Posted: April 29th, 2015

Why An Integrated Talent Management Approach is Important Today…

Why An Integrated Talent Management Approach is Important Today…    2.

An integrated approach versus a Just in Time Approach    4
Issues Impacting Talent Management Strategies in Organizations    5
How Talent Management Strategies Vary in Other Companies    8
Business Impact When Organizations Implement an Integrated Approach to Talent Management    10
What are the Components of a Talent Management Strategy    11
Developing a Talent Management Strategy    12
Identify the People Development Strategy and Succession Planning    13
Creating A Strategic Plan for Integrated Talent Management    13
How to Develop a Mission Statement    14
Define the Strategic Plan Leveraging the Mission, Vision, Values, and Goals    17
Sample Talent Management Strategy    18
Talent Management Strategy Linked to Key Organizational  Priorities:    20
Integration of Talent Management Solutions With One Another    22
What Makes Integration So Hard?    24
Is Your Organization Ready for Change?    28
Assessing Where Your Is Organization Now? Tips for Data Gathering    31
A Tool For All Seasons: SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)    32
Suggested Reading    33

Activity:

What is your Talent Management Process?  Are you integrated or just in time?

•    What is working?

•    What’s not working?

•    What would you like to change?

Five questions to ask:

•    What are the most pressing Talent Management needs?

•    How are these needs being met?

•    What is the impact?

•    How are the efforts to build the leadership pipeline being evaluated?

Issues Impacting Talent Management Strategies in Organizations

Discussion Question

The above section, “Prepare yourself and your team mentally,” makes it sound like everyone is about to start meditating.
But what would happen if you didn’t do this step?

How to Develop a Mission Statement

This is the core purpose for which a person, team, or organization is created. Summarize it in a clear, short, inspiring statement.

Defining a mission is essentially a creative process. In most organizations, it is not much different from strategy. A strategy is a commercial concept that will enable organizations to outperform the competition and can only be developed creatively, even inspirationally. Mission is the same, often a combination of strategy and values with very few rules on how it should be done. The challenge is to create a mission that will shape the organization for many years.

How you define the mission of your business determines the way that you structure your business. At the core of an organization is its purpose or mission. The mission provides the guiding direction for developing strategy, defining critical success factors, searching out key opportunities, making resource allocation choices and pleasing customers or stakeholders.

The mission is the synthesis of what the customers see as your business, what the employees in your group see as your business, what your products and services should be, who your customers are and what value you bring to them. It also includes what the larger environment sees as your purpose and what work you actually do.

Your mission statement should:

•    Distinguish your business from others, making clear what is unique and/or special.
•    Tell, from the customer’s perspective, what you offer.
•    Be a guiding tool for the employees, and help them make decisions and know what course of action to take.

Exercise

Answer the questions below for what is Talent Management in your organization as you see it:

What business is your organization in?

Who are your customers?

What is the added value your customers receive?
What is unique about what your organization does?
How does your organization make your customers’ lives better?
What contribution does your organization make to society as a whole?

Follow-up questions:

What would your talent management vision  statement look like?
What is the purpose of your Talent Management Group?

Discussion Questions

What is the difference between a “vision” and a “mission?”

Which should be created first? A vision statement or a mission statement?

Exercise

Simply react to the following vision statements and mission statements. Are they good? Clear? Motivational? Helpful? How might they be improved?

Statement

Your Reaction
Be the best XYZ fulfillment house we can be.
Be known as the most enjoyable restaurant in town.
Have a market share of 25%, as measured by the ABC survey of dollars spent on movies.
Provide customer service that is noticeably better than that of our competitors.
Be viewed by the community as the first choice in utility providers.
Enable local patrons to be able to go to anyplace in the city without having to drive their own cars.
Provide capabilities to customers so that anyone who uses our services never again initiates contact with a competitor.
Enable everyone to have a front yard that matches their wildest dreams.

Define the Talent Management Strategy Leveraging the Vision and Mission

Develop a TM Strategy
•    Assess readiness of the organization – See assessment, pg. 22
•    Identify gaps
•    Brainstorm actions
•    Identify key priorities
•    Determine specific goals to measure success
•    Define how the process is integrated
•    Select a task force committee
•    Gain buy-in from Senior Management

Conduct an environmental scan
•    Analyze workforce trends
•    Conduct a SWOT
•    Assess the organizations current and future talent needs

Gap Analysis
•    Compare current talent to future needs
•    Identify gaps and surpluses

Gap Closing Strategy
•    Develop a plan to close the gap between the supply and demand
•    Monitor and evaluate progress and results

Sample Talent Management Strategy

This example outlines the purpose of the program, the desired results, and how the initiative will be carried out.

