I stumbled upon this course from Kathrine, while I was searching for Talent management concepts in LinkedIn learning. I was curious and wanted to understand the concept of succession planning. This post summarizes my learning from this course on how should leaders go about building a Talent Management strategy within their Org.
Note: I chose the featured image as Runway ! – Cause it’s the most important duty of the people Leaders to provide a “runway” to their direct reports so that they can fly !!! 🙂
Main Takeaways
- Talent management is an ongoing process.
- Develop internal employee for the next role, this will improve employee retention and is also cost effective.
- Focus on engagement and Retention.
- Ensure talent gets enough visibility among the leaders.
- Always maintain a healthy HR- Business partnership for better talent management.
Build your Talent Management Strategy and Plan
Leaders generally have business strategies that they need to implement in the coming years mainly based on the market needs. Business leaders and HR should get together and discuss what new roles, skills are needed in order to achieve that business objective. A true talent management plan should also include what resourcing gaps does the organization has and is there a scope for re-skilling. Based on the above both teams should come up with how many new roles need to be created and how many job postings should be added. The best approach is always to look for internal talent and how we can mentor the team to take up this new role. This will not only reduce the onboarding cost but will also boost employee motivation.
Note: Biz leaders need to own the Talent Management strategy. HR Representatives need to make sure that the leadership role in overall talent management is simple and non-time-consuming to get better engagement from Leaders. Use metrics to show talent management gap need for better strategy and benefits. Idea is to show data around hiring costs, the percentage increase in productivity, etc.
Step by Step guide to build Talent Management plan
1. Identify Talent Needs:
As I mentioned earlier, the first step to build a good talent management plan is when Business and HR functions get together and Identify what the business strategy is and what are the areas where they would need resources to achieve business outcomes. Once the goals are identified we go over what skills are needed.
Being as specific as possible, for example, if the strategy is to build a new mobile app to reach a specific market then the resource requirement would be like 1 Certified PM, 1 mobile architect, 3 iOS native developers, etc.. and finally deciding what success would look like, meaning if building an app is a success or its maintenance is also part of the vision.
2. Assess existing talent:
It is very important that we always look at our current talent pool and assess to identify high potential employees and have a plan on when the employee could be ready for the next role. Talent assessment can be done by following the below process:
a. Having the right assessment tool – What is the criteria that will be followed for the assessment. Is that going to be based on Skill (new training/ certifications) or after achieving a certain outcome?
b. Performance management process – This process involves identifying employee strengths and creating a curated development plan for each employee.
c. Review and succession planning – This is the actual process where various stakeholders (business leaders, HR etc ) come together and decide on promotion/ role changes and should the employee be trusted with a business challenge.
If and when there is a right opportunity organization should always look to promote internal employees as against looking for external candidates.
3. Recruitment:
A recruitment plan consists of analyzing the current and to-be workplace plan, Building the recruiting Strategy, and Review and maintain the talent pipeline. Building a Workplace plan is where the business and HR analyze the headcount that they can allow in the current year and what resource strength YoY is needed to achieve a particular business outcome.
In building the recruitment strategy the recruitment team needs to get a detailed business requirement like what background education should the candidate possess, skills required, past experiences, and so on. Organizations should always make sure that they have strong a Talent pipeline. If this means them identifying external candidates with the right skill or finding the right talent within the organization who can be cross-skilled to take up new roles.
4. Employee Development :
One of the most important cultures Organisations should bring is to have the right employee development programs.
This can be further divided into 3 parts.
1. Leadership Development Programs: These are the programs where a suitable employee is identified and asked to take up an assignment under a proven leader. Here the employee is working on solving a business problem under the guidance of a business leader and will allow the employee to gain not only business acumen but also acquire necessary leadership skills. Furthermore, the assignment leader evaluates the participant on his strength and weakness which immensely helps their growth.
