Are Your People Your Most Valuable Asset? Really??
EVERYONE SAYS THEIR PEOPLE MAKE THE DIFFERENCE. ALMOST WITHOUT EXCEPTION, THEY ARE WRONG.
To achieve sustained competitive advantage, you must create and deliver something that is valuable, different and hard to imitate–and you can’t do that with a human resources strategy like everyone else.
The companies that truly make talent a strategic focus of their competitive advantage ask themselves these questions:
- What will drive our business in the next 3 years and beyond?
- What will PEOPLE need to be capable of doing to make the business successful?
- Are we adequately staffed to meet today’s needs?
- Are we adequately staffed to meet our 3 and 5-year objectives? What are the gaps? Should we “buy” the talent or “develop” the talent?
- Who is at greatest risk for turnover?
- Are we underutilizing employees?
- Are we assuming raw talent will wait for us to challenge them?
- Why are some people failing at their jobs and will training help?
Too often, flaws in the process of leadership selection and development, coupled with invalid assumptions about human nature, screen out the very people who would make the best leaders.
Among the more common problems are choosing the wrong people for leadership roles, misunderstanding what a “good†leader looks like, and ignoring or misusing executive assessment.
A Strategic Talent Management approach addresses the blind spots in many other assessment methods by fostering a frank discussion about an individual’s strengths and weaknesses and including a prediction of performance in a more responsible role.
Through a structured group discussion by people who know both a position’s requirements and the candidate being considered for the position, Think for Results helps the organization assess the individual’s fit for a role, and determine their future potential success in higher level positions.
The process covers three areas:
Description. A review of an individual’s abilities across numerous leadership areas, including complexity of information processing, optimizing resources, delivering results, problem solving, strategic thinking, managing performance, and communication skills
Prediction. A discussion of how the candidate will likely perform in a more responsible, broader, or different role, and where the candidate could stumble
Development. A list of short- and long-term development priorities
Our process also helps to build consensus among people moving into more senior positions. Because the evaluators often end up being the new leader’s peers, they are invested in making the promotion work rather than acting out their frustration for not being included in the selection process.