The Seven Components of Talent Management

Talent management includes seven components that, when implemented strategically, combine to keep an organization on the leading edge.

Strategic Employee Planning. Developing your organizational goals and strategic plan is the first step. Next you must think about how to reach your goals and implement the plan. More specifically, you must identify the key roles and personnel who will get you there. You may already have the positions and people in place, or you may need to adjust the current structure to fill the gaps.

Talent Acquisition and Retention. Bringing new talent into your organization is important, yet equally so is recognizing and cultivating talent you already have in-house. Hiring from within your organization is more cost-effective, so when you’re working at talent pooling, remember to look internally as well as externally.

Performance Management. Aligning the right person with the right role is the heart of performance management. Its ultimate goal is to ensure that roles align with business strategy to achieve goals. It enables you to ensure that you’re aligning a talented employee with a role that suits them, develops goals for success, supports their development, and moves the organization forward.

Learning and Motivating. Semantics become important here, because learning is more than training. Learning is the acquisition of information and skills, which yields knowledge and experience. Implement learning programs that include activities and tasks that support the organization’s culture and initiatives. When employees see how their growth impacts the organization, they’ll see just how valuable their role is.

Compensation. Alignment remains the important concept. Aligning your strategic goals with incentives means recognizing employees, rewarding contributions to success, and acknowledging their value to the organization.

Career Development. This ties back to the talent retention component and the notion that hiring from within is not only an option, but often preferable. Nurture potential leaders by providing professional development tools that can advance their career.

Succession Planning. Knowing the talent within your organization is a start. Knowing the key roles essential to its success is equally vital. Which roles are critical to success? Who currently fills those roles? What happens when those positions become available? Having a plan in place means that the decisions are already made, and that the organization will continue to run smoothly if a key position must be filled quickly.

BLOOM’s Role in Talent Management

At Insight Strategic Concepts we regularly work with clients to align business strategy and talent management. BLOOM® is one way we do that. It’s a simple performance management system that provides the metrics and information managers and executives needs to make smart decisions and to keep the company moving forward.

With my marketing background, I also know about the realities of cognitive dissonance, which these statistics do not always track. People say they will buy rice cakes because they want to lose weight, but do they? Employees say they will change their jobs when the time is right, but do they? When is the time right?

For years to come, there will be turmoil in global relations, economic pressures, and environmental threats. The pace of change will not change; in fact, it will speed up. Over the past two years many business owners have made many tough decisions. They figure it out as they go, and in our experience many business owners are in fact more scared than their employees. With their homes and livelihood on the line, decision making becomes a pressure-cooker situation. Many business owners will do all they can to avoid tough decisions in the face of uncertainty. As we have witnessed, often this leadership complacency is what employees misconstrue as “unethical” or not right.

It is a tough call. What causes such “unethical” behavior? First, it is important to closely examine what is being accused as “unethical.” Then it is necessary to understand the cause of what leadership is really trying to hide.

Where leadership goes wrong is in not being honest about not knowing what to do and then trying to cover complacency. Employees simply want to know the truth and then be a part of building a new plan.

Transparency is Key

Transparency is required for achieving strategic alignment with employees. Share the facts and engage employees in the results. Leaders don’t need to have all the answers. They simply need to provide the dialog for strategy and collaboration to create solutions.

Transparency is the only road to accountability. Employees know fact from fiction. When they see the genuine effort by leadership to inform, they engage whole-heartedly. Perhaps this is really why people stay in their jobs – employees ultimately see the fear of the unknown, and they stay out of dedication to help the best way they can. (After all, if 65% and 48% of executives believe that trust and transparency are the factors leading to voluntary turnover then this awareness of realistic leaders must keep people employed. It is the oblivious leaders that lose people regardless of the times.)

Every employee wants to make a difference. No matter the degree of engagement, tapping into talent and identifying clear proof of performance is where people are seen and will engage.  (In fact this is what inspired us to create BLOOM®, our talent alignment software that forces such alignment between strategy and talent within an organization.)

