Talent Management made easy

Talent Management is a set of practices encompassing the entire cycle of an employee’s experience and tenure at a company, yet its importance and influence is often significantly underestimated.

Most of the focus within Talent Management goes on the recruitment of employees. Many companies struggle, however, with the ongoing decisionmaking as to who among existing employees to promote, how to develop them and, significantly, who and when and why to terminate. We can thus see Talent Management as a kind of constant gardening companies need to do in order to maintain high levels of Engagement and organisational performance, in turn contributing to a healthy culture when done well.

The prevailing approach to Talent Management, commonly known as the '9 Box' methodology (more on that in a moment) tends to hinder the goals described above. Ironically, this method tends to do more harm than good, often resulting in either excessive bureaucracy or fostering political behaviours. As a consequence, poor talent management can lead to a toxic workplace culture.

This doesn't have to be so.

Today we look at how companies can significantly improve the decisionmaking around how to promote, develop and terminate employees in a way that can enhance their culture and improve their Human Capital, achieving the outcomes shared in my previous post here.

Shortcomings of the 9 Box approach

The ‘9 Box Talent Management’ matrix was implemented into the HR Profession with little thought as a ‘copy/paste’ of a similar tool used by Boston Consulting Group to evaluate businesses. Here's an example of it, though categories often vary:

The inference here is that you can treat investments into humans the same way as you can treat investments into businesses – and that the two work the same way. The approach to decisionmaking is very simplistically framed on the 2 axes shown above – ‘potential’ and ‘performance’, with extra investment and opportunity applied to individuals generally high in both.

This is a clearly ridiculous idea. For one thing, humans are more adaptable than companies. For example, if a business offers consumer financing, it isn’t easily going to be able to pivot into, say, an airline. A human with financing skills, by contrast, can often readily transfer their skills into any number of settings, including within airlines.

This is one example of what the 9 Box misses in its ‘potential’ axis – namely, skills and skill transferability, something the OECD has found to be the singly greatest predictor of company performance, absent of the industry they find themselves in. Quite a big miss that, don’t you think?

And the less said about the ‘Performance’ axis, the better. I have already covered how 95% of companies use standardised Performance Management practices and how, by meta-analysis, these have been found not in any way, shape or form to relate to Business Unit Performance and in reality do ‘more harm than good’ to both companies and the engagement of employees.

Put simply, companies would be better off then not using the 9 Box at all (I will revisit this more thoroughly in a future post so stay tuned).

What is really lacking is…

The problem is that the 9 Box methodology creates an illusion of rigour and reality, when it is devoid of both, and instead forces leaders to view their colleagues via a simplistic, surface and shallow lens which fails to recognise the real value they contribute and are able to contribute.

This leads to a damning waste of human capability and also, returning to our gardening metaphor, ironically results in the unfortunate situation where leaders end up watering the weeds and throwing weedkiller on the roses, ignoring or punishing productive individuals and giving succour to the bad. In this kind of garden, organisational politics is king.

What companies can do instead…

Instead, companies need to ensure their Talent Management practices are:

☑ objective: backed up with data and real examples, and

☑ deep: taking into account all the capabilities an employee has, even when they are not being used in their immediate roles.

An algorithm for Talent Management

To ensure their Talent Management is both effective and robust, companies need to take an algorithmic approach to the process, capturing and combining four key factors of value:

1.       Criticality. How critical is a person to the organisation or their function?

2.       Contribution. How much of a contribution has the person made to the company? (It’s important that this includes intangible factors, like attrition or internal promotion of Direct Reports if they are a manager)

3.       Capability. What skills, accreditations and achievements have they made over their career that is applicable in terms of ‘closing the gap’ to potential future roles they have identified.

4.       Character. What standout examples have they demonstrated of living the company values and what examples of navigating adversity.

While this may sound complex but it doesn’t need to be. It’s not difficult for HR Analytics professionals to capture this data and aggregate it within, say, an internal HCM platform. The information gather itself is largely operationalised through effective manager practices, linked to Employee Engagement. So a win there by joining up manager practices with Employee Engagement.

Using this approach also joins up the currently fragmented stated of HR processes and practices within a company, with much greater enablement and mobilisation of non-HR people to drive the business forward in a sustainable way.

I am sharing an example of the algorithm at Senior/Enterprise Leader level with the kinds of objective factors that can easily be gathered, below. Let me know what you think of this approach to Talent Management in the comments!