People – Exploring the Potential

Talent is crucial to any organisation. But how can we improve something that cannot be measured? Talent is something which is innate to an individual. It is the ability and the capability to achieve results. So it is fair to assume that talent precedes results. Taking this relationship forward is Dr.Sullivan who makes a fair attempt to measure the value of talent in this article. 

Economies crashing, bottom-lines dwindling, costs spinning out of control and employees being laid off…. Does it ring a bell?? I could very well be talking about your own company. And for the larger part of the corporate world this is not their worst nightmare, it is their darkest reality. The times are bad and they could get worse. Swine flu spreading over continents only symbolizes the grim scenario we are destined with. But don’t they say that you give your best when the worst arrives?? This is exactly what every organisation worth its salt needs to believe. If all get their acts together and drive at top speeds with conviction, we may very well get home safe before its complete dark!!

The best foot forward is to stop walking and look back on the path we’ve treaded and unlearn some things and adopt some others all the same. The moment beckons change… change in the way we approach managing talent in the organisation…change in the way we measure what we have and change in the way we go about accomplishing what we aspire to achieve. These times require us to improvise and develop our talents to outsmart our economy and our competitors alike. The word competitive advantage could not get more important now than ever. Every company needs to identify what it is best at and look at how it can strengthen the parts that need rework.

The key is to believe in the fundamentals and create value in every activity that is carried out in the battlefield. If its talent acquisition, the question companies need to ask is at what cost are we creating value through sourcing our talent from the market. Are we in dire need of external talent? Is the talent within not sufficient enough to achieve our targets? If it’s assessing quality of the existing talent, we need to ask ourselves if we have the right tools to measure and assess. Are we honest to ourselves and are we open to arrive at conclusions we may not be ready for? Are we willing to identify our best and put our support behind them to get us out of this rubble? Are we willing to take stock of the bloopers and recreate the sequences? If these questions are answered then the first step to a successful transformation is well underway.

The next phase of this transformation is to quantify the issues that plague us. We need to measure the extent of any activity in affecting the organisational success. There is no place to guesstimate and take actions based on unsure information. Organisational intelligence is of prime importance to make sure that the actions we take are based on quantifiable and credible information. Dashboards of senior managements need to be reworked to identify the right indicators and use the information in real-time to take bold decisions and pursue suggested changes with unflinching focus. Review mechanisms should be set up to take stock of situation on real-time basis and managements need to have the flexibility to rework their tactics without much delay. The old school of thought that believes that every step needs to be run and re-run before being deployed is about to undergo a change. The key is to have the right people have access to the right information to act fast and act incisively. There is no room for error and there is no room for delay. It is this living-on-the-edge situation that makes it even more important to have the right minds in the right places. We need to focus on our best minds to deliver the goods. First time Right (FTR) that worked wonders in manufacturing needs to be adopted as a practice in every activity pursued in the organisation.

Extensive and efficient use of technology is the key to enable the swift decision making and actions. Implementing technology solutions to take care of data capturing and collations leaves the interpretation and decision making to the talented minds. A robust technology framework ensures that the decisions are based on unmistakable data that is easily traceable. This allows the talent to create more value than grapple with reams of data and end a major part of their work-time in collating it. Benefits of technology are known to everyone. What’s important is to identify the right technology that suits the needs of the organisation and what you want the technology to achieve for you. For everything else, there’s talent and talent will lead to value that is sustainable and deliverable at the right moments.

The world is changing! And the corporate world is changing its outlook towards HR. Amongst all the metamorphosis that is happening around us, one prominent element that stands out is the focus on people…. The ‘Right’ people.

The old notion of people being an asset to an organisation has undergone a paradigm shift. Today is the era of lean mean fighting machines and in such a competitive environment the onus on organisations is to cut out the flab and maintain and flexible and value adding work-force. There is no room for mercy or charity in this race to be the most efficient and effectively managed institution. Companies around the globe are today focussed on restructuring their three Ps – Process, Performance and People. Bouts of ‘right sizing’ and layoffs have hit the headlines of many a newspapers recently. In this context it comes extremely critical for an HR practitioner to objectively identify the ‘right’ workforce in terms of quality, quantity and mix. Age, ethnicity and value alignment are of critical importance as HR around the globe tries to tackle workforce aspirations and business performance in multinational organisations.

Talent Management has become a burning topic of discussion at coffee tables across. A very reputed HR portal (Bersin & Associates) has voted talent management enabling issues as the Top 22 among a list of 62 issues identified. This just goes to accentuate the huge impact talent management has on business performances of corporations globally.

Talent Management is a stratified into talent acquisition, talent auditing & assessment, talent retention and talent development. All these set of activities are used to ensure that the machine is kept running through out the life-span of an employee in the organisation. Beginning with getting the right people in, the talent management practice begins to support the business practices. Identifying the right candidates using various assessment tools like competency based interviewing and psychometric tests etc, the people with the right attitude and aptitude are inducted in. The recruitment and selection process is followed by a well planned induction and on-boarding process that ensures that the new recruits are exposed to the culture, values and systems of the organisation. The talent prevalent in the workforce is consistently being assessed using various tools like assessment centres, talent reviews etc to ensure that the rotting apples are identified and proactively repositioned to ensure that productivity doesn’t suffer. In this regard, a renewed focus is being laid on lead indicators to ensure that modifications are carried out proactively. This calls for metrics that can be tracked and constantly monitored on dashboards by senior management. HR metrics hereby are the drivers of the talent management practices. This attempt to quantify and assess HR performance in terms of talent management has resulted in C-level Business leaders acknowledging HR as a strategic partner in their business vision.

Finally based on the talent levels of the workforce and the criticality of the roles, development programs are sketched out to ensure that the employees are being groomed into becoming future business leaders with the right mix of values, competencies and performance potential. Succession planning is an obvious next step in ensuring that the critical positions do not go unfed in the event of talented workforce leaving the organisation. To facilitate a robust succession planning exercise, organisations around the world are ensuring that the critical roles are identified and the required ingredients in terms of the competencies are chalked out in an objective fashion. Once the roles are identified, the challenge is then to assess the workforce and identify a talent pool that fits the bill. Talent pool depth and coverage play a crucial role in justifying ROI on the entire gamut of talent management activities being carried out in an organisation. A visible spin off of a robust ROI in terms of human capital management is a healthy sense of engagement among employees. An employee looks for good career opportunities, a compensation that suits the effort and the outcomes he delivers and an opportunity to develop his competencies to move to bigger and better things. An employer who facilitates these opportunities for its employees has reason enough to believe that his business stands to perform exceptionally.

“Henry Ford, Jack Welch, Bill Gates….. All practitioners of Talent Management.”