Trust is an outcome of transparency. Freely sharing information, engaging in employee performance planning, setting individual development goals, and assigning special projects are just some genuine ways to be transparent and build trust that lasts.

Nothing replaces honesty. Everyone knows when they are getting a shady deal. Lack of sharing is as bad as lying in tough times. This type of withholding is often when employees will engage their imaginations to create “unethical” behaviors. Silence in uncertain times is dishonest. Furthermore, letting rumors get out of control starts a path for repetitive abuse and turmoil that can easily become uncontrollable.

Share Your Experience

How does your organization use transparency to develop its workforce?

Support of the CEO and Executive Team

When CEOs model the way for effective talent management you see successful system implementations and results. This includes defining clear expectations, setting individual development goals, conducting performance reviews on time, coaching and mentoring individuals, and holding managers accountable to fulfilling the same performance. We find that managers are most uncomfortable with building employee relations and holding others accountable to meeting expectations. They are uncomfortable with the dialogs and conversations required to be effective. They often let their own insecurities get in the way of helping others be better. The CEO is the best person to help managers overcome the fear and intimidation of the process and coach others to success.

Avoiding Complexity Creep

Complexity is what makes most good intentions a wasted effort. Without clear expectations, it is easy for complexity to creep back into the process. People start adding and building in features for all the contingencies and therefore confuse the true purpose and meaning required for the process. Your talent processes should be audited at least annually to look for opportunities to streamline and eliminate unnecessary complexities. This requires measuring outcomes and monitoring processes to determine what you need to weed out to optimize the time of HR staff and managers.

The Right HR Management and Talent Leadership

Few HR managers and staff have business systems and operations experience. This lack of understanding often makes it difficult for them to effectively integrate talent practices into the organization’s functional aspects. This may impede them from displaying the courage needed to engage and educate managers on the importance and practical steps to implement talent management priorities.

Internal Focus on Continuous Process Improvement and Paperless Processes

HR involves a lot of paperwork and provides great opportunities for savings in the time and money spent on resources – people, paper, email, and training. Talent managers must understand the business and where reduction in resources can be implemented.

Passion and Courage

Talent management is about people coming together to achieve a common purpose. The leader’s passion and commitment to achieve a vision is required to engage a systemic and focused talent program. Leadership must be persistent without compromise to achieve a focused and deeply engaged system. Passion is contagious, and the courage to take action only occurs when leadership sets the right example.

Share Your Experience

What challenges or successes have you encountered in your talent management program?

When you’re running a business you take great pains to develop your vision and strategy and to use a model that works. When you put so much effort into putting all the pieces in the right place, why would you even consider changing the configuration of your unique processes to accommodate the rules and structure of a talent management system? That’s what many systems require; we’ve heard it from our clients, and we’ve experienced it ourselves.

BLOOM Performance Management System Eliminates the Excess

Front line managers need a system that supports them and helps them align talent with strategy. In our experience, successful talent management software means that you connect:

• Strategic growth initiatives
• Transparent measure for success
• Organizational structure
• Roles & key results areas
• Individual development plans
• Talent & performance reviews
• Rewards, advancements & incentives
• Learning & development programs

A Better Way: Simple Talent Management

We designed BLOOM® to be a simple talent management system. BLOOM’s approach:

• Wins early buy-in from front line managers because they understand the benefits of talent management AND how to use the software
• Clearly connects business strategy with organizational structure
• Supports your business process rather than imposing a rigid framework that just doesn’t fit
• Achieves quick, easy implementation without additional fees (often that means you’ll be up and running in a matter of weeks (or days if you have all your data ready) – not months!)

Other systems are these systems overly complicate and priced so that clients pay for those little- to never-used features!

