6 keys to creating talent management for all
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Talent & Potential has learned a lot from working with organisations of all sizes to create a talent management culture that delivers talent management for all. In the process, we’ve created the capacity for integrated succession plans across entire divisions, career conversations for all, great PDPs, and shifts of up to 6% in employee engagement. This article brings together our experience to identify the 6 key things you need to have, to bring talent management to everyone.
1. A driver
You need a strong driver to create a culture shift. Creating an organisation where everyone gets high quality talent management is no exception. What is your driver for action? Are you worried about losing talented people – because managers have not had conversations with them about progression and careers? Is the driver that you want excellent succession planning rather than a reactive approach to dealing with people departing? Is it the cost and morale damage of filling gaps with external hires that’s the pain point? Perhaps you believe that HR earns its seat at the Board by helping to beat the competition – and a key way of doing this is by being seen the best company to work for. Or does your organisation already have an ethical drive to value and support all of your people – so that talent management for all is a natural next step?
All of the above can be measured, and a good start is to convince the business of the pain points of NOT actively managing the talent of everyone in a 21st century organisation. Note that the first step may be as simple as getting one committed sponsor on board; if one Head of Department is driven to make it happen, you will be able to create a fully functioning practical pilot with measurable success. This will often be taken up with gusto by other parts of the business once it has turned from concept to reality.
2. A positive vision about people that managers can buy into
If you want to bring talent management to everyone, you have to do it by involving line managers. Good managers achieve their results by valuing and supporting all the people in their team, using their strengths, and helping them realise their potential. Even average managers don’t want to do things that will upset people in their team. Yet many HR talent tools and processes are resisted by managers – a sure sign that they are not helping managers to motivate their team.
You need touchstone statements that will test every tool, process and communication you design, so that these embody your vision. Examples are:
- Everyone delivering Satisfactory and above performance is valued because they all deliver for the business. We don’t just value fast-trackers – we value every contributor.
- Everyone’s potential is fluid, and can change over their career. At times people will want to be stretched, and at other times they will have other life priorities. These are Honourable Choices.
- Over time, in a successful career, potential will be transformed into achievement and legacy.
- Our processes enable self-directed action. Good performers are able to put up their hand if they feel capable of more, and earn the right for development investment by showing drive and commitment to learning.
- We help people to use and develop their strengths every day.
- We value diverse talents, so our systems have a range of routes that suit different kinds of people.
3. A good definition of potential
A good definition of potential paints a clear picture of what is being looked for and is easy for managers to rate.
The potential definition won’t ask managers to rate potential for a level above their own (‘has the potential for 2 promotions’). 49% of your managers are by definition below average performers. How confident are you that their rating of a team member’s potential to do a job one level higher than the manager’s, is meaningful? Nor should potential ratings rely on senior managers moderating the potential rating of someone they don’t manage and of whom they may have very little knowledge. Such potential ratings are more likely to correlate with extroversion and visibility (or the manager’s persuasive powers) than true potential.
Even some commonly recommended potential definitions can have problems. One example asks managers to rate a team member’s ‘Ability’ as part of a three-pronged assessment of potential. This is not easy for managers to rate. How do you rate the Ability of someone who is a breakthrough technical genius, but you can’t take them to a client meeting because of their lack of social skill? Based on decades of psychological research, potential definitions should enable managers to rate conceptual ability and people skills separately. This individual has high specialist potential, but low managerial potential. Yet this can’t be seen immediately from their potential rating.
Another problem with rating potential is that managers very rarely ask their people if they have the WILL to be stretched or promoted right now. This is critical to know. The will to take on a big challenge varies from person to person, and over time in any career (depending on what is going on in the rest of life). If you don’t ask about how much stretch a person wants right now, you’ll make wrong decisions about how to support and retain that talented person.
Unless your definition is solid and easy to use, you’ll worry about consistency of potential ratings, spend a long time in moderation meetings – and still end up with flaky data. Over time, we’ve developed a potential rating that starts with an overall statement “The capacity and will to take on a bigger challenge for the business” (defined further by 4 separate ratings). This rating is designed to be very robust and easy for managers to rate reliably; and has the added value that it doesn’t create expectations about promotions that you may not be able to deliver.
