How Early Talent can Adopt High Flyer Behaviours Fast!
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T&P are presenting at the ISE Student Development Conference on this topic on the 28th March. We’re also sharing tools that you can use to create more high flyers – based on 281 hours of research and analysis into the behaviours of high flyer early talent in 6 large organisations. So in a nutshell – what are the behaviours of the early talent who outperformed their peers, and were most highly valued for adding business value? From interviews with the high flyers themselves and their early managers, we identified 3 broad clusters of behaviours mentioned as important for success, and 11 sub-groups.
- Business Contribution behaviours, with 4 sub-groups (delivery, business aware, clarifies complex information, adds business value) – these helped people impress through their contribution to the business.
- People Skills behaviours, with 4 sub-groups (initiates relationships, builds good relationships, incisive communicator, culture sensitive) – these helped them impress by working effectively with others.
- Self-Directed Skills behaviours, with 3 sub-groups (self-managing, self-directed learning, drives own career) – these made them easy to manage, and enabled them to navigate their own successful path in a large organisation.
- You tell them what good looks like
We created a pack of Professional Success Cards that give 55 bite-sized actions to take based on the research, and devised ways to focus their attention on this throughout the first year. (We’ll be demonstrating this at the ISE conference.) It was amusing to us that wherever we did this, Graduate Managers would say “We’ve got a really good crop of graduates this year – we must have got selection right!” Well no – you just told them exactly what they needed to do to be impressive! The rules for success are very different in academia and at work – and people need help to understand and apply the new rules. - You appraise them specifically on the success behaviours that make the difference
We developed G365 – an appraisal scheme that was tailormade to get people on rotational schemes to use more high flyer behaviours. This helped managers to be consistent in addressing how they were doing, and how they could improve. G365 resulted in an 18% boost in early talent ratings of how challenging and useful placements were, and the scheme moved from 14th to joint 2nd in national ratings based on early talent feedback. This shows the power of helping managers all work to the same behavioural vision for success! - You create digital learning experiments to support people at any location
We’ve been trialling a series of digital learning experiments based on the high flyer behaviours. This tackles the issue of ensuring consistent development for people spread out nationally or globally. The experiments are curiosity-driven learning that asks early talent to experiment with success behaviours and post their observations and results in order to learn. The process can also involve line managers and creates a strong learning community if people can’t regularly meet face-to-face. In a recent test of Learning Experiments, graduates showed an average 31% increase in high flyer behaviours, sustained 3 months after access to experiments had ended.