We become enamored by bells and whistles for many reasons. In the world of talent management, it is usually out of wanting to cover all of the bases, except we find that most HR managers and executives don’t really know what performance management game they are playing when they are making their selections. Here are just some of the reasons why:

1. There is no focus on process. Letting software dictate your process is a huge mistake. This immediately causes the mindset to get every feature possible just in case you may need it someday. There is no focus on real objectives, culture, and steps for success. Upon signing of a new talent management software contract, you are left with a pile of tools and no vision of the house you are trying to build. This leads to overload and confusion at the start of your implementation process.
2. The assumption is made that “we can just turn off the features that we don’t want need.” If the features are there, they must be configured and reasoned with. Here is where the trade-offs begin. This will always make your talent management process more constrained and complex than it needs to be.
3. Another assumption: “the more we invest in the most robust system, the better the results.” When it comes to talent management systems, the proof is in the ability to successfully implement system use with front line management. Here, their measure is the simpler, the better. Your managers simply do not have time to be talent management software experts. They want to learn the system with a 2-hour or less training and move on to meaningful results. If they are spending more time tracking performance in software than mentoring performance in the field, then you have a problem.
4. Paying for expensive software cannot replace the value of top-notch HR management. Technology does not run itself – people and processes run software. HR management is the director of the orchestra. In fact, the more complex you make the system the higher the executive talent needed to plan and oversee the implementation all of the components.
5. “The more we pay, the more we prove our commitment to people.” This one may not be as conscious as the other assumptions. However, there are organizations where being and having “the best” is a part of their culture. In the quest to be the best, you can also end up buried in fees and features that take months if not years to sort through. At the end of the day, your people want to invest in them, not your software. They need to know very simply what you expect of them and what resources they have for growth and development. This is not complicated, nor should be the software that tracks it.

Systems like BLOOM come with a simple methodology that streamlines operations and keeps the complexity and high-expense out. Be clear on the process you are trying to achieve for optimal talent performance and keep it simple. Your bottom line will be richer and your people will be thankful.

Interesting in learning more about simple talent management? Contact us to schedule a demo of BLOOM.

“The real company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.” (http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664 slide 7)

Although the idea is not completely new, Netflix approach is easy to understand. They outline these seven aspects of their corporate culture:

• Values are what we Value
• High Performance
• Freedom & Responsibility
• Context, not Control
• Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled
• Pay Top of Market
• Promotions & Development

The company values judgment, communication, impact, curiosity, innovation, courage, passion, honesty, and selflessness and they address in general terms what each of those mean beginning on slide 10 (http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664).

How can a company succeed with such loosely defined policies?

The answer is simpler than you might think: they trust their employees to make good decisions. They can do this because they focus on hiring and retaining high-performing employees. Performance matters. The values permeate the Netflix culture from hiring to promotions or firing.

Netflix understands the value of top performers.

Netflix asks the question: “who would you fight hard to keep?” The answer identifies high performing employees, whom they reward based on quality of work and effectiveness rather than the number of hours they log. Employees who don’t contribute much or who resist challenges are essentially dead weight: they drag the team down and better serve the company by moving on than by hanging on. The Netflix example emphasizes the importance of providing context so high performers have enough information and knowledge to make good decisions; the alternative – establishing control – leads to bureaucracies and red tape that bog down progress and stifle growth.

How to align top performers with company values and strategy.

Generally, top performers have can-do attitudes and get things done regardless of whether their job description includes the task. How do you measure autonomy and results? A strategic performance management system like BLOOM provides tools to track education, talent reviews, and most importantly it provides a means to align an organization’s strategy – including initiatives, objectives, goals and action steps that are directly tied to employees. BLOOM even integrates the company values into talent reviews to assure employees are aligned to the culture.

When an organization enables top performers to operate by values rather than requires them to adhere to strict rules, it enables the adaptability, purpose and creativity that lead to company growth and innovation. It instills a sense of trust and ownership.

Think about the values your organization has. How do they and their resulting processes contribute to your culture? How do they detract? What motivates each – a desire to innovate or a need to control?

The Pew Research Center is currently working on a yearlong series of reports that will profile the generation known as Millennials — reports that will enable employers to further understand the drivers and motivators to which this group responds.

What is a Millennial?

