By:
Scott Hobbs
Joint Managing Director

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TURNING LINE MANAGERS INTO TALENT MANAGERS
 

Managers are extremely busy.  Despite the pace of their lives and the volumes of workload they face, the vast majority would really like to develop the people who work for them.  They know intuitively that if their team is happy and thriving, good results are not going to be far behind.  A number have a passion for development and for seeing people reach their best - but for many the ‘dark art’ of talent management remains either a mystery or a preserve of the senior managers in their organisation.  Yet successful organisations need to have people using their best strengths every day.  We need people to rapidly progress through a constantly evolving organisation, so that they reach positions where they can make their best contribution.  How much better would it be if ALL managers were active talent managers, pushing this forward!  But can you turn line managers into talent managers in a single day? More important, can you maintain and grow this active talent management culture, without HR having to push it every step of the way?

Over the past decade, a focus on talent management has led to the development of potential models, complex tracking processes and software systems.  We can now slice and dice data, and predict and track career movement, while being careful to ensure fairness and objectivity.   The down-side of this advancement is that talent management now seems to have travelled out of the reach of the busy manager.   Managers are often people who haven’t chosen the development of people as their specialist subject - instead they are IT managers, production managers, call centre managers.  Their schedule is driven by customer and delivery urgencies.  They rarely have uninterrupted time to delve into the thinking that would allow them to robustly manage talent.  

So if you want to turn your line managers into Talent Managers - what can you do?  How can you convince people that it’s even an undertaking worthy of effort?  And if you get to that stage how do enable a busy operational manager to adopt the right thinking fast - without needing all of the background knowledge and years of dedicated experience of an HR professional?    

Why would you want to do it?
Surveys of CEOs show that at the top of the organisation, talent management is rightly seen as critical to business success.  Getting your talent strategy right delivers immediate competitive advantage as people begin playing to their strengths, winning market share and delivering improved bottom line results.   You have identified the best people to take on your most complex challenges and toughest turnround situations.  As well as creating a bottom line impact, talented employees feel fulfilled and engagement results start to rise.   Given the benefits, creating an organisational culture where talent is effectively managed is a strongly value-add activity.

How do you go about it?
In any organisation, there a just a few natural people managers out there, who manage in a sophisticated and sensitive way to create high performing teams.  Often such managers are a nursery of talent for the rest of the organisation.  But not everyone finds this easy to do. Managers have chosen their own specialisms, and have often ended up in people management roles because they are good at delivery, strategic thinkiers, or entrepreneurial, rather than people-focused.

Approximately a year ago, a leading Building Society approached us with this very dilemma.  They had a vision of what the organisation could look like if all their line managers were managing the talented people in their teams actively, right across the organisation.  Despite a mix of ability, they felt that their managers could really help their people release their talent - if they had the right tools.

Our challenge was to take the complex systems and thinking around talent, and to turn them into a toolkit that  a busy manager could use to get the best out of their people.  The objective was to make a significant shift towards the more sophisticated thinking of a talent manager, which would be sustained, year on year.  And they needed to learn that thinking in a day.

This design challenge was rather like making a Swiss watch.  When you as a consumer look at a Swiss watch, you see a highly polished object that is elegant and easy to use.  Often, the watches don’t even need winding or to have a battery replaced.   It’s only if you open your watch up that you would see the complicated and intricate workings that lead to that result.  We wanted to make something that managers would be able to pick up and use to tell the time - without needing to be watchmakers.

Talent managers do 3 things well:

• They have a sophisticated view of potential, and spot and use the potential in every member of the team
• They identify the succession planning priorities for their team, and address these to avoid crisis management
• They quickly grasp people’s strengths, limitations, and development needs - and get them driving their own development

We wanted to provide tools that made each of these areas simple for managers to pick up, and that would improve.
 
Understanding all types of potential
Most managers believe that they have an internal compass that helps them know when someone is talented.  When questioned, many managers admit that their judgement is based on seeing people in their own image rather than objective criteria.   Managers often feel they are making important talent decisions without a safety net - they are not sure how to assess potential, and often their decisions can be substantially altered by more senior management.  By understanding potential and being given a framework of specific, tried and tested things to watch out for, managers can easily review their people.   We also wanted to tackle the problem that leads managers to focus only on those with fast track potential for fast track.  Instead we wanted them to spot different kinds of talent:

• The champion who is critical to delivering top quality work for customers, but doesn’t want to progress
• The ambitious youngster who wants to run before they can walk
• The potential leaders, who have mastered the challenges of the job and urgently need a move or they will look elsewhere
• The steady contributors who will reliably do the less challenging work, but who need to be kept fit for change

We offered them a supportive nine-box grid that helped them understand the value and contribution of everyone delivering satisfactory or higher performance, and how to develop anyone in any cell of the grid.

Identify and address succession planning issues in their team
Succession planning is often the item at the bottom of the to-do list, which is put off or ignored because it feels like an overly bureaucratic way of planning for something that may never happen.  Managers are rightly focused instead on customers and operations in the here and now.  But failures of succession planning result in the biggest knee-jerk panic reactions the business experiences.  If managers ignore succession planning, high performance can be damaged by one crisis after another. We boiled succession planning down to three key questions your boss could ask you.  As long as the manager can answer yes to each of those, they are already ahead of the majority of the managerial pack.

Kick-start strengths-based development that is owned and driven by team members
Employee engagement research tells us that people who are allowed to play to their strengths will be fulfilled in their roles - and will deliver higher performance.  But most managers approach development planning by trying to try fix people’s weaknesses.  The problem is that there are two types of weaknesses.  Those due to inexperience can easily be developed.  But some weaknesses are inbuilt - linked to personality, and indeed to strengths - thus decisive people are rarely patient listeners, and people who are great at adherence (sticking to processes and systems) are rarely innovative.  Trying to develop these inbuilt weaknesses is working against the grain; it generally makes the person miserable, and has little lasting effect.  So we developed a card sort exercise that acts as a discussion provoker, looking at strengths that energise, strengths that drain, weaknesses (inbuilt) to manage, and development areas (where the person can develop new strengths).  On the back of each card we put all the sophisticated thinking at our disposal.  There’s a section on how to use strengths, and what kinds of task or role are ideal for people with this strength - very useful in career discussions.  We included a note on how weaknesses might be the flipside to particular strengths.  And gave suggestions on exactly how to manage each type of inbuilt weaknesses.

Managers loved the cards, as it enabled them to discuss topics like strengths that are mismatched to the job (suggesting a job move), and how to manage weaknesses, taking the heat out of traditionally challenging conversations.
 
So can you turn line managers into talent managers in a day?  The answer from our experience is yes - if you provide tools that reinforce the new, advanced thinking every time they are used.  

Despite their busyness, most managers want to develop people.  They just don’t know how to start.  When they find a practical way to engage with their team members, they very quickly embrace it.   
The proof of the pudding is that 3 months after people are trained, we asked them to rate their talent management skills before the workshop, and after going back and using the tools with their team.  These are the compelling results:

• Understanding potential in team – increased by 57%
• Understanding talent in team – increased by 50%
• Development the team need to focus on – increased by 48%
• Team take responsibility for own development – increased by 41%
• Clear about succession plan – increased by 47%

Instead of presenting complex systems and models, giving the managers a Swiss watch speeds up the process.  They understand parts of the process and trust the rest, knowing that the result will be the right one.  As they use the materials with different team members and move on to manage different teams, their understanding deepens and becomes more intuitive.  

They have become active talent managers.