Purpose:

To ensure retention, engagement, new hires, and replacements for key job incumbents in executive, management, technical, and professional positions in the organization. This policy covers all aspects of Talent Management above in [name of organization].

Desired Results:

The desired results of the Talent Management program are to:

•    Identify high-potential employees capable of rapid advancement to positions of higher responsibility than those they presently occupy.

•    Ensure the systematic and long-term development of individuals to replace key job incumbents as the need arises due to deaths, disabilities, retirements, and other unexpected losses.

•    Provide a continuous flow of talented people to meet the organization’s management needs.

•    Meet the organization’s need to exercise social responsibility by providing for the advancement of protected labor groups inside the organization.

Procedures

The Talent Management Program will be carried out as follows:

1. In January of each year, the management development director will arrange a meeting with the CEO to review results from the previous year’s planning efforts and to plan for the present year’s process.

2. In February top managers will attend a meeting coordinated by the management development director in which:

A.    The CEO will emphasize the importance of Talent Management and review the previous year’s results.

B.    The management development director will distribute forms and establish due dates for their completion and return.

C.    The management development director will review the results of a computerized analysis to pinpoint areas of the organization in which predictable turnover, resulting from re-tirements or other changes, will lead to special needs for management talent.

D.    The results of a computerized analysis will be reviewed to demonstrate how successful the organization has been in attracting protected labor groups into high-level positions and to plot strategies for improving affirmative action practices.

3. In April the forms will be completed and returned to the MD director. If necessary, a follow-up meeting will be held.

4. Throughout the year, the management development director will periodically visit top managers to review progress in developing identified high potentials and successors throughout their areas of responsibility.

5. As need arises, the database will be accessed as a source of possible successors in the organization.

Source: William J. Rothwell and H. C. Kazanas, Building In-House Leadership and Management Development Programs (Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 1999), p. 131. Used with permission.)

Talent Management Strategy Linked to Key Organizational Priorities:

What Does That Mean?

Most Talent Management executives and vendors can cite big business results from certain Talent Management interventions. That might justify their purchases, and they are probably good business decisions.

But that doesn’t mean they align with the organization’s bigger picture. What might such an alignment look like?

•    If an organization’s information in largely in people’s heads, so that turnover would be a problem, it should embrace retention efforts, especially among its knowledge workers.

•    If an organization is in growth mode, it would do well to have tools and/or training to help hiring managers conduct good interviews.

•    If an organization is planning not for the next 3 years but for the next 30 years, it should invest in succession management program design.

•    If an organization is very flat and decentralized, so that upward mobility is unlikely, it should have individual development planning tools and training.

•    If an organization is trying to expand into new countries, it should consider diversity training, even for workers who will not be interacting directly with people in those markets. For example, the marketing team, who might never set foot in the new countries, should learn to understand and appreciate the local ways.

•    Research by IBM and the Human Capital Institute shows that:

–    Knowledge-intensive industries, such as telecommunications and professional services, which focus heavily on the intellectual capital delivered by their people, focus on motivating and developing talent at the individual level, as well as enabling people to network with one another. This is likely useful both from a retention point of view and an innovation point of view, in that it cultivates sharing of ideas and information.

–    Financial industries focus more on attracting talent and identifying high potential talent and having programs to retain them. The researchers suggest that the financial industry is driven more by individual contribution mentality, as opposed to teamwork, and compensation is viewed as a more important driver. They feel that selecting and retaining is more important than idea sharing and teamwork in an individual contribution environment.

–    Retailers are more likely to deliver a variety of solutions, largely because of the high percentage of employees who come into direct contact with customers.

Talent Management Strategy Exercise

Identify one of your organization’s key goals, strategies, or its mission or vision statement:

How has it adjusted its hiring practices to reflect that? How else could it adjust its hiring practices to reflect that?

How do its employee development programs reflect that? How else could it adjust its development programs to reflect that?

How can it add or adjust other Talent Management initiatives or programs to reflect that? You can use the table several pages back for guidance.

Discussion Question

Please provide an example of how your organization ensured
alignment / integration / linkage of two or more Talent Management practices.

