What has business change and transformation got to do with your talent strategy?

For the Insight Report we released last week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lorraine Mills CPsychol , Principal Consultant at Right Management . They are experts in change and talent management. It was great to have Lorraine’s perspective because organisations cite business change, growth and transformation as having a significant impact on their current and future people priorities.

The interview I did with Lorraine is in our content library for our members to view and digest. We covered a lot in the 30-minute discussion, so I was keen to distil some of the key points here for people too.

Firstly, Lorraine shared her thoughts on how change has changed. She talked about the fact that most of us now operate in a continuously changing environment. Transformation stacking is a reality for most organisations and their people. Large-scale changes are being made simultaneously meaning you must deliver change in a different way. Also, people are fatigued with the amount of change they are experiencing at work and have less trust in the change process and what their leadership are telling them.

So, it is a tough environment to deliver change well and embed it, but what does this mean for your talent? Lorraine and I talked about how organisations are responding to this. Those doing it successfully are embedding change as a core capability, improving their resilience and adaptability. Some of the ways they are doing this are through:

1. An effective learning culture and growth mindset. An environment where curiosity, experimentation and feedback are encouraged.
2. Engaging their people in the two-way design and delivery of change rather than taking a top-down approach.
3. Leadership that is very clear on purpose and role modelling the right behaviours and values.

I think these things need to be built into your talent management and development too. If continuous change and improvement are the reality for most organisations, you need to look for skills that support this and prepare your talent for operating in this environment.

Are you assessing people’s potential for learning and growth? More than just questions about ‘what they learnt from a situation’, you need to really test how people approach learning, their curiosity, ability to challenge, flexibility of thinking and ability to identify opportunities for improvement.

Have you got the people in your talent pools learning from each other? Coaching and mentoring programmes are simple, effective and dynamic ways of supporting a learning culture. Equip your talent with these skills and make it a core part of their ongoing development.

Are you creating development opportunities for your talent pools to be curious and experiment? How involved are they in shaping change in the organisation? Setting your talent to work on your biggest business challenges can produce improved results and support the stretch and development they need/are looking for.

How much time are you investing with your talent on your purpose, values and behaviours? They can be the advocates of these alongside your current leadership, supporting communication and engagement generally and for specific changes happening. Developing their ability to role model these will build their future leadership capability too.

I’ll be sharing more reflections on another interview later this week focused on learning culture. We also have some great events coming up that dive into some of these subjects in more detail. I'm Looking forward to joining The Burnout Beater - Colin Minto today talking about preventing burnout and building mental resilience. On the 27th June we have Gavin Russell exploring leadership and culture, and on the 2nd July Catherine Serusclat sharing her insight on implementing effective coaching and mentoring programmes.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the above.

Have a great week,

Ted Miller

Register for events here:

Preventing Burnout - Register

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Implementing coaching and mentoring programmes - Register