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Talent Management Feature
of the busy manager. Managers are often people who haven’t chosen the development of people as their specialist subject – instead they are IT managers, production managers or call centre managers. Their schedule is driven by customer and delivery urgencies. They rarely have uninterrupted time to delve into the thinking that would allow them to robustly manage talent.
So if you want to turn your line managers into talent managers – what can you do? How can you convince people that it’s even an undertaking worthy of effort? And if you get to that stage how do you enable a busy operational manager to adopt the right thinking fast – without needing all of the background knowledge and years of dedicated experience of an HR professional?
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manage in a sophisticated and sensitive way to create high performing teams. Often such managers are a nursery of talent for the rest of the organisation, but not everyone finds this easy to do. Managers have chosen their own specialisms and have often ended up in people management roles because they are good at delivery, strategic thinkers, or entrepreneurial, rather than people-focused. Approximately a year ago, a leading building society approached us with this very dilemma. They had a vision of what the organisation could look like if all their line managers were managing the talented people in their teams actively, right across the organisation. Despite a mix of ability, they felt that their managers could really help their people release their talent – if they had the right tools.
“In any organisation, there are just a few natural people managers out there, who manage in a sophisticated and sensitive way to create high performing teams”
Surveys of CEOs show that at the top of the organisation, talent management is rightly seen as critical to business success. Getting your talent strategy right delivers immediate competitive advantage as people begin playing to their strengths, winning market share and delivering improved bottom line results. You have identified the best people to take on your most complex challenges and toughest turnaround situations. As well as creating a bottom line impact, talented employees feel fulfilled and engagement results start to rise. Given the benefits, creating an organisational culture where talent is effectively managed is a strongly value-add activity.
How do you go about it?
In any organisation, there are just a few natural people managers out there, who
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Our challenge was to take the complex systems and thinking around talent, and to turn them into a toolkit that a busy manager could use to get the best out of their people. The objective was to make a significant shift towards the more sophisticated thinking of a talent manager, which would be sustained, year on year. And they needed to learn that thinking in a day.
This design challenge was rather like making a Swiss watch. When you as a consumer look at a Swiss watch, you see a highly polished object that is elegant and easy to use. Often, the watches don’t even need winding or to have a battery replaced. It’s only if you open your watch up that you would see the complicated and intricate workings that lead to that result. We wanted to make something that managers would be able to pick up and use to tell the time – without needing to be watchmakers.
TALENT MANAGERS DO THREE THINGS WELL
• They have a sophisticated view of potential, and spot and use the potential in every member of the team
• They identify the succession planning priorities for their team, and address these to avoid crisis management
• They quickly grasp people’s strengths, limitations, and development needs – and get them driving their own development
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Scott Hobbs is a director at Talent & Potential. For his second installment on talent
management, register for the Learning e-newsletter on
www.learnevents.com. ‘Developing your line managers as coaches’ will also be addressed at the World of Learning Conference on Wednesday 28 September 2011. See page 32.
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