Mamee-Double Decker Group

HR practitioners will wonder who they will lose after the year-end bonus is paid or during the start of the new financial year when headhunters come calling to steal talents. Even top-notch organizations will have the same concerns as they battle their fiercest competitors for the same talents.

Positioning Your Best Talent With Your Most Critical Positions Potentially Generates The Maximum Value As Compared With Any Other Combination.

For HR in industries facing talent crunches, what do we do? Attrition is inevitable, but one of the most effective counter-agents to an employee’s lack of staying power, besides salary, is their growth, in this case, both personally and professionally.

For organisations with hundreds of employees, do we have adequate resources and budget to take care of every individual? Of course not. So, how do we ensure our business is sustained by keeping the right people with us?

Every employee can be called a talent. But with limited resources, you want to invest the most in those who can return the most back to the Company.

Who are your talents?

Using performance data over a period of time to check for consistency, identify your talents and rank them in terms of strength. If you can, include an assessment in learning agility, which is a great pre-cursor to potential and future performance.

Once you know what your key talents are, identify your critical positions so that you can match them with these positions.

Key positions typically have great impact to the company if left empty and/or are hard to fill due to a lack of competent candidates.

Which talent for what position?

Check each talent’s career aspiration, which is a must-have starting point. That being said, this is not enough. The immediate superior, who plays such a crucial role in developing and keeping our talents, must agree that the talent’s career aspiration is the right one for them. This accurate assessment can only get better if there is an alignment of the targeted role between the two of them for the talent to aspire towards.

But there’s never going to be a perfect fit of talents to critical positions? What then?

While that is true, it should not stop us from mapping as many right fits as possible, as this match allows the Company to know what to do with their talents and which role requires external talents to be brought in to improve your talent bench strength.

For talents aiming for the same position, this means you have a backup, which is always a good thing. But also open your minds to consider some talents who may do as well or even better in a new role. Have you considered moving from a technical role to a non-technical role such as human resources? With HR systems, AI, analytics, and RPA, even HR has become highly technical, and an IT specialist will not find HR to be a strange place to be.

Some organisations promote people due to their seniority but they make horrible bosses. We must assess leadership capability before we promote or move our talents up.

What do we need to know from our talents?

The answers here are pertinent to not only People Managers wanting to get a handle on their talents or HR facilitating the Company’s talent management and development but also every one of us who wants to progress in the organization as a talent.

The first thing to ask is whether we will grow to the next level. Are we willing to move to another role, take up additional responsibilities or even be based outside of our current location? Then, ask, how can this person take up a higher role? Does this person have the necessary experiences, exposure, knowledge and skills to make them competent? Finally, ask when this person is ready to move up. Is it soon? Or do they require more time?

TALENTS BELONG TO THE COMPANY AND NOT TO INDIVIDUAL MANAGERS. THe management-team must ensure that this is made clear to all and Talents ARE developed for the company.

How do we actually make an investment in our talents?

Many of you have been introduced to the concept of learning by 70/20/10. For the uninitiated, 70 refers to learning by doing the work or learning through experience. This includes project work, OJT and job rotations. 20 refer to learning from others, which can be your immediate superior or mentors/coaches. Finally, 10 refers to classroom training or attending courses/seminars and conferences. Of course, learning through experience is most effective.

Organisations should adopt a structured development plan which features a heavy emphasis on project work and job rotations. The former may be easier to do than the latter, but it still requires management to create the environment for projects to take place and for team members to be rewarded for their extra efforts. For the latter, it’s even more difficult as superiors tend not to want to share their best people. In this case, the management team must work as one to allow for and make the rotations happen.

Wrapping up (and covering the rabbit hole).

Talent management and development in any company industry is not so difficult to do. Sure, the situation is more precarious if you are a manager or HR in a renowned, fast-moving corporation where talents are actively courted. However, setting up a Talent Framework is relatively easy. It is more challenging to get it as part and parcel of your critical, annual HR calendar of activities. More to the point, getting your Managers to be passionate about identifying and developing their talents is crucial to the success of any framework. Good luck in your efforts as a talent yourself, as a manager of talents, or as part of the management/HR team looking after your talents. It is, after all, a team effort!