Organizational Development Consulting

    Talent Management Best Practice

    Talent Management Best Practice has emerged as a cornerstone of the organization’s Human Resource function and has overarching strategic implications.  Forward thinking organizations embrace Talent Management (TM) as a critical success factor and leverages acquisition, development, and succession as the macro focus areas when developing enterprise-wide people strategies.

    Talent Management Focus Areas and Considerations

    Talent Acquisition

    • Talent acquisition is now considered a critical and fully integrated best practice in an organization’s upfront hiring process.  By involving management and leveraging clearly defined roles/responsibilities, organizations can benefit from shortened talent ramp-up time, improve overall moral, and collaboration/contribution earlier in the employment cycle.  Creating attractive employment packages, dynamic working conditions, diversity, and growth opportunity all contribute to the “attraction.”  However, it is equally critical to build substantive screening and selection criteria to help hiring mangers fill the front end with the proper competency baselines.  By ensuring the early alignment of resources in the pool, we promote early-stage productivity that can be measured in double digit improvements, lower attrition, and higher engagement.  Thus, cost of acquisition and talent ROI is optimized across a multiple of return in value-to-scale growth scenarios.

    Talent Development

    • “Training” employees is not enough to stay competitive in today’s marketplace.  The adage of the past was to become a “learning organization” of the future requires that companies become, “thinking organizations.”  Best practice approaches to talent development encompasses various blended delivery models, supportive learning artifacts, and scenario based curriculum development, all delivered by senior level practitioners that have an understanding of industry/organization needs.  The distribution of content should blend not only modality, but also embrace the use of peer to peer, social, and the curating of IP that meets the needs of your workforce, with agile solutions and the just-in-time application of skills.  By using a toolbox of assessments and pre-evaluation work, custom learning paths, supporting artifacts, and coaching/mentoring programs you are ensured to maximize the impact of training across the enterprise.   The aforementioned is always most effective when a dynamic focus is put on the “purpose” of learning and tied to a dynamic performance management baseline.

    Talent Succession

    • The loss of talent has sunken costs we will never fully be able to measure.  Understanding the need to keep moral, productivity, and engagement high, while lowering the cost of attrition is a critical success factor that is often overlooked.  An organization’s employee engagement model must encompass multiple approaches to build participation, inclusion, and diversity.  In many ways, talent retention is as much about organizational culture, as it is about core competency.  Forward focused organizations understand the need to retain talent, and they also understand that the old models do not meet the new needs.

    Talent Management Implementation Best Practices

    Macro

    • Recruiting – Sourcing, Candidate Pools, Interview
    • Alignment – Compensation, Employer Brand, Corporate Values
    • Onboarding – Collaborative Validation, Mission, Cultural Synergy
    • Training – Job Rotations, Leadership, Role-Based Curricula
    • Mentoring – Coaching, Sponsorship, Peer Reviews
    • Career Pathing – Goal Setting, Envisioning, Aspirational Planning
    • Cross Training – Cross Functional Readiness, Skills Optimization, Domain Knowledge
    • Change Management – Readiness Review, Change Plans, Stakeholder Management
    • Transition Planning – Calibration, Talent Reviews, HiPo Identification

    Organization

    • Align People & Business Strategy
    • Define roles and responsibilities – job descriptions
    • Develop cross departmental talent plans – Identify crossover skills
    • Build performance management models
    • Competitive Salery Review
    • Establish cultural norms
    • Short and long-term incentive programs

    People

    • Review & validate job functions
    • Competency Mapping – Map skills to job functions
    • Assess skills by job function – Performance Assessment

    Process

    • Create an agile talent model
    • Design enterprise talent best practice
    • Integrate performance metrics
    • Build cross-functional talent models

    Technology

    • Ensure it is non-inhibitive
    • Align HRMS systems
    • Scale to a project system
    • Create employee interface

    Why Talent Management Is Important for Business Continuity

    Talent Management strategies can help organizations realize optimal results.  However, in order to accomplish the positive impacts discussed above, they must understand the scope of the actions and how they integrate with other core business functions.  In our experience, the highest rate of return is recognized when organizations “build” cross-functional plans to consider continuity, sustainability, and succession as part of the talent foundation.  Organizations that approach talent management in a segmented way can still realize value, yet a deliberate execution plan for each element must be defined.  The first step is always defining the desired outcome and in doing so, you can better illuminate the path forward that best meets your organization’s needs.

    Customize your Consulting Experience

    • Align Subject Matter Experts with your Industry, Region, and Culture
    • Benefit from Benchmark Research
    • Gain Insight from our Cross-Industry Experience
    • Partner via our Stewardship Engagement Model – Watch the Video
    • “Own Your Knowledge” with our Teach/Learn/Practice/Apply, Approach
    • Accelerate Individual Growth with Performance Coaching
    • Supplement with Professional Development Training

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