Decoding The Talent Management Puzzle

Well in advance of measuring employee engagement, are you confident that you are hiring and retaining the right talent for your organization?

Executives are often flabbergasted when a team has low morale, misses a deadline, and reports back with a lack of enthusiasm. Leaders are quick to point to performance management as the Band Aid that will repair a team back to excellence. You hear it coming… “We didn’t monitor the situation closely enough”.  However, we know from practice that oversight alone isn’t enough to move teams from stranded to raring to go. In fact, strategies such as increasing oversight or even offering a large incentive are rarely effective at obtaining better results. 

There is another tool in a leader’s tool belt that need not be overlooked. That is getting back to basics with a simple, winning strategy for talent management. If you don’t think about talent management on a daily basis, you should. A talent management strategy includes the basic considerations of team capabilities, before you build onboarding programs, career paths, and incentive plans. Well in advance of measuring employee engagement, are you confident that you are hiring and retaining the right talent for your organization?

Start by taking the time to construct roles into the four quadrants of Knowledge, Tools, Skills, and Attitude. We’re not surprised if you’ve already discussed pieces of these, but have you sat down to consider the differences?  As you address your next hire, your next training opportunity, or your next corrective action, consider putting pen to paper on the following:

1. Knowledge comes first, it is the foundation of information and experiences that we attempt to recall at the right moment. Thanks to the digital age, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), and Google, knowledge has become more liberalized than ever. However, be sure to consider what internal information a role requires, not just what external information is available. When documenting the knowledge needed in a specific role, classify information as internal / external and role-specific / organization-wide. The internal, role-specific information is what will illustrate the foundation of a particular role’s required knowledge.  
2. Tools are the strategies we employ to apply knowledge to practical applications. For some, an ISO 9000 model may serve best. For others, especially agile organizations, proprietary methods that change frequently may be the norm. Often these tools are internal processes around software and if your organization hasn’t documented processes, you’re already a step behind. The good news is that standardizing your tools will enable scalability and rapid onboarding of new employees.
3. Skills are the talents we develop, often through several sequential experiences. Skills, unlike tools and knowledge, have to be honed beyond the classroom.  Often we see team members pick up these new capabilities over time, but you shouldn’t leave skill transfer to chance. Your most skillful team members are easily identified in any organization, just ask the question, “Who does this job really well?” We bet your team already knows who has the top skills and these high performers have the skills your entire team needs to master.
4. Attitude manifests itself in the behaviors of individuals. Spend a day at any company and you’ll quickly recognize a series of behaviors representing that company’s culture. A favorite and easily identifiable example of ours is Southwest Airlines, well-known for its culture of customer service. The two most common traps for attitude is believing that it doesn’t need to be written down and that it can’t be taught. Attitude is almost always captured by a company’s core values, either through single powerful words or through phases that capture a common organizational attitude when approaching challenges.  Great leaders know to reward the right attitude when they see it and by doing so they create and maintain culture.

As we reconstruct our roles and responsibilities we have to ensure the four quadrants of Knowledge, Skills, Tools, and Attitude are aligned with organizational goals and career paths. This winning talent management strategy creates opportunity in teams, decreasing time to success, increasing retention, and decreasing absenteeism. So before you think that a new performance management strategy alone will serve you, make sure you have the right talent management strategy. Because aligning your talent strategy to your performance strategy will raise the bar on employee excellence.

Opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinions of any of my affiliated organizations.