Talent Management Success

Posted: July 10, 2017 by Robert Craven

Talent management is a hot topic for everyone: getting the right people at the right desks doing the right things. Especially if you are sub-1000 staff and you don’t have your own HR team. Whatever your size (9, 90 or 900 staff) you still need to have a plan in place for recruiting, training and retaining your most valuable asset, your team.

Working from the principles of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, your team needs to demonstrate a full understanding of how your organisation approaches and deals with the following attributes:

• Trust
• Conflict
• Commitment
• Accountability
• Results

Healthy teams have a full understanding of what each of these values mean. In other words:

1. They trust one another.
2. They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas.
3. They commit to decisions and plans of action.
4. They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans.
5. They focus on the achievement of collective results.

Here are five questions you need to be asking yourself about your talent strategy. The first four are talent management related and the fifth is really talent acquisition focused.

 

1.  Are your business objectives and your employee goals aligned and if not, why not?

You need to make sure your talent (your team), understand exactly how what they do influences the success of your business. Alignment is about them knowing what goals they should focus on and why these are important to the company’s overall success. This helps them focus on the right things.

 

2. Do your performance management processes positively influence productivity?

Whatever form of performance management processes you have in place, they should positively influence productivity. They should communicate, encourage and hold people accountable for meeting performance expectations (doing the right things the right way). They should also leverage individual strengths by putting people in jobs that support their strengths and by giving them the tools and resources needed to increase their performance.

 

3. Do you have the right number of people doing the right jobs?

Are the people in your teams placed effectively, according to skillset? If the team is achieving its targets and hitting KPI’s you’ve probably got it right, but if not, you may not have the right people or the right number of people, sat at the right desks.

 

4. Are you able to manage turnover in key positions?

Have you got your finger on the pulse of your key staff members: do you know who is twitchy and are you putting in place programmes and policies that increase commitment?

 

5. Are you able to support business growth with a parallel talent acquisition program?

A growing business needs to manage and train new staff at the right speed for them to be ready to contribute as demand increases. No mean task as it takes 3-6 months for new staff to become fully productive.

 

So, there we go, a smoothly running team can really be as simple as clear communication and getting the right bums on the right seats… look out for a follow up article on talent recruitment coming soon.