Business Technology, for the Win - IT Talent Management

As a CIO, do you want to be successful? The key to any leader's success is the team that they build. No CIO can do it all. No CIO can know it all. You need to surround yourself with intelligent and capable resources. In addition to smart people, you also need to ensure that you attract team players who can help you develop a strong culture. Your goal is to inspire and motivate them to perform at their best and raise the level of the team overall.

Building a top-performing team takes hard work and planning. You need to develop a robust IT Talent Management Plan. As an IT leader, you must work closely with the Human Resources (HR) department, but you cannot wholly pass this off to them and expect them to build your team for you. They have the tools and skills to support you, but ultimately you own the responsibility of making sure that your team is high-quality.

When building an IT Talent Management Plan, there are a number of areas that you need to address.

Job Descriptions and Position Descriptions - Your team needs to understand what is expected of them to be successful. This starts during the recruiting and hiring phase with a complete and compelling job description. This sets the expectations early and ensures that there are no surprises with your new employees during the onboarding process. After new hires join the organization, it is important to continue to evolve their job description into their position description. This ensures clarity in their job duties and expectations throughout their lifecycle as an employee.

Job descriptions and position descriptions need to have the expectations of the job but also need to clearly spell out the skills and competencies needed for an employee to be successful. Skills and competencies are similar in nature but have some differences.

Skills - These are learned knowledge that an employee has gained that enables them to perform the work. These often can be measured through the use of assessments and evaluations. These are often referred to as the hard skills associated with a job. In a technical data role, these might include programming languages such as R or Python or knowledge of programs such as Tableau or PowerBI or platforms such as Snowflake, Oracle, or SQL Server.

Competencies - These are generally inherent skills that a person has naturally. They can be further refined and developed through training, mentoring, and practice. They are not as easy to measure but are just as critical, if not more critical, for an employee to be successful at their job. These are often referred to as soft skills. These can include areas such as verbal and written communication, innovative thinking, growth mindset, inquisitiveness, determination, and teamwork.

One amazing resource for developing strong job descriptions and position descriptions is Gartner . Through a subscription to this service, you have access to a number of professional position description templates that clearly establish the necessary skills and competencies for different roles in the organization. These can help develop a library of assets that can be part of your IT Talent Management Plan and jumpstart your efforts in ensuring that each of your team members has clarity on their roles and responsibilities.

Goals - Part of your talent management plan is to establish your practices for establishing and tracking individual, group, and department goals. Having a clear connection between an employee's goals and the organization's or business's goals can engage your employees to perform at their best. When they can see the fruits of their effort, this creates an intrinsic reward that is a powerful driver.

Rewards - Intrinsic rewards are important, but are only part of the equation. These rewards can be very compelling for employees and can help amplify the passion that already exists within them. To add fuel to that motivation, these should be paired with extrinsic rewards. Monetary spot bonuses are often a good motivator, but also remember that experiential rewards can generate feelings that go far beyond what monetary bonuses can provide. The same budget spent on an employee experience can generate much more motivation and goodwill than if the money was given directly to the employee.

As part of your IT Talent Management Plan, remember that not all rewards need to be individual. For you to be successful, you need to develop a rock star team. They need to perform individually and they need to act as a team. Determine if there are rewards that can be established that motivate team success. Do this in such a way that the team supports and lifts one another to meet the target objectives.

Compensation - Intrinsic and extrinsic rewards are a component of the total compensation package, but it is important to have a strong base. Your goal as a leader is to fight to ensure that your employees are being compensated appropriately for the position that they hold and the value that they create for the business.

It can be challenging to know exactly how much you should be paying your employees. There are multiple organizations that will monitor the market and match your positions to both the average salaries for your markets and the associated upper and lower bands. Some examples of these companies include Aon Radford ( Radford Data & Analytics ), Payscale , and 美世 .

As a Gartner CIO client, you get access to an annual copy of the Gartner / Mercer salary guide. This is a partnership between the two organizations to establish compensation packages for many of the most important roles in your organization. Their data includes baseline salary and short-term and long-term incentives. You can use this to assess how close your compensation packages are to the market. Gartner recently released the 2022-23 version of this report exclusively for CIOs in Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner for CIOs, and Research Board Programs.

A complete compensation analysis includes not only the base salary that an employee receives but also includes other factors such as equity, annual bonuses, and benefits.

Recruiting / Interviewing - By partnering with internal and external recruiting representatives, you have the ability to ensure that you are attracting the right people to your organization. As part of your plan, you want to establish an interview process that moves quickly enough to not lose candidates, but thorough enough to truly vet them. The goal is to identify mechanisms to assess a candidate's fit on the team. The cultural fit of prospective candidates is very important and can be one of the most important criteria associated with building a strong and effective team.

Onboarding / Mentoring - Your plan needs to address how you will bring new employees on board and quickly integrate them into the team. Making sure that they are set up on the systems and working productively is important, but you also want to make sure that they are quickly integrated into the culture of the team. If the team quickly adopts them and sees them as part of the group, they will be more inclined to push forward any of the process steps to get them operational as quickly as possible.

Establishing norms and standards for how mentoring works, who fills the role of mentor, who receives mentorship, and the metrics for measuring mentoring success should all be part of your talent management plan.

Mentoring is a key component of succession planning. It is helpful for the mentor and the mentee. Both grow from the experience. It is important that mentors pass their knowledge on to those who will one day take their place and the mentee gains critical experience to expand their role and prove that they have the skills and competencies to move up in responsibility and position. Mentoring is also a form of leadership and allows you to identify who your strongest leaders of the future will be.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) - One key factor that must be included in your IT Talent Management Plan is that of your processes and approaches to achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This is much more than a program. It is part of your culture. Your strength comes from its diversity. The processes enumerated in the plan are constructs of how you will approach the cultural transformation to ensure that your team understands and lives the fundamentals of this concept.

DEI does not stand alone but will be evidenced in the areas of recruitment and interviewing, onboarding, goal setting, mentoring, succession planning, and even compensation and benefits planning. When interwoven with the way that you approach talent management, it becomes easier to develop DEI as a strategic pillar to developing a welcoming culture for all talented members of your team.

As a CIO, if you have a solid IT Talent Management Plan and are able to execute well on it, you will build a strong team. With your leadership and vision, that team will be able to perform well and ultimately make you successful. In the end, it comes down to empowering great people to work at their optimal level and when that happens the organization wins.

—————————————————————————————————————

Throughout the year, Gartner has events all around the world where you have the opportunity to go and learn from the best analysts in the industry. I just returned from the largest of these events, the Gartner Symposium. I was able to listen to three amazing presentations dealing with IT Talent Management - "Getting Pay Right: Overcome the Challenge of IT?Compensation Hikes in 2022?and Beyond" by Lily Mok , "Seven Big DEI Mistakes and?How CIOs Can Avoid Them" by Jose Ramirez , "Executive Guide to Labor Volatility and Global Talent Resilience" by Frances Karamouzis . As a Gartner member, you get access to presentations like these and can speak with these and other analysts who can provide you with context-specific advice and guidance in building your own IT Talent Management Plan.