Strategic Talent Management

More than ever, leaders of global companies are struggling to manage their best talent. They fully realize that today’s fast competitive global business environment makes it that much more difficult to keep the best talent on board.

Notwithstanding the need to keep the most excellent new leaders on your roster, like many organizations, you may be finding that the ways in which you recruit, develop, and manage talent are stagnant. Our research shows that barely more than 30 percent of those in the executive suite said they had a strategy to help them identify future leaders.

What Can You Do?

Your organization’s leaders need to find ways to manage and retain your top performers. We know that accomplishing this is harder than ever, especially as increased market intensity and the need for strong potential talent are peaking at a time when the pool of prospective leaders is declining. That decline can be attribute to stagnant hiring during the 1980’s and a shrinking population.

The result is a challenging business environment that has fewer experienced leaders to deal with your company’s need to stay ahead of the game. On the other hand, these challenges also represent opportunities to alter and measurably improve how you manage your talent.

Talent management is not merely an HR concern—it is a leadership imperative. Managing talent strategically requires much more than treating the symptoms with the same old remedies. It requires that your leaders fundamentally rethink the role of talent in strategy execution, and fix your processes to make talent a priority, rather than an afterthought. More than ever, you must treat talent management as a top priority, bringing it to the forefront of your overall strategy.

Creating a Talent Plan

Whether you’re starting a new company or preparing tomorrow’s leaders, in order to be successful you must hire the best talent, make sure that the talent is aligned with the company’s overall strategy and culture, aggressively develop that talent, and reward your rising stars well. In addition, you must take authentic steps to keep your new talent aligned with their vision of a desirable culture and future strategy.

A well-thought out strategic talent management plan that brings together business strategy and talent strategy is key. Your business and talent managers must see themselves as equal partners when it comes to this segment of business planning.

Effectively Managing Business Talent

To effectively manage business talent, CLG will help you implement important behavioral changes that allow you to do these four things successfully:

• Align business and talent strategies. Make each aspect of your talent strategy directly connect to your overall business strategy and execution. When you have completed your business plan, question yourself about those you are bringing into the company and the processes you already have in place. You’ll need to know if your people are ready to develop and support your business plan for at least the next three to five years. If that’s not the case, adjust your activities that do not directly link to the new strategically-based leadership requirements.
• Look ahead, not behind. Develop tomorrow’s leaders for tomorrow’s challenges. Talent management should be based on where the company is going, instead of where it’s been.
• Track the talent profile. Make talent metrics part of your business portfolio, giving it the same attention as other bottom line metrics. Acknowledge that these metrics play a vital role in your business, and are an excellent indicator of your future capacity to carry through with your strategy.
• Hold the business accountable. Regardless of the strength of your strategy, it is critical to make sure your people will and can execute it. Make sure you have the talent you need to secure additional market share, as well as the talent to execute your plans.

Further Recommendations

CLG recommends that you require your senior leaders to provide a talent strategy that is commensurate with your targeted business strategy operating plan. If you don’t have an equivalent talent plan, your business strategy will represent nothing more than a vision with no way to make it happen. Refuse to approve business plans that fail to address finding, developing and managing talent to successfully realize that vision and strategy.

Employees’ needs shift as they progress through their careers. Maintaining open communications, frequent and high quality feedback, and active engagement in the talent management process is a necessity, with your top talent especially. You must regularly assess your top employees and ensure your company provides an environment where performance is valued, encouraged and rewarded, and where growth and continuous learning is expected.

In the end, it comes down to providing a workplace where your employees routinely exhibit discretionary performance and where they see others doing the same. In today’s business environment, talented individuals have more options than ever regarding where they choose to work. Strategic talent management is only possible when it transitions from being an HR process to a business process and a leadership priority.

The talent crisis is not a reality for just some companies - it is a reality for all organizations. The good news is that there is immense talent out there. The challenge lies in the fact that these individuals expect a better and different management process than prior generations demanded.

Learn more about how CLG addresses this challenge in our white paper, The Talent Crisis - Who’s Delivering on Your Strategy?