This ends our first series on integrated talent management, but we didn’t want to leave you hanging without some food for thought on how to get started. So, here are some “low hanging fruit” ideas to make immediate improvements and begin to establish a cutting edge integrated talent strategy.
Make the shift from “training” to “learning”. No, it’s not a new concept, but we still see companies running people through workshops and “leadership training” programs that are disconnected from the organization’s strategy and business. Abandon over-reliance on off-the-shelf, leadership-for-leadership’s-sake programs. Avoid the inclination to just “check the box.” Instead, apply learning methodologies that actually enable your people to become stronger contributors to your organization.
Amplify the voice and impact of your HR professionals. “We’re not appreciated.” “We’re not invited to the table.” “All they want from us is the transactional stuff, not the strategic stuff.” Sound familiar? It’s a catch 22. The more HR professionals talk about wanting, or not having a “seat at the table,” the more they won’t. To combat this, invest in building trusted-advisor, strategic relationship management capabilities in your HR business partners. Ensure they are properly equipped to (1) influence the parts of the organization they support, (2) bring a suite of strategic talent capabilities to the table, and (3) help their clients take ownership of the talent requirements of their organization.
Stop recruiting, start selecting. It’s amazing to us how many organizations still rely on the “resume and interview” as their primary selection methods when a glut of research has proved just how unreliable they are for selection decisions. If you only make one change in your talent strategy, change how you select people into your organization. Choose from among the numerous proven approaches to assess fit, experience, and capability for the roles you are filling; develop your leaders to employ those methods; and watch the quality of your selection decisions increase and the pain of failed onboarding experiences decrease.
Integrate resource allocation processes and hold leaders accountable. If a leader repeatedly missed her numbers or overran her budget, it’s highly likely she’d be fired. Why, when it comes to talent resources, are we not as stringent in our accountability? It’s likely because counting things and shuffling numbers to meet a target feels less complex than effectively managing people. Leaders still hate delivering tough messages, still hold perfunctory 1×1’s that do little to develop people, and use the word “coaching” in name only. Yet there is little accountability for leaders to engage in the care and feeding of those they are charged with developing. At the root of this issue is often the artificial disconnection of financial and strategic resource allocation processes from talent resource allocations. The use of the “9 box” approach to sorting the talent portfolio has become widely popular despite a great deal of criticism and misuse. In one organization we worked with, we forced leaders to do it as part of their annual operating and budgeting process. They were shocked and dismayed when they began to realize just how disconnected their people decisions were from their financial decisions. Today, they have fully integrated their business planning processes so that strategy, operational, financial, and people planning happen as one integrated set of decisions. They have done away with piecemeal processes and decisions that often contradicted one another. The primacy with which leaders treat talent decisions is dramatically more significant now that they see the immediate implications of those choices on the financial performance of their business.
In our opinion, integrated talent management is a worthwhile endeavor to pursue. And, the good news is you can start small, secure a foothold through some early wins and grow your strategy and approach from there. We wish you much success in your efforts. Write us and let us know how it is going.