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

Organisations throughout the world invest a great deal of resources, time and money in Talent Management to retain High Potentials (HIPOTs). They are highly capable, intelligent, and quick learning resources that we are discussing. Would a hike in salary package, grade, or designation place them motivated all the way?

 

Imagine a goldfish in a tank with lots of fighter fish. A formula1 car on a high-traffic road. Shoe polish adjacent to fruit racks in the retail outlet. How repulsive are these images? This is precisely how hipots will feel if they've got 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:

 

Consider 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 may well 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 wish to be told. A hipot would hate to be directed all the time, and they like to be challenged cognitively. They'd prefer guidance only after trying out things on their own. An environment where the organisation or maybe the managers are less tolerant towards learning through experiments and failures do not support nurturing a talent pool. ‘Telling approach' is one indicator of an organisation that lacks a high-performance culture.

 

ASPIRATION MISMATCH:

 

Tenure-based promotion is a good enough ground repel the talent pool from your organisation. Precisely what it takes in such a situation would be to manage somehow and stay put for the promotions to happen. A hipot could find being employed in such an environment insulting. Hipots intend to grow in accordance 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 check 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 buy it from the market? These generally are two different things. In case your organisation is attracting talent, you'll always have a talent surplus situation, no matter what the market condition is. When 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 will not likely 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 result in interpersonal challenges as well as an spiking of employee churn

 

 

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

 

• Define the DNA of hipots for the organisation

• Define the strategy to recruit hipots. You'll have to make sure that they work with managers who can offer them the right environment

• Conduct surveys to see 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 accountable for talent management and review them regularly

• Define a career path for all roles in the organisation. The 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 absolutely ok to not recruit hipots for your organisation, but this decision needs to be based on talent pool bench-marking

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