Talent Management Strategy: Practices Which Makes Or Break Your Organisation's Talent Pool

Organisations worldwide invest considerable resources, time and money in Talent Management to retain High Potentials (HIPOTs). They are highly capable, intelligent, and quick learning resources that we are referring to. Would a hike in salary package, grade, or designation place them motivated for long?

 

Visualize a goldfish inside a tank full of fighter fish. A formula1 car on a heavy traffic road. Shoe polish besides fruit racks in the retail outlet. How repulsive are these images? That's exactly how hipots will feel if they've to work in an environment that doesn't suit their culture, aspirations, and capabilities. They are going to feel suffocated and what follows next is the hipot going in search of fresh air.

 

 

CAPABILITY MISMATCH:

 

Take into consideration a situation where your hipot has to report to a supervisor who seems to be low on general intelligence. The manager would most probably spend more time concluding a brainstorming session. The hipot may see this additional time as waste and incapability of her manager. The hipot might not find enough motivation to sit through the future meetings with the manager or not really look forward to learning from the manager.

 

 

CULTURE MISMATCH:

 

We all know that adults don't want to be told. A hipot would hate to be directed always, and they like to be challenged cognitively. Generally they would prefer guidance only after trying out things on their own. An environment where the organisation and the managers are less tolerant towards learning through experiments and failures will not support nurturing a talent pool. ‘Telling approach' is considered one indicator of an organisation that lacks a high-performance culture.

 

ASPIRATION MISMATCH:

 

Tenure-based promotion is a good enough a way to repel the talent pool farther from organisation. What is needed in such a situation usually is to manage somehow and stay put for the promotions to happen. A hipot could find employed in such an environment insulting. Hipots intend to grow according to performance, effort and demonstrated capability.

 

Organisations can't expect hipots to wait patiently for their turn of promotion. The irony is that the organisations don't look for their patience while recruiting them. The talent management strategy must be in line with the intent to nurture and retain the talent pool.

 

“At companies with very effective talent management, respondents are six times more likely than those with very ineffective talent management to report higher 'Total Returns to Shareholders' than competitors.”

 

“Only 5 per cent of respondents say their organizations' talent management has been very effective at improving company performance”.

 

Source - https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/winning-with-your-talent-management-strategy

 

 

ATTRACTING VS BUYING TALENT:

 

Does your organisation attracts talent or get it from the market? These are two different things. If your organisation is attracting talent, you'll always have a talent surplus situation, no matter what the market condition is. In case you are buying talent from the market, you may consider the following thoughts:

 

• Increased wages are not going to keep the hipot motivated quite a while

• A Deputy Assistant VP grade won't mean much for a longer duration

• If there's a mismatch between expectations and reality, the hipot may regress in performance after joining your organisation

• Recruiting hipots may bring about interpersonal challenges as well as an increasing amount of employee churn

 

 

Some pointers that can help in making informed decisions about attracting, recruiting, and retaining the talent pool:

 

• Define the DNA of hipots for your organisation

• Define the strategy to recruit hipots. You will have to make certain that they work with managers who can present the right environment

• Conduct surveys to ascertain if your organisation's culture is conducive for nurturing the talent pool. Should there be shortcomings, including organisational culture and practices, address them through a robust learning architecture

• Make leaders answerable for talent management and review them regularly

• Define a career path for all roles in the organisation. An employee should enter, get promoted, and exit the organisation at the correct time

• Make people development a default competency for managers and leaders. Organisations should give talent management competency enough weightage for making their promotions decisions

• Provide equal opportunity for all employees to learn and grow

• Make the promotion criteria objective and transparent

• It is definitely ok to not recruit hipots for your organisation, but this decision should be based on talent pool bench-marking

organisation development