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As our competitive arenas change and demand different types of performance, we have to keep developing our ability to play the game in the right way to have a chance of staying relevant and successful.
If you want to be a high performance organisation, you’d better make sure you’re superb at helping everyone who’s part of your business be really good at getting better – Talent Development, but in common sense language! If you can support the people in your organisation to understand the talent they already posses and know how to use it to great effect, your next job is to ensure that they’re ready to keep refining and developing that talent so they stay fit for purpose. What’s your businesses track record of helping everyone continuously stay fit for purpose?
What does talent development look like from a high performance POV?
From a high performance perspective, it’s critical that you are clear about the role of talent management in your pursuit of success. It’s incumbent on you to ensure that everyone has a clear understanding of the attributes they possess that meant they were invited to be part of the organisation in the first place. Once the foundation of the talent is clear, the next step to take is to ensure that everyone knows they’re expected and supported to keep growing and developing within their role. We believe that everyone should be permanently on a performance improvement plan, so that there’s always a sense of becoming more efficient, more effective and consistently ready for how the field of play is adapting and developing.
If you’re having to “identify” talent, you have to ask yourself why you recruited those people. You shouldn’t have to be identifying talent after people are already through the door. By all means, keep checking in with everyone about their ambitions for growth with their role and in the business, and definitely keep sharing openly where you see people demonstrating an aptitude to contribute in ways they didn’t originally come into the organisation for.
With the right approach, you can help everyone be focused on using their talent to make the contribution the business needs of them, now.
Who/what do you need for effective talent development?
One thing that’s always worth doing as an organisation is ensuring you have a clear picture of what your talent distribution requirements are to serve the focus of the business for the next 12-36 months. Ask yourself; how many superstar performers do you need? How many maverick talents do you need and can you accommodate? How many future stars do you need? How many solid citizens do you need who provide the foundation for everything else?
When you know the distribution of talent you need, you can then have great conversations with everyone about the role they play and what that means for how their talent can be harnessed and developed so their contribution is optimised.
So what?
You can make talent management a lot more powerful for yourself if you have a picture of the overall talent requirement of your business. Start with what you need, then use talent management as a proactive way of ensuring you’re as well set up for success as possible!
The here and now – be present in the present.
When it comes to high performance, it’s essential you know how to identify talent that is present right now. This isn’t about identifying talent for some future role. It’s always about making sure that everyone is being supported, as part of the job too, to enjoy making the most of their talent. Evidently, hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. But in the high performance organisation, everyone enjoys knowing what their talent is and knowing that as part of everyday performance, that talent will be cemented in place and added to in the most relevant way required. If everyone knows that their diary is their development plan, as well as their contribution in action, then we have to worry less about talent training as a special investment, because everyone is enjoying a focus on continuous improvement.
Is the environment supportive of developing your talent?
All businesses are interested in being more successful. All businesses are committed to increasing profitability and being commercially successful. Many businesses are equally committed to being successful as a function of their purpose driven approach to work. Whether you’re focused on the WHAT or HOW of business success, creating a culture where everyone knows how to nurture talent will really help you get on the path to sustained success. With systematic talent development built into your ways of working, whenever you’re successful (result or performance wise), you’ll know what you did, how you did it and that success becomes instantly more repeatable. When performance and results are being worked on together as the focus for how you prepare, support and nurture the talent of the people in your business, you’ll be opening up a much greater opportunity for setting new standards and delivering successes you’re proud of.
Shifting focus.
When you start taking the high performance approach to talent, dated concepts like retaining talent get a reduced focus for you. Instead you start to benefit from everyone collaborating to make the best contribution possible to the success of the business, for as long as it feels right for all parties. You begin to focus on defining what will help everyone enjoy the next opportunity for growing value and impact together. If you repeatedly combine business ambition with the personal ambitions for development and growth of everyone in your organisation, you create a culture where everyone knows they are valued and valuable. You can keep committing to creating a meaningful collaboration. Rather than recruiting people and hoping not to lose them, the high performance approach benefits from the chance to keep creating new reasons to stay and be involved. Sometimes though, people’s ambitions will be met by being in another organisation, and the truly high performance organisation enjoys the opportunity for people to continue their talent development in a new environment.
If you’re ready to rethink your approach to how you’re recruiting talent, retaining talent and focusing on talent development, then we’re here to set you free from outdated ideas!
