How Do You Grow Your Talent From Within?
In these days of competitive labor markets, greater employee mobility, and increasing recruitment costs, our emphasis has to be on growing talent from within.
This requires a razor sharp focus on performance, potential, and capability development.
Sometimes, it’s best to bring someone in from outside (for example, when you need to lead a major performance turnaround or culture transformation – you understand the principle that the people who built the house can’t renovate it)!
But, more often, it’s better to grow talent from within.
Why? Because:
- You know the individuals you’re dealing with – any promotion decision is inherently lower risk
- You can be more surgical about which skills, capabilities, and behaviors you need, in order to build a culture of performance?
- You can motivate your people by showing them that they don’t have to leave your company and go somewhere else to advance their career
I look at 5 key components in the talent management process.
Four of the five components are assessed at the individual level, and the final one is a comparative assessment that rates your internal talent in relative terms.
This rigorous assessment is generally confined to leaders, not individual contributors
The first element is the behavioral assessment. This is critical if you want to avoid talented jerk syndrome.
Everyone watches your promotion decisions… if you promote someone who behaves badly, or isn’t aligned to the company values and culture, what message are you sending?
The second element is a broad-based assessment against the performance standard for that leadership level (for example, Team Leader / GM / or Executive).
This assessment rates each leader’s performance in each of the categories that your company deems to be important. Most companies would assess their leaders on their commercial and financial performance (of course), but in an industrial business, for example, they might also be assessed on their safety leadership.
The third element is short-term deliverables, which are variously called KPIs, KRAs, MBOs and so forth.
These are normally annual targets that are set to achieve specific outcomes… It’s what most businesses call ‘performance management’. Did this person achieve their KPIs?
KPIs are useful, but they have their limitations, so they can only really be viewed within the context of the other 4 talent management components.
The fourth element is the development plan. This is where you help every leader to think about what they need to do to progress to the next level or, if they are newly promoted, to attain excellence in their current role.
People need to know they have a future development path if they have any ambition to progress.
The final element is the nine-box. This is where you map every leader in the business on a grid, in order to compare their performance and potential.
It enables you to see the relativity of your talent, so that you can plan their development paths methodically.
A key rule here is that there is no potential without first demonstrating performance.
Nurturing your talent requires deliberate, methodical assessment and management of your people… but if you’re not doing this, what are you doing that’s more critical to the long-term success of your business?