Shift Your Mindset: Revolutionize Your Talent Strategy

Before venturing on this journey, let’s envision the destination. What does a digitally transformative organization truly look like? To achieve true transformation facilitated by the Open Talent model, it’s crucial to systematically delineate your intentions and harmonize them with key organizational stakeholders.

This initiation shifts your organizational lens – revealing the expansive landscape of potential. It serves as a lighthouse for your leadership, illuminating the way forward. There are key 5 steps:

1. Identify The Right Stakeholders

Open Talent integration extends to numerous organizational departments. Involve senior representatives from HR, Operations, Risk, Legal, and Procurement for seamless program initiation. Growth-oriented stakeholders with robust leadership can aid communication of progress, challenges, and adjustments. Preempt stakeholder obstacles via collaborative discussions. Set goals, anticipate challenges, and seek support from influential leaders to inspire mindset shifts.

2. The 'Art of the Possible' Workshop - Gaining Leadership Alignment

An internal workshop, known as the 'art of the possible', assists managers in articulating measurable and meaningful needs. Its primary aim is to establish clear objectives.

• Is there a massive turnover problem you need to fix?
• Are you desperately looking for data scientists??
• Are technical hurdles slowing your innovation process?
• Do you need to tap into fresh thinking?

Workshop goals need to be explicitly charted and managed. The workshop should introduce the concept of framing and reframing and consider how to evolve your current leadership, culture, and strategy prior to a company-wide transformation.

3. Framing And Reframing

These are crucial leadership skills. Shifting mindsets empowers teams to embrace new opportunities and challenge entrenched organizational norms. Take inspiration from Dick Fosbury’s innovative high jump approach. As a high school student, Fosbury was obsessed with the high jump. Sadly, he wasn’t very good. He failed at all the standard techniques and couldn’t qualify for the varsity team. Rather than give up, he invented his own kind of jump, the Fosbury Flop. Early attempts yielded little. He could have packed up, gone home, and vanished into obscurity.

Instead, he reframed the problem. He experimented, learned, and refined a technique that has become the dominant form in the sport. Fosbury became one of the most prominent athletes of his era, won a gold medal at the 1968 Olympics, and set a world record. What a legacy!

Networked leaders ought to take a leaf out of Fosbury’s book and be unafraid to find new solutions to old problems.

4. Build A Center Of Excellence (CoE)

Establishing a CoE stands as a pivotal milestone in your transformative journey. A well-resourced CoE is the beating heart of an Open Talent strategy. Networks need hubs, and that’s what the CoE provides. It serves as the essential nexus within networks, fostering effective connectivity. The CoE is an integral part of the Harvard and Open Assembly methodology and acts as the central control room for Open Talent access and management.?The primary goal of a CoE is to ensure optimization of the organization’s utilization of the skills, talent and knowledge available within its networks.

First, you must hire the right CoE leader. You need an adept leader who's passionate about talent, open to constructive feedback, and adept at navigating bureaucracy. They champion learning, motivating innovative strategies. They must demonstrate unwavering commitment throughout, not just during early successes.

The CoE must remove procedural roadblocks impeding Open Talent adoption. Seamless integration into the existing structure is essential to prevent disruption. This task is simpler for startups, but more challenging for an incumbent organization where structures are already ‘baked in’.

5. Focus On Tasks

Traditional mindsets view talent as scarce, fixed-cost resources. Open Talent's transformative potential lies in perceiving resources as abundant, on-demand, scalable, and adaptable—preparing organizations for exponential growth.

Networked transformation necessitates reframing work as tasks, not roles. Conventional recruitment processes could render AI strategy obsolete due to time delays. In contrast, leveraging Open Talent platforms for virtual workshops and task-based collaboration accelerates solution implementation. These platforms access a diverse pool of talent, independent of location, while reducing costs and implementation time.

Envision a transformed future. Shift your mindset. Forge ahead with confidence.