The most cut-and-dry identifier of someone in the Millennial generation is that they were born between 1978 and 2002. Attitudinal and behavioral tendencies generally observed in this generation include:

• Prolonged adolescence
• Better educated than previous generations
• “Helicopter parents” have instilled a strong sense of the Millennial’s uniqueness, which leads to the belief that they are special and should be treated as such
• Use of technology comes as second nature

What Millennials mean for your business

The above description of Millennials may indicate that they have a warped sense of reality, and to some extent that’s true. But they’re also a tolerant, tech-savvy bunch that can help move your organization into one that makes more effective use of technology, builds a stronger of community (internal and external), and fosters trust. They were born in the era of laptops and iPods, Facebook and Twitter, and they know how to use them effectively.

Millennials tend to be civic-minded and confident, valuing diversity and achievement

They like to be challenged. They want to like their work and to leave work at work (not take it home like their parents did); if they don’t, they will find more meaningful work elsewhere. Use this information along with their Kolbe Indexes® to align your Millennial employees with your business strategy.

Your business will benefit from Millennial’s persistence, optimism, diversity, confidence, and multi-tasking abilities, though you’ll need to provide plenty of structure and to grow their experience working with people. You can optimize Millennial’s performance by:

• Budgeting plenty of time for orienting them and creating a clear picture of the work environment and expectations
• Learning about the employee’s goals and develop a strategy for weaving them into job performance
• Setting employee goals (short- and long-term)
• Growing  your training department  and providing opportunities for professional development and continuing education
• Demonstrating and developing strong leadership
• Where there are lots of Millennials, consider expanding the size of teams and appoint a strong team leader
• Offering assistance with handling difficult people issues
• Establishing strong mentoring programs – matching young workers with most seasoned people with whom they resonate

What are some ways you have succeeded working with Millennials in your organization?

Dealing with conflict takes self-awareness, respect, careful listening, honesty, and structured dialog in order to be positively resolved.

Disrespect breeds an unhealthy approach conflict.

Respect is the foundation of understanding differences. If you do not respect the person you’re engaging, then you likely have little true desire to discover and negotiate your differences.

Disrespect typically comes from one of three sources:

• Some form of emotional, physical, or resource-affiliated abuse
• Denial of rights for a person to act or feel a certain way
• Misalignment of ethics and core values between two people

Be honest with yourself and identify whether any of these issues exist. If they do, you may need to accept that some level of conflict may always exist and that conflict management may be more realistic than conflict resolution. If maintaining a relationship requires conflict management then you need to understand some facts:

• Choosing to be in situations that include an obstacle to successfully handling the demands and responsibilities of a relationship undermines your ability to construct and maintain a positive self image.
• One of the most consistent and strongest findings in research about conflict is the significant relationship between conflict and stress-related health outcomes, which include: psychological strain, anxiety and depression, somatic complaints, elevated blood pressure, and substance abuse.

Approaches to conflict

Self-awareness goes a long way in dealing with conflict. Knowing how you operate initiates the process of understanding the skills you need to handle stressful situations. Your personality, values, beliefs, instincts, and intellect all affect how you handle stress. The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument identifies five conflict-handling modes.

According the Thomas-Kilmann, in a conflict situation a person’s behavior can be described in two basic dimensions:

1. Assertiveness: the extent to which the person attempts to satisfy his/her own concerns
2. Cooperativeness: the extent to which the person attempts to satisfy the other person’s conflict

These two dimensions further flesh out to define five methods of dealing with conflict:

1. Competing: assertive and uncooperative, this is a power-oriented method.
2. Collaborating: both assertive and cooperative, collaboration may take longer but provides a win-win outcome.
3. Compromising: intermediate in assertiveness and cooperativeness, compromise offers a middle ground that is often lose-lose.
4. Avoiding: unassertive and uncooperative, avoidance does not address conflict. This along with the following method often lead to passive agressive behaviors.
5. Accommodating: unassertive and cooperative, accommodation is the the direct opposite of competition and leads to habitual self-sacrifice.

Once you understand how you approach conflict you will begin to develop conflict-resolution strategies that are relevant to how you behave under stress.

Convert conflict into constructive energy. Working through conflict is better than putting up with it. One of the best processes we’ve found is the Kolbe Conflict Counter Actives™ that leads to mutual understanding, defined goals, and resolved conflict around a specific issue.