Gaining Buy-in and Alignment

Start with the
big picture
Make sure you understand the big picture. Let the big picture drive your action steps and your communications.
Identify the stakeholders    Create a multi-functional advisory committee. Anticipate problems by learning stakeholder concerns.
Plan for constraints    Identify time constraints and resource constraints. Don’t over-commit. How big is your staff? What are their other priorities? Create a strategic plan for the project – identify the mission, vision and goals. Define the actions needed to implement the change. And make sure that the people involved know and embrace their roles.
Short Term versus Long Term    For most ambitions, you must go one step at a time. Create a short-term plan and a long-term plan.
Prioritize    Which jobs first? Which organizational levels first? Which functions first? Which solutions first? The most critical and real business needs should help determine priorities.
Centralize or
de-centralize    While either is good, depending on the project and organization, remember that the issues you will have to deal with along the way are different.
Get buy-In    Ensure that senior leaders want it, and are willing to make it a priority for themselves and others. Ensure constructive mechanisms for dealing with people who fear or resist change.
Organizational culture    Stay close to organizational culture. If the culture is flexible, don’t be too rigid. If the culture is empowering, don’t micro-manage.
Sustainability
Plan for maintenance    When your implementation is over, there will probably be some type of ongoing needs. Users will have questions. Jobs will evolve. Make sure to plan some mechanism for dealing with this.

Measurement
Identify measurable outcomes and how to track the results.

Exercise:

Suppose you have been put in charge of implementing a 360 program in your marketing division. Identify at least five variables you must first think about, plan, or research.

1) ________________________________________________________________________
2) ________________________________________________________________________
3) ________________________________________________________________________
4) ________________________________________________________________________
5) ________________________________________________________________________

Diversity and Inclusion

Following are a few topics that we have discussed only briefly, if at all, in our sessions, and that need to be considered in Talent Management Integration.

•    These are practices related to ensuring open-mindedness and continuous exploration of new alternatives.
•    It is often used in the context of people, and ensuring that diverse types of people are hired, promoted, retained, etc.
•    The origin in the United States was based on legal and fairness considerations, but over time, diversity has become more viewed as “the right thing to do” and a competitive advantage, based on the notion that productive employees can be found in all races, nationalities, religions, age groups, etc.
•    “Inclusion” is the concept that just “having” people of different backgrounds is not a good solution. Rather, involving, encouraging, empowering, and training them to the same extent as any majority groups is the major thrust, and where much of the benefits will come from.
•    While relevant laws differ from country to country, the notion that minority groups can produce productive and gifted employees just like majority groups is a key point, not limited to any culture or country.
•    Diversity training, diversity surveys, diversity associations, and diversity metrics are available for organizations to use and learn from.
•    Ways organizations try to build diversity into everyday work include:
–    Staffing teams with people from different backgrounds, to ensure diversity of thinking.
–    Treating people’s differences as strengths to be applied, rather than distractions.
–    Ensuring that hiring and promoting is done in a way that does not discriminate
against minorities.

Discussion Question

How is diversity and inclusion addressed in the average workplace?

Ethics and Integrity:

•    The reason this is being addressed here is that the integrity of leaders, both peoples’ immediate supervisors and organizations’ upper level leaders, is often deemed relevant to engagement and/or retention, especially among high performers.
•    Managers who do not do what they say they will do probably have higher turnover than managers who do, based on retention research.
•    In conclusion, the cost of having one or more managers who demonstrate low integrity or ethics probably manifests not only in his or her own performance, but in the performance, retention, and engagement of the people exposed to him or her. Investing in selecting and training for integrity will likely provide an incremental effect throughout all Talent Management practices.

Discussion Question

Can integrity be tested and interviewed for?

Can it be trained?

Sharing Information:

•    We mentioned earlier how a mission and vision can help tie Talent Management efforts together. So can feedback. In the pursuit of goals, and in the pursuit of the bigger picture, providing feedback about success is important.
•    Where should information sharing begin and end? Nobody knows, but you should lean towards over-communicating company information. There is the eternal friction between people being communicated with not enough versus too much. Too much is better.
•    The more open the communications are, the more empowered employees will feel, and the more ownership they will feel for the organization.
•    That engagement turns into performance and retention, which puts it into the bailiwick of Talent Management.

Discussion Question

Does your organization communicate too much or not enough?
Does it communicate the right way? Does it communicate about
the right things?
What would you like it to do differently in this regard?

Tools for Integrating Talent Management

Is Your Organization Ready for Change?  Change Management Assessment

Below are 17 key elements of change readiness. Rate your organization on each item. Be honest. Don’t trust only your own perspective; ask others in the organization, at all levels, to rate the company, too.