Despite all of the conversation about “big data,” too little of the mountain of information available is yielding insights that advance performance. It’s no different with human capital data. In this case, even a little data goes a long way. The beauty of working toward an integrated talent management platform is that you begin to net benefits almost immediately. In one of our client systems we helped them integrate disparate efforts in performance management, leadership competency articulation (connected to strategy delivery), and role segmentation into one, holistic approach for assessing promotion readiness for their most important roles. We achieved the primary outcomes of helping improve their decision making around succession slates and providing candidates with clear and specific development actions required to accelerate their readiness.
The ancillary benefits came from the meta-analysis we conducted across all of the individual assessments. With the addition of work history data – number, placement and duration of career rotations – we identified several talent practices that were out of alignment with the organization’s strategic aspirations. Among our insights, we uncovered that the director level was the foundational rotation in setting a leader up for success at the executive level. It was the career point in this organization where leaders first began to deal with complex, enterprise-level issues and opportunities. In these roles they cut their teeth on strategy development and broader pattern recognition, and they also began the major shift from individual contributor to organizational leader. It was an important, if not the major inflection point in a leader’s career within this company. Given the importance of this rung in the leadership ladder, you would expect that great care was taken to provide focused development and preparation in this role. That was sadly not the case. Instead we found an average tenure at this level of 1.2 years – too short to fully learn what would be required at the next level. We also found that there was no substantive preparation or support provided to leaders entering the director level. Rather, leaders were somewhat randomly thrown into this role and expected to sink or swim on their own. This organization was clearly missing an opportunity to strengthen its leadership bench and ensure a robust pipeline of capable leaders for the VP level and above.
We also discovered that role placement was generally for the sole benefit of the company, not necessarily the individual. That is to say, despite recognizing on-the-job learning as one of the most effective adult learning methods, this organization was not taking advantage of career rotations to strengthen people’s capabilities. People were placed in roles purely because there was an organizational gap to fill and rarely with the person’s development needs in mind.
Lastly, we helped the organization see, at a more macro level, where their leadership competencies were taking hold and where they still had some work to do. This helped inform more targeted development actions for the broader enterprise by identifying which competencies required greater focus and investment. As we dove deeper into the data, we surfaced additional insights about what was working and what wasn’t specifically related to development, performance management, and rewards. We helped them identify meaningful actions to either amplify what they were already doing that was working, or to address gaps and other issues in their current approaches. The organization was able to leverage even this “little data” to improve its talent management processes and increase the return on its investment.
How well does your organization leverage its human capital data to improve talent management? Are you missing some opportunities to make better decisions? At the end of the day, that is what integrated talent management is all about.