A conflict-resolution dialog. There are many layers of discovery required when people explore core issues and root causes of conflict. Here are some modified steps for dialog that demonstrate the types of considerations needed:

1. Listen, listen, listen. Listen actively for words and feelings. This means to listen with empathy and without evaluation. Be present. Be encouraging. Reflect back to the speaker what you heard before you respond.
2. Write down and define specific examples of the conflict. Discuss your examples. Are they based on similar situations? Do you agree on what isn’t working?
3. Reaffirm your mutual trust.
4. Identify the areas where you leverage each other’s talents.
5. Develop a list of shared goals. Discuss differences and commonalities.
6. Discuss the amount of time you spend together, what materials and resources are shared, and whether one person has more control than the other. Do you agree on how it should be and why?
7. What disagreement do you have about each other’s feelings, thoughts, and actions? Where do your perspectives differ the most and why? How are your perspectives the same?
8. Are your natural approaches to problem-solving different? If so, name the differences.
9. What are the consequences of your conflict? How do they affect the other person’s expectations?
10. What are more realistic expectations? How will you achieve your common goals?
11. What action steps are you each willing to commit to? How often will you meet? How will you define success?

We recommend using a facilitator help you to learn the comprehensiveness of the process, especially in complex situations.

It’s imperative that business owners and leaders take every opportunity to know who their employees are and what they want from their lives and work. Such understanding leads to high workplace morale and high employee retention.

“Improve the odds” of hiring well & getting a person plugged into the right role

At Insight, it’s no question what tool yields the most useful assessments: the Kolbe Wisdom™ system. We’ve used Kolbe for over twelve years now because it’s different from the other indexes; it neither seeks to identify personality style (affective) nor to measure intellect (cognitive), either of which the majority of other tools seek to do. Rather, Kolbe identifies a person’s natural instincts and drive — also known as conative style. Personality can change over time due to circumstances, growth, and experience, whereas one’s natural instincts and ways of taking action remain consistent over time.

The Kolbe A Index® measures a person’s instinctive approach to creative problem solving. In other words, it helps you to predict how a person will solve problems and provide solutions for emerging issues. It describes the natural way each person takes action in four distinct modalities/action modes, and since every individual has 100 percent mental energy or creativity that is distributed across all four action modes, understanding a potential employee’s Kolbe A gives you valuable insight into whether and how they will fit into your organization and contribute to your success.

The four Kolbe Action Modes:

• Fact Finder: The way we gather information. People within this mode range from generalist to specialist.
• Follow Through: The way we organize information. People within this mode range from being adaptive to being structured/systematic.
• Quick Start: The way we deal with time and uncertainty. People within this mode range from stabilizers to improvisers.
• Implementor: The way we seek tangible solutions. People within this mode range from being abstract to concrete.

How to use conative information

Understanding how instincts combine with intelligence and personality will help you optimize the hiring, deployment, retention, and effectiveness of your employees. Assessing and understanding the instinctive methods of all of your employees will create a less stressful work environment in which employees are more satisfied and more productive in their positions.

To see and achieve the big-picture vision you must use multiple assessment tools

You need to use more than the Kolbe A assessment to make a hiring decision. While it does provide information about the person who completed it, the Kolbe A does not tell you whether a person will be good at a particular job – that’s where Kolbe B Index® and Kolbe C Index® come into play and measure the potential gaps a person may have in a role per your expectations of the job or the current or past match of a top performer doing the same job.

The Kolbe B Index® is similar to the Kolbe A, but instead measures the person’s own expectation about fulfilling the job. A significant difference between an employee’s Kolbe A and Kolbe B indicates a stress point or strain. This is useful for comparing current and past employee’s perception of the required job performance for the position you are hiring to the results of the candidate. It is helpful to know the view of a person who actually performed the postion before in order to set your expectations for the job.

The Kolbe C Index® builds on A and B to measure the supervisor’s requirements for the job. A significant difference between the results of the Kolbe C and the Kolbe A identifies another point of tension.

