill but their lack of emotional intelligence – they don’t play well with others or need to develop in a variety of different areas. They may need to become a better team member or leader, learn to be more self aware or more resilient, or manage themselves more efficiently. A mentor or coach can really help in these areas. Coaching can help people to apply skills consistently over time and in a variety of different situations – some more stressful than others. A coach or mentor can give someone honest feedback that isn’t easy or even practical for co-workers to provide.

Talent management is a best practice concept that embraces many disciplines, including leadership development, career planning and development, assessment, 360 and other forms of feedback and needs assessment. It also includes training, team building, human resources and strategic planning. Though this process is time and labor-intensive, it will impact an organization at a deep level with lasting, positive results.