Persuading the board to invest in talent management
According to the newspapers, Chief Executives are kept up at night by the talent question. Fuelled by the thought of losing key people, they are suffering a kind of talent-induced insomnia. Yet from inside the organisation, it doesn’t feel at all like this, especially when we try to get budget, resources, and Director time to address talent issues – it sometimes seems like a never-ending battle to gain support for executive talent management or Graduate programmes. Talent can add tremendous value to the business – so the question is: what steps can be taken to establish talent management’s rightful place as a valued business enabler?
1. What problem is it solving?
There is a real danger that Talent is seen as a ‘worthy’ cause. It is tolerated because, ‘we should be doing something for our people’, whereas scores of studies show it can add clear value. The first challenge is to identify why talent matters in your organisation. What would be the one thing that would galvanise the Board into action?
In conversation with a Chief Executive, I asked what prompted them to invest heavily in talent management in their organisation. The response was immediate and compelling. They explained that as soon as they realised that their internal fill rate for positions was only 30% – and that the resultant recruitment bill was eye-watering – investing in talent pipelines became a no-brainer.
In another organisation, when the Board was considering halving the numbers of the global graduate programme, the key piece of information that stopped them in their tracks was how many of their 118 senior vacancies were filled from past members of the graduate programme. The graduate alumni, who represented 2% of the employees 2 bands below, were filling 10% of the senior vacancies 5 years on. In fact, that information made the board wonder whether they wanted to enlarge the scheme!
2. How do you demonstrate talent’s added value?
Talent management needs to be seen as a business essential, not as a ‘nice to have’ HR project. When the business see the programme as essential to their success, the support and required resources follow. The key to this is to establish – in no uncertain terms – the business benefit. You may want to demonstrate the impact of:
- Improving your external fill rate, to reduce the spend on recruitment firms
- Maximise retention – to save significant sums of money resulting from churn
- Reduce the time to hire by having internal talent pipelines in place – measure disruption costs
- Tackle the risk of exposure through poor succession planning – cite examples
- Drive engagement, increasing the performance contribution from each employee
- Address demographic problems created by an ageing workforce
- Fill key roles in the business where it is hard to find qualified external candidates
- Increase the number of people coming into the organisation from outside the sector, augmenting the organisation’s ‘people bench strength’
- Build a cadre of leaders who are tailored to your organisational culture
3. How do you ensure ongoing support?
There are a number of strategies that you can use to ensure ongoing support:
Meet the people – the most effective strategy is to get the senior leaders to feel and touch the programme. Once they connect with it and the people on it, you’ll win far more support than if they see it as purely an idea with nameless, faceless people. One way to do this is to involve them in the selection process. Seeing themselves as part of the team who are ‘talent spotting’ causes them to care about individuals who are on the programme. Another strategy is to pair up your true high potentials with senior leaders as their bosses or mentors. When senior leaders begin to meet people who are genuine High Potentials, they often get very excited. This is particularly the case where the HiPo is someone they have never met before. It creates the perception – which is completely true – that there is a whole swathe of talent out there that needs to continue to be unearthed.
Maintain high profile support – it’s a fact of organisational life that senior managers are looking for a steer from their Board of Directors on what they should be interested in. They are hugely influenced by Directors’ behaviour and by the decisions they make. Gaining support from even one or two members of the Board is often enough to build momentum. Make it really easy for people to get involved. They may not want to write a paper or to attend lengthy meetings, but find it easy to go for dinner with some of the talented people, or to involve themselves in a Q&A about the business, or to mentor a talented individual once a month.
Keep communicating – it is tempting to ‘go quiet’ and assume that people will remember there is a talent programme that needs to be supported. This is rarely the case. Senior leaders, especially board members, have so many things to focus on, that it is easy for it to slip from their radar. Regular proactive communication will keep their attention. Be the bearer of good news – data, stories, successes.
Let other people tell the board that it’s good – communicate to a wide group of people around the organisation. I’ve had experiences where other people in the business have communicated successes from talent programmes to senior leaders because they know they are interested in it. If you communicate with a lot of people – positive upward communication will start to happen without your involvement.
Deliver what you said you would – make sure that if you have made promises that certain targets will be reached, take it seriously and reach them. When you have achieved what you set out to do, make sure they are aware of that fact. If you can get the KPIs you are working towards onto their dashboard or regular management information, you will have constant visibility as these are regularly reviewed.
Talent does not automatically earn its space on the Board’s agenda. Make sure that your talent programmes are solving problems that are worrying your business leaders. And if they aren’t yet worried about talent – provide the facts and figures that WILL worry them!