Talent Development (every talent belongs to someone)

Indeed, this post is about talent. In the last years the acquisition and development of talent is a priority in the agenda of the vast majority of organizations and executives.

But this is not really new. In my experience managing different teams we have different ways of developing the talent, for example, why instead of looking from the top how to develop the talent we apply our intelligence to help them to discover their own? I will try to explain what I mean.

Let´s start to ask ourselves some questions as follows:

·         Which is the talent that makes them unique and it is needed by the organization?

·         In which situations and how they could develop it?

·         Why we don’t create scenarios and opportunities so they could effectively test it?

·         What if we give them feedback about how they did it and how they could improve it?

If you are worried to retain your key employees, those who will allow you to carry out your corporate strategy which took a lot of resources (time, effort and expertise) to be planned I can understand your worries.

Allow me to tell an example from my own experience. Some time ago when I was leading a finance department I proposed to my organization to look the talent development from a different perspective. We need to consider the human being aspect that was my argument. I did not get too much approval, to be honest, no approval at all. I heard things like “this is not your business you just do the changes approved by the senior management” or “we understand your point but you know, here the things are different, people don’t leave the company, they need the money and they do whatever”. The attrition rate was increasing dramatically. But not only the new employees were leaving but also the most seniors as well, including some pioneers and also the so called “right hands”. How was this possible? Was not money everything?

I insisted that we needed to ask different questions, intelligent questions. Avoiding the questions where the replies could be premeditated. The senior management and the HR Director asked me to prepare a list with my proposals. Well, see below some examples:

·         How do you feel on Monday morning?

·         How do you feel on Friday afternoon?

·         Do you think we should offer anything different to our customers?

·         What obstacles, from the leadership perspective, do we put to allow you to do your tasks?

·         Do you know how your work contributes to the business?

·         How do you think we could save money?

·         If your work is not for 10 points, what do you lack to do it?

·         What was the latest decision senior management made and you did not understand?

·         How we could communicate these decisions in a clearer way next time?

·         How could you do you work more effectively?

·         If you could change the collective behavior of the organization, what would it be?

·         How you see, how you feel working in the team of this company?

·         What make you feel proud of working in this company?

·         What did you learn last week? From whom did you learn anything?

I could add more but I don’t want to bore the reader!!!

The above questions did the people spoke out.  Speak out if you are concerned, that was the message. When you ask people honestly they are ready to share their thoughts. They talk with the expectations that something is going to change. At the end of the day we have to tell the employee which is the talent the company needs from him/her.

As you know the quality of the answers are based on the quality of the questions. The reason for the above mentioned questions was to look for clues to clear up the uncertainty in terms of what the person considers the company could do to improve his/her performance and results. In other words it is the employee who will express the intention to develop and strengthen those capabilities that would increase his/her value, image and self-confidence. Hence the question is: what is the organization doing to create opportunities where the talent of the employees can be put in practice? We don’t need to assign the role of team leader immediately but the person can be a team member where he/she can feel is useful, trustful and part of something superior and important.

Continuing with the above example after telling the employees what was the talent most needed and how they could apply it and after including them in challenging projects the situation started to change. The employees started to express their opinions and freeing the first talent: to respond creatively and sincerely to honest questions and concrete experiences. In this scenario the ability of the company to capture all these comments and transform in recognition and concrete rewards started to create a philosophy of respect for the own capabilities and the willingness to “walk an extra mile”.

The takeaway of this story is to know the organizations cannot assume the right to lead and manage the talent, the knowledge, the culture, the satisfaction or any other intangible which is flying over the company. The persons have to be seen from a global perspective so the organization can meet their motivations better than other only focused on satisfying the own needs even if they are well-intentioned.

Based on the above managing the talent should not be the “business priority” of the moment but to ask ourselves: if we already have the base group in our organization with dozens of talents waiting to be shown up, what can we do with them? It is about maximizing the current talent not to manage it. And actually is not a “war of talent” as in the war nobody wins. The searching should be in the opposite, in my view, get that all win, the employee, the manager the organization and the society. This way winning the heart of the people and establishing the mechanisms and support that contains the discipline people will remain in your organization. Do the right thing others will imitate it.