4. 21st century talent systems
You need to redesign all your current talent systems to follow your people vision statements. For example, if you value everyone at Satisfactory plus, you must take out all the indications of ‘judging’ people that are prevalent in 20th century systems. For example, the most widely used Performance/Potential Matrix (9-box grid) clearly has a ‘good box’ (high performing high potentials who are our ‘talent pool’) and a bad box (underperforming, over-promoted people who we’ll look at hard to see if they should be managed out). Managers dislike this grid because they know that sharing it with people demotivates the majority of their team who feel they’ve been placed ‘one box away from the bad box’.
You need to test all your talent processes against your vision statements. Does your potential rating make people feel ‘labelled for life’? Do the routes into your talent pool provide for people with different strengths (Visible extroverts? Introverts who need to be judged on their outputs? Hares who enjoy being thrown in at the deep end? Tortoises who will put in the work to prepare and win the race? People with families who are not mobile?)? Also – do your systems reinforce self-directed behaviour?
For example, we’ve designed a grid that line managers love, that explores the potential and development of all Satisfactory plus people. After 2 hours, we find that managers want to spend more time talking about it! And they look forward to discussing it with their people.
We’ve also designed award-winning talent programmes that start with asking all good performers to self-nominate for stretching development. We then get these talented people to earn the right to investment – based on their drive and commitment to learning – rather than their manager’s view of them.
5. Investment in training
If you want good talent management in your business, you have to put it at the core of your leadership training. Are all your managers trained in:
- Identifying individual strengths; how to flex the team to maximise the use made of each person’s unique strengths; how to recruit and develop people to increase team bench strength?
- Spotting potential and how to rate potential accurately; how to adapt their management style to support people with different types of potential; how to discuss potential with people
- Using succession planning to stabilise their team and prevent firefighting; how to make their team a nursery of talent for the business
- Understanding what great learning looks like at work; how to design great PDPs based on workplace learning; how to get your team to own and drive their own development; how to use the learning opportunities and experts in their environment
- Understanding different types of career conversations you might need to hold; how to hold these career conversations; how to help people to take ownership and self-directed action to progress their career inside your business
6. Engaging practical tools based on conversations
Line managers are engineers, call centre managers, production managers, store managers, IT and Finance professionals. Talent management is a small but important part of their job – but they may not do it frequently enough to retain the skills they learn in training. They may, for example, only hold 6 career conversations per year. Therefore they need a talent management toolkit of simple, engaging exercises with a guaranteed good result. They need tools that start conversations and make it easy to take action. They need to be able to pick up and put down these talent management tools whenever needed, secure in the knowledge that a useful conversation will result.
We’ve been experimenting and refining talent toolkits over the last 5 years, working with managers to test and improve them so that they deliver value reliably. For example, for career conversations we have a toolkit that focuses the manager and team member on choosing which of 6 possible career conversations to have. Then there is a booklet of questions for the manager and team member to work through, that promotes discussion, useful feedback and identifies action for the team member to take. Finally we have a card pack of 78 career actions that the team member can take themselves – based on hard research into the career management tactics of successful people in many sectors. Armed with this toolkit, managers have no fear in setting up an hour’s career conversation, because they know that the kit itself will reinforce and remind them of everything they learned in training. They can use it flexibly to have a meaningful conversation where their team member makes choices about what to discuss.
There are similar tools supporting conversations about strengths and potential, and workplace learning. These tools are essential to consolidate and reinforce the training so that managers retain – and build – their knowledge and understanding over time.
The takeaway
It is possible to have talent management for all. It requires a clear vision, 21st century processes, and practical, manager-friendly tools. And there is probably no better way for HR to contribute to the success of a business than by creating a employee powerhouse where everyone is using their best strengths, feeling valued, and knowing that in this organisation they can drive their own successful career.
Learn more at our open seminars – contact us at info@talentandpotential.com