If you answered yes to any of the questions on the title page of this blog, we believe you are ready to integrate your talent strategy more tightly with your organization’s strategy and reap the benefits of doing so.
It all starts with strategy. Organizations are systems. The results they produce can be directly correlated to the rightness of their strategy, given market conditions, the needs and wants of customers and consumers, and the degree of fit among and across all components of the organization model. So, the best way to achieve results is to ensure that you have a clearly defined strategy well suited for your situation and then deliver it through an aligned organization comprised of:
- the right core work (the value-add work you do);
- designed and organized optimally;
- conducted by the right talent – right skills, right roles;
- supported by the right culture of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors;
- led by capable, connected, and caring leaders.
If you are not realizing the results you want, assess the fit between your strategy and the elements above. Chances are good there is misalignment somewhere in the system.
If you’re sure you have the right strategy in place and that is well understood and embraced then you are ready to integrate your talent management approaches to increase your capability and capacity to deliver on said strategy. To help you get started we offer our three-phase, twelve-step approach. In this blog post we give a quick highlight of the three phases. In future blogs we will dive a bit deeper into the steps within each phase so check back later for more detail.
Phase One: Define ITM Business Requirements – this phase is all about understanding the requirements that your strategy and business objectives place on talent. Specifically, the capabilities, behaviors and attitudes required to perform and deliver on expectations – your standards of competence – and the degree of fit between current talent practices and what you need. This phase is about clarifying the areas of opportunity and defining a clear set of criteria that will help to inform changes and improvements to your integrated talent management approach.
Phase Two: Develop Integrated Talent Management Approach – Once clear on what is working and what is not, as well as what standards of competence you need to successfully deliver on your strategy, you are ready to develop your Integrated Talent Management strategy, processes and tools. In this phase you will identify critical decision points along the employment or talent lifecycle, as well as begin to segment critical talent populations (e.g., levels, functions, businesses). You will determine what data is required at each intersection of critical decision point and population – what information will you base important talent decisions on and what degree of rigor you will apply – and you will determine the specific approach for securing that data. Typical approaches might include 360o assessments, scenario simulations, external leadership instruments, etc.
Phase Three: Build and Implement Integrated Talent Management – A lot of the heavy lifting is accomplished in this phase. This is when you will validate your proposed design and secure buy-in for the consistent application of real data to inform talent decisions. You will build out the actual tools and processes required for securing that data – interview protocols, on-line surveys, data repositories, among other things – and you will pilot those tools and processes in real time paying close attention to refinements that need to be made. You will build an appreciation for the preparation required by the organization to successfully adopt the new integrated talent management discipline – training, additional buy-in, reinforcement – which will help inform your implementation plan. And then you will implement, measure impact, refine and reinforce your integrated talent management approach.
As mentioned above, we have broken each of these phases down into discreet tasks and steps. We will post these in a series of blogs over the coming weeks. If you feel like the task is too daunting we offer additional support for diving in and beginning the tough, but important work of instilling better talent management discipline.
After 10 years of research, Laurie Bassi, director of McBassi & Co., a human resources consultancy and investment firm, believed that investing in talent could help an organization earn higher returns. To prove her point, Bassi set up a fund that invested only in companies that made significant investments in their people. She started her fund in 2001 in the middle of a sharp market downturn. As of March 2006, an investment of $50,000 in Bassi’s fund was worth $82,900, not including custodial and management fees. The same sum invested in the S&P 500 would have been worth $76,700. This represents 23% higher earnings from the companies that made significant investments in talent.
Ready to increase your performance and earnings? Want to develop talent rather than always having to look for it outside? Ready to strengthen your executive leadership bench? Then stop by again in about a week and we will provide further insight into making Integrated Talent Management a reality in your organization.