Identifying, retaining, engaging and developing top talent
The post-covid ‘great resignation’, followed by the current economic slowdown and recent ‘tech-shedding’ has brought the focus squarely back on to talent. Initially, it was, “Who do we want to make sure does not leave?” and now, in some cases, it seems to be, “Who do we want to make damn sure we don’t let go while we ‘streamline’ the organisation?”
While clearly, renumeration policy is a core pillar in any retention strategy, we are noticing that many of our clients are using talent identification and development as a way of flagging to key talent that they are valued and have a future in the organisation. Businesses are dangling the carrot of accelerated development as a way of luring people to stay longer – essentially saying, “Why leave now when you can leave in three years (if you really, really want to) to something much bigger and better after you have experienced our wonderful two-year talent programme.”
Here are three questions to think about when identifying and developing your key talent, high potentials and leaders of the future:
1. Is there clarity on how you identify potential in your organisation?
Some organisations seem to blur the lines between performance and potential. To use a football analogy, just because someone is a great performer in Division 2, doesn’t mean that they have the potential to become a good Premiership player. Sometimes organisations have defined their own potential ‘anchors’ as a guide to judging whether people have the potential to ‘stretch’ into more challenging future roles. When our clients don’t have their own anchors, they often use our six shown below.
We have long seen diagnosing potential as a mine-field for organisations and, therefore, have developed a comprehensive online diagnostic that makes it much easier for both managers to make judgements on their people re potential, and, as importantly, for organisations to use this data to make crucial decisions relating to promotion, succession planning and entry onto talent/high potential programmes. We find that the intelligence and the graphical display from our diagnostic removes much of the politics out of the decision-making process.
2. How holistic is your talent development strategy?
Of course, with a limited development budget, working out who to invest your development dollar in is just one of the challenges. Another is to decide by what means you are actually going to accelerate the development of people, namely where you will get the biggest ROI. This ROI should be judged by a blend of retention, promotion, engagement and performance metrics.
Post pandemic, we have seen a return for high-touch, face-to-face development programmes. What is clear is that companies are using these programmes, not just to accelerate the development of the participants, but also, to make them feel special (and want to stay) and often, to create a cohort of cross-functional change agents in the middle of the organisation to drive strategic initiatives and cultural change.
Although 70/20/10 as blended development concept is still alive, no one believes those numbers anymore. It is apparent that any successful development approach must involve stretching experiences, exposure to role models, mentors and coaches and, of course, informal and formal learning activities / assignments.
We never undertake a high-potential programme assignment without including an element of professional coaching because we believe it is difficult to embed the learning and make it relevant to a particular participant’s context without 1:1 sessions with an experienced executive coach.
In the last two years, we have been delivering a number of collaborative programmes, whereby the client delivers some of the content, perhaps relating to strategy or ESG, while we concentrate on the elements in our sweet spot such as taking control of your career, authentic leadership, generating followership, building high performing teams, creating a high-performance environment, enhancing resilience, leading through coaching, influence/impact and strategic stakeholder management.
3. Are you enlisting your talent multiplier managers?
One of our key learnings, over 20 years of working with the best and brightest, is how important people’s managers are in nurturing (or indeed vaporising!) talent. Just as in football, some players choose their next club because they know that the team’s manager will make them a better player. High potential talent should be placed with those managers who have a reputation for being talent multipliers, not talent diminishes.
Do you know who the talent multipliers are in your organisation? Are you using them to bring out the best in your most talented people?
We encourage organisations to involve the managers of talent programme participants in the design process of any intervention. Additionally, we give them clarity on what is expected from them on each step of the development programme journey.
Ascend currently have live assignments related to the development of key talent and strengthening leadership pipelines with a range of global brands (e.g. PricewaterhouseCoopers, Chemring Group, Schroders) around the world in the following sectors: financial services, professional services, defence, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, technology and government.
The one thing all our clients have in common is that they all see investment in people as a strategic imperative to set the business up for sustainable success.
We are holding virtual demonstrations of our High Potential Diagnostic Tool on 22 February at 9am and 1pm UK time (1pm and 5pm UAE time) where we will take you through the tool in detail.
Please click on the link to register for one of these. Don’t worry if, at the last minute, you can’t make it. We will be recording our demonstration and all registrants will receive a link to this recording.
Please do get in touch if you would like to discuss anything relating to the diagnosis of potential and/or designing and delivery of high impact, blended high potential / talent development programmes.