Local Trends in Talent Management and Leadership Development
Leadership and retention are seen as urgent issues globally in human capital management, and many organizations in the Baton Rouge area are experiencing those pressures, as well. They are responding by doing much more to develop their employees, including structured approaches such as classroom learning, mentoring and rotational job assignments. They’re making sure that their managers understand that retaining and growing talent is important.I recently shared my observations about these trends in talent-development strategies in a presentation for the Greater Baton Rouge chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management. Here’s what I’m seeing around Baton Rouge and the Gulf Coast area.
A Shift Away from Traditional Performance Management
Traditional performance management conjures images of a yearly review and either a message of “keep doing what you’re doing” or a discussion of some kind of problem and maybe a plan to improve. I’m seeing a move away from this old practice to a more continuous focus on development, and it’s a great change.Leaders are working with employees to layer many types of competencies: technical skills, soft skills, leadership and business acumen. They’re working to maintain areas of strength, foster improvements in weaker areas and encourage competencies that will be needed in the future.A key component of this shift is training managers and employees on how to deliver and receive coaching conversations. For example, instead of a manager saying “I’m adding you to this task force. It’ll be good for you,” they can be much more specific: “Let me tell you why I want to offer you this opportunity. You’re strong in this area. You’ll get exposure to these other departments and you can build relationships there. You can get an idea of their politics and how information flows. You can see understand how what we do here impacts the rest of the organization.”
More Career Development, Earlier
Development used to happen only horizontally — training only managers or supervisors — but organizations are seeking to develop people vertically and starting much earlier in their careers. The idea is not to wait until someone expects a promotion or someone else is leaving. If you develop people early, you’ll have a pipeline ready to fill gaps, and set pathways to retain your great people.This is especially important for millennials. They are very career-savvy and a bit fickle. They expect an organization and a supervisor who will teach them and help them develop a career path. They want both informal coaching and formal training programs, and they’ll leave an organization if they don’t get this.
Preparing Leaders for Uncertainty
Those of us in the Gulf Coast region don’t have to be told that the world is complex and uncertain — we routinely see circumstances like fluctuating oil and gas prices, state budget shortfalls, and natural disasters.While it’s important to have some development take place in a classroom, it can’t all occur there. It’s important to hire and develop leaders who can make decisions without having all the information. They’ll need to use their experience, critical thinking and judgment to make a call, and if that call is wrong or circumstances change, they need to be agile enough to quickly change directions.
Planning for the Future
Succession planning begins with determining which positions are critical — but you have to be careful how you determine this. If you ask employees for input, everyone will say their job is critical. Instead, what positions would be hard to fill if you lost them? You could probably find a CFO pretty quickly, but what about your middle management or operations? Often these are critical roles that would be hard to fill. Do you have the bench strength to fill them?You’ll need to assess readiness of those you anticipate will take over, which includes past performance and upcoming potential as well as current readiness. If someone isn’t quite there, provide coaching and training — and do it well before a role is vacated.Succession planning is also accomplished through strategic hiring and promotion of high-potential employees. You need a mix of qualified outside hires and inside promotions. Outside hires bring fresh ideas and new perspectives; internal promotions boost morale as others see room for growth.
Spreading the Institutional Knowledge
When your succession plan is set, you’ll need to actually start transferring the knowledge. Technical information that can be found in databases and documents is the easy part of this, but the “tacit transfer” is much harder. This is all the knowledge that’s in your head that you don’t even know you know.Apart from being hard to quantify, tacit knowledge transfer can make some people uncomfortable. Some people like being the only one with certain information, so it takes trust to let that go. And some others will continue to go to the person they’re used to dealing with even after the transfer. In these cases, it’s up to the transferrer to point to the new contact and smooth the transition: “You’ll love working with Erin. She’s a great researcher and will have excellent insight into your team.”A few remarks like this will build Erin’s confidence, as the new learner, and the confidence of key stakeholders, who can now trust that Erin has the knowledge she needs.Success Labs is a leadership-development and management consulting firm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to explore their business potential and improve their company and cultural performance. Contact us to get proactive about your people strategy.
