Talent management implies recognising a person’s inherent skills, traits, personality and offering him a matching job.
Every person has a unique talent that suits a particular job profile and any other position will cause discomfort.
It is the job of the Management, particularly the HR Department, to place candidates with prudence and caution. A wrong fit will result in further hiring, re-training and other wasteful activities.
No matter how inspiring the Leaders are, they are only as effective as their team.
A team’s output is healthy only if the members are in consensus with each other. To achieve such harmony, the key ingredient is “putting the right people in the right jobs.”
But there is no magic formula to manage talent, the trick is to locate it and encourage it. Talent Management is beneficial to both the organisation and the employees. The organisation benefits from: Increased productivity and capability; a better linkage between individuals’ efforts and business goals, commitment of valued employees, reduced turnover; increased bench strength and a better fit between people’s jobs and skills.
Employees benefit from: Higher motivation and commitment, career development, increased knowledge about and contribution to company goals, sustained motivation and job satisfaction.
Essentially, the process of talent development in organisations is a complex one. This is because the architecture of talent pipeline differs across organisations. The main shared goal of top management and HR professionals in an organisation is to build talent-rich organisation through,
•Zero-Talent Outages: Having two or three people ready, willing and able to step into each role that opens up due to a business opportunity, promotion retirement or resignation of others.
•Succession and not Replacement: Ensuring that these people are actually better than the people they are succeeding, in a short time, if not immediately.
•Becoming a Talent Magnet: Building the kind of reputation as a talent rich enterprise that attracts great talent into the organisation.
Talent rich organisations look at cadres of talent at different levels in the organisations rather than focusing on a handful of individuals only. At each age group they would like to see a good number of people who have great potential, experience, maturity and aggressiveness to drive forward.
From this group, the organisation needs to select a few people; which can lead the organisation towards a futuristic innovative growth path. Along with this it is necessary to create and maintain the HR systems that will help attract, select, deploy, develop, reward and retain this talent.
This essentially means that the organisations needs to manage the careers of the talented people so as to see them move into leadership roles, with the sense of continuity and with an urgency to create an efficient succession planning process in order to create a pool of talented people on a continuous basis.
For developing such an architecture, four dimensions need to be considered:
•A clear, articulated picture of the talent needs for the next several years.
•Developmental pathways that can be used to get the raw potential developed into polished performers(talent transformation)
•Programmes that enable both talent to develop and talent mangers to do a great job of ensuring that the organisation becomes a talent rich enterprise.
In order to develop an effective talent pipeline, corporate need to focus on nurturing, assessment, refilling, and monitoring to ensure that it continues to provide the right conditions through which the human talent can reach its potential and strategic goals. For doing so, organisations needs to have its place a talent development system.
Talent development system: this meta –system is composed of seven smaller system each of which must be aligned with the others the main driver is the human resource strategic planning system, which shows the talent required to execute the strategic plan.
It is made possible by recruitment and selection, career management, training and development, succession management, compensation and benefits, performance management system.
MVPs
If 20 per cent of every organisations workforce consists of ‘MVPs’ (Most Valuable Player), then 2 per cent of the total workforce-are super performers. Super performers are the people who are instrumental in carrying out the corporate mission, whose performance skills and abilities serve as an example to the organisation, and whose departure would have a significant impact on the business.
Every organisation has them and would like to have more. Yet interestingly, not every organisation can identify them. It is puzzling, therefore, to observe in this decade, when it seems organisations are truly starting to acknowledge the strategic importance of human capital, that the processes used to manage that capital are not optimally designed to place quality-in both the talent selection process and the employment experience-at the center of the equation indeed, the primacy of the time to hire metric reflects a worldview still oriented around time.
Organisations have failed to adopt advanced practices for using information about candidates, potential candidates, and employees to facilitate and improve the act of finding and retaining the Super performer. It’s an unfortunate misstep, because quality employees are essential to any organisation. In order to identify the super performers, organisation uses ‘Employee Ranking Grid’.
This report is composed of a two dimensional matrix with performance on the horizontal axis and potential on the vertical. During the review process of this report, we can find that only 3 to 5per cent of the total population in the organisation fall in the category of super performers.
The names in this category is usually known to all, however, there shall be few names that results in strong disagreement. This rather a natural process of sharing results would reveal how the top level accurately identifies the super performers. Given a shrinking labour market that continually presents challenges to attract and retain super performers.
It is not just about retention. High performing companies are seeking to achieve multiple objectives when compensating their top talent. Long term incentives may help to achieve some of these objectives, but other non compensation elements are important as well.
The objectives of high-performing organisations include the following:
•Attract top talent- using a competitive rewards strategy tied to market.
•Engage and motivate employees-driving business performance and connecting results to compensation outcomes.
•Retain top performers-differentiating pay opportunities based on performance, and lengthening the timeframe associated with pay receipt.
•Create succession plans-knowing the next generation of leaders.
•Lengthen the performance horizon-focusing on longer-term results (beyond one year)
•Create line of sight-aligning individual performance, business outcomes, and shareholder expectations.Organisations tailor their compensation strategy to help meet these objectives, and where by long term incentives can play an important role.
Recognise talent
Talent recognition is tied directly to retention and ultimately, organisations results. The recognition associated with incentive eligibility is an important outcome for high performers. Organisations have found that the amount of incentive pay is often less important to certain employees than the fact that they are eligible for an incentive pay award.
Broaden the base
Introduce long- term incentives deeper within the business, selectively for your high performers. Perhaps it is time to ignore internal equity and ensure that superstars understand how important they to the success of the business – both in the short and the long run.
Top performers are not born in top management positions; top performers often rise from lower levels within the organisations- they shall be the next generation of leaders. Hence organisation must use selective awards of long term incentive opportunities to connect them more deeply to the business.
Give top talent more
By differentiating reward sizes, organisation’s can boost morale, suggesting that performance is rewarded. To have the greatest impact, organisations must have a clear strategy, understand what they are trying to accomplish, and tailor the incentive strategy to fit its objectives.
Build excitement
Make employees love their jobs. Clear communication is expected out of employees and vice-versa. Organisations must engage employees in producing results by linking performance with rewards.
(The writer is a member of the faculty at L N Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research, Bangalore)
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