- Skills based Training programs: In an organisation where majority of your employee’s skills are Tech based, it would be a good idea to partner with various online learning platforms like Udemy, LinkedIn Learning and gain a enterprise wide license. This will encourage the employees to take up any trainings related to their skills and also skills they want to acquire as per their career aspirations. Alternatively , leaders can curate trainings in such a way that might help the organisation achieve their business outcome.
- Career development Programs: This category is more of a formal education programs where companies support their employees to take up graduation/ post graduation programs like MBA or MSc and then followed by a Hand-on Experience in their organisation.
5. Succession Planning:
In this final step of talent management let’s review succession planning in little more detail. This starts with identifying if the employee is ready for the next role or not.
What should you keep in mind while performing succession planning:
a. Identify employees: In this step, the manager needs to review each employee’s performance based on their current work and identify their strengths and development areas. Leaders should have a long-term vision for the employee and discuss it with them.
b. Identify Positions: This is an important step where business leaders along with HR reps brainstorm and identify all critical positions in their vertical. These positions could be at a senior leadership level or mid-level management. In addition, they should have clarity on what does that position demand in terms of specific knowledge or unique skills. (Example: ~10 years experience as a Supply chain project manager, or IT project management experience with strong database skills, etc…)
c. Employee specific development plan: Not all employees are ready for their next role yet. Well in that case leaders should make sure they identify and communicate what skills (Tech or Leadership) that an employee needs to demonstrate so that they are elevated to the next role. Managers need to make sure they curate plan at individual employee level explaining skill gaps, identifying the right training that can help them in the process and what is the mentoring and coaching strategy that will be followed.
Talent Management Best Practices
Below are some of the best practices that should help you in your Talent Management transformation journey.
- Focus on engagement and Retention : A market research suggests that organisations with engaged employees have 23% higher chances of revenue increase when compared to others. However, only approx. 50% of the companies are engaged with the employees in the industry.
- Onboarding Process: Well you can start the engagement and retention process by looking at your organisations Onboarding process. Do you have a great first day or week process in place which would delight a new employee ? Further, look at creating individual role specific onboarding process with a clear 30, 60 and 90 day plan. Always have the direct manager own the onboarding plan as he is more closer to the employee than anyone else in his new job and finally set realistic expectations with the employee this will help him understand his new roles and responsibilities and what is expected out of him.
- Career Development: Creating action plan should not end after 90 days, managers should ensure that they develop and discuss long term action plan with their team members. This action plan should include what are the criteria’s for an employee for his promotion or bigger roles, what are the trainings available (Tech and Leadership) that employee can avail. No career advancement plan will lead to employee attrition.
- Increase Talent visibility: Once you have the plan as a Manager your have to make it obvious to the leaders on the TOP performers. Constant appreciation will keep the morale high among team members. In addition, you should also have regular formal review process as part of succession planning and have informal review to discuss employee strengths , weakness and opportunities area (Informal review can happen over lunch or coffee etc..). Some other ways to have the employees engaged would be by creating job rotations and providing them with cross functional opportunities. We can also have members assigned to high profile initiatives . I was once engaged in a company wide initiative and it not only brought me visibility among the leaders but also helped me network within the organisation which I might have never had gotten incase I had stuck to my actual job.
- Create a strong HR- Business partnership: As a manager you have to ensure that you are engaging the HR business partner in timely fashion to help identify talent needs and constantly find ways to engage and retain talent. There are organisation where even the HR org has talent development plan in place which can be used in employee career development. It is also a good idea to involve HR and Business partners in your strategy planning to understand recruiting , succession processes.
Conclusion:
Periodically measure if the current strategy is in line with the company’s values and challenge the status quo. Effectively communicating the values with all employees and clarifying them will help employees align themselves to the organization’s values. In addition, you can use these values during the interview process.
I want to conclude by saying that change will not happen overnight but by following the above process you will ensure that you are on the right track to having a good talent management process.
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