The only way to use the Kolbe A Index® result in hiring is to compare it to the instinct demands of the job you’re filling. When you bring in the complete trio, you have data from both successful people already in the job (when applicable) and from supervisors and others who know the demands of the job. Under fair-hiring laws in the United States (and many other countries), employers must be able to prove that the criteria that they use in hiring are related to the successful performance of the specific job. Implementing the Kolbe Wisdom™ system enables you to demonstrate and document your compliance.

Insight is an expert in the Kolbe process

We’ve developed a recruiting process called “The Insight Whole Mind” that uses the Kolbe Wisdom™ system among other assessments to help our clients in their hiring and workforce development. I am a Copper Circle Member, the only Kolbe Certified Independent Consultant in Michiana, and have more than twelve years of experience and training using the Kolbe system. Feel free to contact me to set up a consultation and to explore your organization’s workforce development plan.

We believe that by understanding that each person has a distinct talent you will frame how they will approach their interests and their work. We also believe that the greater a person’s ability to match his talent with his work, the better his attitude and by his extension productivity will be. In our experience, most organizations don’t encourage the time and effort it requires to provide this advantage, and we can provide some advice on how to make this happen.

Job matching is ultimately a collaborative support process.

The keys to understanding and implementing a unique competitive advantage are to define your organizational goals and expectations and to know your people and support their growth. Integrating these two ideas is a powerful, effective method for increasing efficiency, improving performance beyond your expectations, and as a result retaining your best people.

Before we get to how to match people with jobs, let’s take a step back.

Any business initiative can be derailed without committed purpose and people supporting the necessary actions. The overarching reason for failure is a lack of understanding of these two elements. Specific issues include:

• Not identifying and/or consistently communicating a common purpose
• Losing focus on priorities
• Too much responsibility in too few of hands
• Too little attention to detail
• Poor matches of people to jobs
• Lack of individual ownership toward change
• Pessimism
• Erosion of innovation and creativity
• Complacent leaders without vision

Leaders must work to develop clear, understood purpose and actively align employees and roles with initiatives, otherwise hard work will continually be wasted effort, which in turn will deplete employee morale and retention.

How to get started matching people with the right jobs

Job matching requires meticulous detail in developing a process that is consistently implemented throughout your organization. We find that the best approach is to start in one specific area that is experiencing problems and adapt the following steps to your organization’s needs.

Three Phases of Development: Ready, Set, Go!

To prepare the development of your job matching process, start with completing the following steps:

Get Ready: Inspect and reinforce your organization’s foundation

1. Utilize a process to set specific organizational goals
2. Develop a three-year vision and set up one-year goals for the organization and for individual departments
3. Learn about your employees! Support managers with processes and tools for learning, understand each person by using assessments, and comprehend and track their short- and long-term goals

Get Set: Articulate specific expectations for your job matching process

1. Create job centers for each department by categorizing the main functions in each department. For example, separate job centers in a product department may include line operators, shipping, receiving, and packaging.
2. Detail specific job profiles in each job center, specifying the responsibilities, competencies (i.e. skills, talents, and attitudes), work environment, and training and education requirements.

Go: Integrate the information from steps 1-5 to match people to specific jobs

1. Use a methodology to match your employees with the job profiles
2. Dialog with each employee to discuss fit
3. Set goals (3, 6, and 12 month) with each employee
4. Create a communication plan for each employee to discuss progress
5. Always reward accomplishments with a consistent company reward system

Introducing job matching to your employees

It’s important that a job matching program be a positive, non-threatening process. Here are some tips to achieve that:

• Leadership must communicate the program and already be successfully implementing job matching with their managers
• Leaders must be involved in the training process by sharing their personal experiences implementing the program and the desired expectations
• Don’t enforce the whole system at once. Find a specific starting point, and introduce it bit by bit over a year or longer. You may want to break your job matching process into phases and sequentially introduce each phase throughout the organization, or you may want to implement the complete process one department at a time.

For additional tips and more extensive information let us know, and we will send you an article that includes details about leadership involvement, implementation, feedback loops, and collaborative support.