As a team leader, you want to attract, retain, and grow the best talent for your team. But how do you identify who has the potential to excel, and how do you help them develop their skills and career paths? In this article, we will explore some of the best ways to find and nurture top talent for your team, based on the latest research and best practices.
Performance is not the only indicator of talent; some may excel in their current roles yet lack the ability to take on new challenges or learn new skills. Others may have high potential but need more guidance and opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities. To identify potential, you should look beyond the results and assess factors like learning agility, motivation, curiosity, self-awareness, and leadership. You can use a combination of tools such as behavioral interviews, psychometric tests, 360-degree feedback, and simulations to assess potential. Additionally, you can observe how they respond to challenges, feedback, and change in their daily work.
More often than not, it is the Manager under whom a person performs well than the person himself. A Manager can become a leader when he understands the true potential and guides and places the right talent in the right path for them to do their job correctly; not forgetting timely feedback and most importantly, clearly defined goals for the member. Not to ignore, the person had potential which is why they are part of the team and performance is a result of what we define, motivate and track for them to achieve the mutual goals.
Feedback and coaching are essential for developing talent, as they help people understand their performance, identify their gaps, and set their goals. As a team leader, you should provide regular and constructive feedback and coaching to your team members based on the principles of being specific, timely, balanced, collaborative, and action-oriented. Additionally, you can leverage external sources of feedback and coaching such as mentors, peers, customers, or experts. Encourage your team members to seek feedback from others and share their insights with you and the team. Doing so will provide support, encouragement, and recognition to help them grow.
I started my career as an introvert and did not bother much about things around me and one of my leads came to me and explained the purpose of my work and why it is important to work with people to build the team and deliver as a team than finishing just my job. Importance of feedback given constructively made waves into my thought process and I have not only made friends, but laid a path into public speaking and have made it to Competent communicator by Toastmasters International.
Opportunities and challenges are an essential way to develop talent, allowing people to apply their skills, test their limits, and learn from new experiences. They also boost engagement, motivation, and satisfaction. As a team leader, you should offer opportunities and challenges to your team members based on their interests, goals, and potential. Vary the types and levels of opportunities and challenges, providing a mix of short-term and long-term, easy and hard, familiar and unfamiliar, and individual and team-based opportunities. Additionally, ensure they have the necessary resources and guidance to succeed with direction, feedback, coaching for growth. Recognize their efforts with acknowledgement of contributions, celebration of achievements, and reward of results. You can also create opportunities and challenges such as special projects, more autonomy or responsibility, different roles or functions, or involvement in cross-functional or cross-cultural teams.
Being in operations, planning the work becomes challenge at times as we have days where the incidents take top priority and days when we have nothing to do due to dependent work with others. We always plan to schedule an adhoc discussion to talk about the personal goals and challenging them to build something that makes them closer to their goals. If someone is passionate about Leadership, as a leader, I recommend my team to use the time as an opportunity to learn internal and external courses and use accelerator programs within the company to get one step closer to where they wish to be.
Learning and development are the outcomes of developing talent, which involve acquiring new knowledge, skills, and competencies, and enhancing existing ones. As a team leader, you should facilitate learning and development for your team members by creating a learning culture that is curious and encourages continuous improvement. Provide a variety of learning methods, such as courses, workshops, webinars, podcasts, books, articles, videos, games, simulations, case studies, discussions, peer learning, mentoring, coaching etc. Customize the learning content to the needs and goals of your team members to make it relevant and engaging. Monitor and measure the learning impact of your team members and use the data to adjust and improve the learning content and methods. Moreover, you can help your team members create their own learning plans where they define their objectives, strategies and activities.
Career paths are the final element of developing talent, and are essential for career satisfaction, retention, and mobility. As a team leader, it's important to plan career paths for your team members. This includes exploring their career aspirations, assessing their career readiness, designing their career plans, implementing their plans, and reviewing them periodically. You should also collaborate with other team leaders, managers, and HR professionals to create and communicate the career paths available within your organization. This will help facilitate the career transitions and movements of your team members.
I believe this is the most important aspect of leadership. Planning Career path not only gives an idea of what has to be done, but solves the important part of motivation by defining the 'Why' to the employee/member. When the 'Why' is clearly known, the sale ('motivation') happens quickly. Lot of times the 'when' part is not clearly definable due to the organization dynamics, however the clear career path opens the avenues for the members to think of the 'big picture' and is good enough to get the job done and lets the time take care of the proceedings.