Time to get into the details. If you’re ready to get serious about improving the performance of your organization we want to help. In our next three blogs we will dive deeper into each of the three phases of our integrated talent management approach.
Phase One: Define ITM Business Requirements – as you will hopefully recall, this phase is all about understanding the requirements of your strategy and determining what it will take to ensure you have the people and the performance to deliver it. There are four key steps.
- Interpret Strategy: Identify the unique demands your strategy places on current and future leadership and technical competencies. You must determine the discreet – and specific – set of competencies required to enact the strategy and deliver results. Any strategy document should readily inform a set of required standards to deliver it. If this is not the case, it likely means the strategy is vague, too diffuse or unfocused. You will need to clarify your strategy before you can move forward to build an effective Integrated Talent Management approach or process. Competing on value? It is likely that your strategy will require strength in the ability to integrate and create scale, to work seamlessly across organizational boundaries, in process discipline and continuous improvement, in rapid emulation, among others. The key here is to determine exactly what your organization needs to be really good at to deliver your strategy and realize your market differentiation.
- Codify Standards of Competence: Define or refine your competence requirements if needed. There are many approaches for doing this. The least effective is to buy a ready-made competency model off the internet. While effort intensive, we reaffirm that the best approach is to conduct an exemplar study. This involves selecting a cross-organizational set of leaders who have proven their ability to get things done and to deliver results in your company over a sustained period of time. The goal is to understand, in very explicit and detailed terms, the behaviors, mindsets, and actions they bring to their leadership that support their success, using a consistent research methodology to identify the common behavioral patterns among them, and then distilling them into a specific set of performance behaviors.
- Assess Fit of Current Talent Management Approach: Identify any gaps, disconnects, or inconsistencies in your current talent management processes and practices. A good place to start is with talent decisions you either struggle to make or have made that aren’t yielding intended results. Have you promoted people who are not living up to their potential? Perhaps your assessment, development, and role preparation aren’t what they need to be. Do you lack confidence in your executive pipeline or succession slate for critical roles? Have you made a series of poor hiring decisions that led to unwanted churn?
The Center for American Progress recently reported that “while the costs of losing a ‘normal’ employee are high enough, the cost of having to replace an executive is astronomical — up to 213 percent of the executive’s salary.”[1] In a company of 10,000 employees, you can expect approximately 10% to be in the senior leader ranks. With an average salary of even just $150,000, the cost to replace one executive could be as much as $320,000. At an average turnover rate of 11% (as estimated by the American Psychology Association for turnover at the very best companies) that is roughly $35M in replacement costs annually before taking into account the opportunity costs of a failed or departed executive; and that is just for the top leadership ranks. When you consider the turnover you may be experiencing due to lack of fit, lack of competence, or lack of commitment at all employee levels, the costs are exorbitant. So, if the talent decisions you make are not delivering the results your company requires, then know that before you can design and implement a strong Integrated Talent Management approach, you have to determine what is and what is not working with your processes today. - Develop Design Criteria: Clearly define how you will measure success. Identify and prioritize specific requirements to guide the design of the future talent management strategy, system, and processes. When your Integrated Talent Management system is in place, what must it deliver? Improved probability of success for all candidate placements? Greater confidence in your senior leader appointments? Improved fit and success rate for new hires? The gap assessment conducted earlier in the process should provide great insight into the criteria for a better integrated talent management approach.Next week we will take a deeper look into Phase 2. In the meantime, we wish you great luck on your journey toward integrated talent management. Drop us a line if you want to talk further.
[1] © 2012 CBS Interactive Inc.