What does it mean to say you have a “Talent Management strategy?” It’s a concept that has come to the forefront of strategic planning as organizations realize that a number of traditionally separate L&D domains really function best as parts of a greater whole: things like knowledge management, performance improvement, succession planning, and workforce skills development.
Regardless of how you dice it, I believe talent management is about readiness — readiness to compete, to evolve and to develop. If you’ve been tasked with developing your own strategy, I’ve come up with four components to crafting a working plan, which I’ve used in my organizations’ workforce planning activities. Read below to get some ideas on a strategy that can grow your organization’s long-term health.
Component One: Strategic Foundation
Key Question: In the next 5 to 10 years, what new strategic directions and competitive contractions will your organization and workforce need to adapt to in order to compete in the global marketplace?
The foundation of any effective talent management strategy is developing a workforce that is ready to compete in the marketplace, both today and tomorrow. Practically, this means that your strategy must be able to identify how the business will change to meet the competitive environment in the near and mid-term, and what new skills and knowledge your employees will need to be ready.
My time managing talent strategy at Boeing provided a good example. As the costs of developing and launching new airplane models have climbed stratospherically, and competition has grown fiercer than ever, Boeing has needed to get very tactical about developing new skills required by future business expansions and contractions, often years before they are needed. This has meant that functional leaders need to think explicitly about where their division’s business is going, and who they will develop to get there.
This is a great opportunity to grow for many L&D professionals, as it requires a level of strategic understanding that a lot of us haven’t developed in the past. Developing that understanding and the relationships with functional leaders it requires is incredibly valuable in itself.
Goal: Develop a Talent Management strategy that has as its North Star a clear understanding of the short-, mid- and long-term changes to workforce skills and knowledge as required by the organization’s strategic and competitive goals.
Component Two: Skills and Knowledge Mapping
Key Question: Which skills and knowledge are key to your organization’s unique competitive value?
Effective businesses develop key differentiators that define their unique value proposition competitively. Those that fail in this endeavor don’t stick around long. One of the most important components of any talent management strategy is classifying and shepherding these key talents in our organizations. A good strategy finds ways to uncover, classify and locate key skills and knowledge (incidentally, one of the “classic” activities of Knowledge Management). In contrast, poor strategies focus primarily on skills that may not provide much competitive advantage, or are chosen as a focus for the wrong reasons — without supporting data, on the basis of opinion, or because of stakeholder / leadership interest or pressure. It’s a tragic misuse of learning resources to develop knowledge and skills that are readily available in the marketplace, while ignoring those that make the business uniquely valuable to customers.
Goal: Develop a Talent Management strategy that clearly outlines plans and processes for identifying, classifying and mapping the most important competitive workforce skills and knowledge that enable the company’s strategy.
Component Three: Succession Planning
Key Question: Can you track: 1. Which employees have your most important skills and knowledge; 2. Which candidates are on the path to having them; 3. The likelihood of attrition in either group?
Succession planning is learning and development’s version of risk management. Skills and knowledge aren’t discrete objects we can guard in a database or warehouse; they’re part of the social fabric of our organizations. Knowing which threads exist where, and having plans to repair and replace them when they tear, is a key part of talent management.
There are many ways to do this. At Boeing, we used massive spreadsheets that tracked key roles, the knowledge and skills that made them up, as well as the experts and developing candidates for each role, along with a “bullpen” of likely future candidates, should the need for them arise. While your organization may not require so much detail, a clear understanding of key roles and employees, and a basic “what if” plan for developing new candidates, is a basic part of talent management.
Goal: Explicitly document the development of current and future experts in terms of the strategic skill and knowledge needs of the organization.
Component Four: Learning Paths (Talent Development)
Key Question: Do you know how to grow new experts for a given job role, using an objectively defined and measurable process?
The fourth component is where many learning and development professionals feel most at home. This is the true training aspect: interviewing current experts to learn about how they developed their expertise — training, experiences, trial and error, etc — and then deciding what kinds of tools and events we can build to simulate those rich years of experience in a way that’s efficient and measurable. At both Boeing and Microsoft, we call these learning paths. They have a starting point — a common list of skills and knowledge an employee needs to have to be considered a candidate for a given role. They have a series of learning events — classroom and on the job training, eLearning, certification, field exercises — that build expertise. And they have exit criteria, the skills and knowledge that define a journeyman, expert, or whatever is at the end of your particular path.
The point here: talent management is about making those learning paths explicit, and finding ways to evaluate learners as they navigate them. We need to be able to track our progress to the strategy; we’ve got competitive changes coming up fast, right?
Goal: Develop a strategy that outlines a specific combination of measurable learning tools and experiences that a beginner can navigate to become a journeyman, and later, an expert.
Creating an in-depth talent management strategy from the ground up can seem truly daunting, especially if your organization hasn’t planned for any of the four components. Start small, and excel at one. You’ll quickly find that the process builds on itself, and collecting data begets more data. As with anything worth doing, sometimes the initial leap is the hardest part.
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