Talent management
Talent development is result of activities of many people in HR and L&D. Their activities are aimed at recruiting and retaining best people.
In more strategic terms, they try to attract employees who could contribute to ensure future success of the business. No secret that business need to attract eight people to be successful.
Talent development is often linked to leadership development, as it is natural that leaders can "leverage" their actions and have more positive impact.
Employees that can take leadership positions are considered as high-potential employees and find themselves in the pipeline that supposed to help them develop their potential.
In this pipeline all processes are designed to develop, evaluate and encourage high-potential employees.
This pipeline works, sometimes it has problems and sometimes it just stops. From the point of view of HR professionals pipeline works just fine.
However, there is another perspective - the point view of the employees in the pipeline. They have their own opinion about how the system should work.
For pipeline to be effective, the opinion of employees should be taken into account.
Seven essential questions
To help your organisation develop better system for development of high-potential employees, you should answer the following seven questions:
- How does your organisation identify and recognise high-potential employees?
- Can the high-potential employees in your organisation expect to have higher level of investment in their training, development and support?
- How your organisation helps high-potential employees to deal with pressure of higher performance?
- Does your organisation have formal requirements to high-potential employees performance?
- How your organisation helps with career plans of high-potential employees?
- How your organisations deals with higher level of decision-making and authority of employees?
- How does your organisation ensure that high-potential employees share their skills and experience with other team members?
In this series we discuss all these questions in detail.
Why it is important?
You might ask, why HR professionals need the view inside the pipeline? These insights can help you understand:
- Who are employees your organisation considers as high-potential employees?
- How these employees perceive their status of high-potential employees? How they perceive formal or informal status?
- How does the status of high-potential employee impact performance and engagement?
- How can high-potentials impact the organisation performance?
What should be done?
Every company with the high-potential employees pipeline knows that they should be developed. The more important thing is to understand what employees themselves think about these efforts. The following should be done to develop more engagement among high-potential employees:
Decide on the formal or informal status
Formal and informal status have their advantages and disadvantages for employees. It is important to understand how this approach impacts employees.
Develop fruitful relationships with high-potential employees
Developing high-potential employees should be two-way street - not only the organisation should develop employees, but employees themselves should contribute and share their knowledge, skills and insights with others. It helps to develop engaged and committed workforce on all levels.
Engage high-potential employees into employee identification and development
High-potential employees should play a role in identification and development of other high-potential employees. Sharing this responsibility will allow your organisation to have more streamlined and effective approach to talent development.