Not Every Role Is ‘Critical’—Here’s How to Pinpoint the Ones That Truly Matter (Before It’s Too Late)

Which role is more critical: fighter pilot or commercial airline pilot? Choosing seems impossible, yet we often task managers with making this same type of decision. Presented with pinpointing their critical roles, HR teams usually sigh when the returned document effectively lists the Manager's entire team.?

Accurately identifying critical roles is paramount in ensuring that vital target groups are talent-mapped across the workforce while also surfacing potential business risks. The ultimate goal is to have a clear visual representation of the entire talent landscape, mapping the scarcity of skills against the backdrop of a role's business value and strategic importance. Armed with this information, strategies for retention, talent acquisition, and succession development can be fortified. However, executing this task is easier said than done, and often, the achievement of a 'done state' is hindered by the challenges of collecting and calibrating information and making it widely accessible and up-to-date to bolster business decisions.??

Talent Mapping: Steps for Implementing the 9 Box Grid

Having established the foundations of the 9-box grid, the next step on this journey is to understand the key stages of the implementation process. This ensures that at each milestone, the full potential of the 9 box grid is leveraged.?

A crucial component of the implementation process is correctly identifying which roles will be mapped and, most importantly, which are 'critical roles'.

The five key implementation steps include:

1. Identifying Target Roles: Pinpointing which roles are crucial for the process, focusing on positions that are key to achieving organisational goals.
2. Defining Performance and Potential: Collaboratively establishing clear, comprehensive definitions for 'Performance' and 'Potential' to ensure consistent understanding and application across the organisation.
3. Conducting Calibration Sessions: Organising sessions where management teams review and adjust initial employee assessments to ensure uniformity and fairness in the evaluation process.
4. Formulating Talent Management Strategies: Implementing specific strategies for managing and developing talent, to address the unique needs and opportunities of each of the nine talent category segments.
5. Periodic Reassessment: Committing to regularly revisiting and updating talent assessments to reflect changes in organisational needs, employee growth, and external market factors.

Talent Mapping: Identifying Target Roles

The first step of the implementation process involves identifying how many roles you wish to include in the Talent Mapping exercise. The ideal situation is to Talent Map the entire organisation. This depth unveils invaluable company broad insights into development needs, succession gaps, performance management requirements, and early identification of emerging talent.?

Failing to map deep enough into the org chart risks not identifying and engaging rising star Hi-Po talent. These individuals equate to just 3-5% of staff, yet are invaluable team members. They are reported as being 91% more valuable than the average employee, driving 400% more productivity than their counterparts. They are ideal candidates for critical future leadership roles and are often ripe for competitor poaching. Identifying them early is vital.??

However, without the aid of an affordable software tool, talent mapping the entire workforce using manual processes with Excel and PowerPoint can become dauntingly time-consuming. The labour-intensive process of collecting and aggregating data from various Excel sheets, correcting user errors, and managing staff changes throughout the mapping process can substantially slow the progression of conducting meaningful talent discussions. In worst-case scenarios, it may even prevent the mapping initiative from advancing to the overall goal of implementing talent management strategies.?I've personally been there!

When HR resources are constrained to manual processes, it’s wise to concentrate efforts on a carefully chosen subset of roles deemed critical to achieving the organisation's strategic objectives. These are roles in areas pivotal for business growth and positions that, if vacated, could pose risks to business continuity and success.?

Suggested priority segments for talent mapping include the following roles:

• Critical roles - Specific roles or functions critical to meeting and exceeding the strategic challenges ahead. These roles have high strategic value in achieving business goals.
• Scarce roles - Due to current market forces, these are hard-to-fill roles due to specialised skill sets that are hard to attract, internally develop, or retain at the levels of experience required.
• Senior level roles - Targeting specific senior levels in the organisation, which are integral to succession planning.

A targeted approach ensures that even with constrained resources, talent mapping efforts can yield strategic insights and guide effective talent management practices for a subset of positions.?

Identifying Critical Roles: Structural Risk Verses People Risk

Identifying truly critical roles within an organisation is a challenging endeavour. The problem is that when managers return lists of whom they deem critical to business success, they often include non-essential roles or omit crucial ones. The core issue is the confusion between their perceived team member's value in the role and the intrinsic value of the role itself. It’s a conflation of ‘people risk’—the loss of someone with exceptional business knowledge and skills—with ‘structural risk’—the risk to business goals due to the role being vacant or having the wrong person occupying the position. Looking at the role objectively, not the incumbent, is essential.?

Truly critical roles are heavily reliant on the incumbent's judgment. They often operate under volatile business conditions, with undefined processes and limited support. They disproportionately affect the business's bottom line, underscoring their critical nature.?

Contrary to common misconceptions, critical roles are not exclusively at the top of the organisational hierarchy but are distributed across various levels. It’s imperative that talent mapping exercises are not restricted to mapping just the top 2-3 levels of the business. This will capture senior roles but omit non-senior critical roles, leaving potential business risks unsurfaced deeper in the organisation. A way to remove this conflation is by prompting managers to evaluate each role based on the following three criteria rating each in turn (high, moderate, low):

• Strategic Value: determining how pivotal the role is for achieving the current business goals and overcoming strategic challenges facing the business.
• Business Value: determining how essential the role is for daily operations and critical to maintaining basic organisational functions.
• Market Circumstances: determining how difficult it is to fill the role due to an inability to develop the required skills internally or a current scarcity of suitable external candidates.??

A role that consistently scores high across all three criteria is undeniably critical to the business. Dissecting criticality factors across these criteria serves to aid managers in distinguishing between the current occupant and the role itself. Precisely gathering this data facilitates a clear visualisation of the entire talent landscape, offering dynamic mapping of skill scarcity against the backdrop of the roles' business value and strategic importance.

Dynamic Talent Maps: View What’s Important To Your Business

The accidental omission of critical roles from your talent mapping process poses significant risks when only a small subset of positions are being mapped. This highlights the strategic value of investing in a tool to enable the mapping of every position within minutes. Equipped with extensive datasets and the ability to effortlessly create customised exportable graphs and talent maps, HR is best armed to present the C-Suite with forward-thinking talent management strategies that best utilise top talent and surface business risks. This approach not only enhances strategic planning, it clearly identifies the Fighter Pilot role as truly critical.?

Up Next: What Do We Mean By Performance and Potential?

Building on the insights garnered, the second step of implementation is defining the axis definitions for Performance and Potential. Accurately rating staff against these dimensions transforms the talent mapping exercise from a conceptual model into a powerful engine for organisational growth and employee development.?

Getting In Touch:

If you’re looking to digitise your talent mapping (9-box grid, 4-box grid, etc.)—so you can quickly identify truly critical roles and instantly generate talent maps, succession plans, and individual development plans—feel free to message me directly or visit www.dothings.io. We offer affordable, fully customisable software solutions that streamline and elevate your HR strategy.

This article was originally posted on the DoThings blog.