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Develop talent rather than just hire it

Finding excellent workers who will fit into your company culture and give amazing results can be a challenge. There is a “war for talent” as companies struggle to recruit skilled professionals, so companies can no longer rely on hiring exceptional employees to build a great workforce. The best way to acquire exceptional employees is to develop them yourself — which means investing resources and time to build a productive workforce that will stay.

Leadership tactics are about developing great talent

The most important thing to note while developing exceptional employees is that it takes time. As an employer, you need to create and implement policies and processes for employee engagement and work on retention strategies that encourage people to stay and contribute positively. That means putting together a workforce committed to the company’s success — people who love their jobs and are passionate about the industry.

Ask yourself: are your employees happy?

Although you may think your staff is engaged and committed, you could be wrong. A recent Gallup survey showed only a little over 30 percent of workers in the US felt engaged in their companies. This means most employees are unhappy at the workplace, and many are just contributing the bare minimum.

Why should you bother developing exceptional staff?

Developing staff has many advantages:

They become more productive and efficient.
They improve their knowledge and create better skill sets.
They gain experience they can use to expand on company goals.
They serve your customers better, increase your customer base, and build customer loyalty.
They contribute toward making your company a respectable brand in the industry.

How to develop leadership tactics for exceptional employees

There are amazing benefits to developing staff. Here is where to start.

Start at the hiring process

You need to look for the right people from the get-go — choosing to employ people in line with your company’s future goals, and picking people who have skills you can develop to excellence. Although you may want to use money as an incentive, for many potential employees it’s not all about the paycheck; many professionals now want to work in companies with excellent work culture and are ready to take less money for that opportunity. So while developing exceptional staff, you need to create a work culture that outstanding talent wants to be part of.

Create a great management team

Even if you hire the best talent, the managers in your company will affect the way they work. A good team of leaders brings out the best in your employees, while a bad one reduces the productivity of even the best people. Work at creating a great management team with the skills to help your staff become excellent at their jobs, and invest resources and time in improving your management team by exposing them to skills they can use to develop exceptional employees.

Become a role model

If you do not inspire your employees, you will lose them to other companies with leaders they can look up to. Cultivate exceptional traits and skills that inspire your employees to become outstanding, and make a habit of continually improving yourself so your employees and managers see you as a worthy leader and mentor. It helps if anything you ask of your staff is seen in your own work ethic — if you set high targets, can they see you achieve them yourself? Such an approach builds respect, which is essential in developing staff; it is easier for an employee to follow instructions from someone they respect. Identify role models in your industry that you and your staff can use as inspiration.

Provide the right tools

You cannot expect excellence if you do not give your employees the necessary tools to competently do their work. Part of creating exceptional talent is investing in the right tools — office equipment, machinery, devices, training resources — and, beyond physical tools, productivity software to streamline processes and promote efficiency. For remote workers, find tools to help with communication and ensure work is completed successfully. The tools you use must be modern to keep up with industry changes; if an application is no longer relevant, find out which one is and train your employees to use it.

Expose employees to cross-training

An exceptional employee needs to understand how all departments in the company function — it doesn’t help to keep employees who are only good at one skill. Employees should be trained in all aspects of the business to expand their skill set, creating a dynamic team that can work on any issue. For example, managers must be aware of the work their staff does, such as purchasing stock, advertising the brand, and dealing with customers; managing from the comfort of an office, unaware of how processes work in various departments, no longer works. This approach develops exceptional employees who can take up different responsibilities, relate easily to colleagues in other departments, and see the whole organization as one.

Invest in continuous development

If you wait for the annual review to show employees what they are doing wrong, you waste a lot of time. Instead, use daily or weekly engagements to develop their skills using individual development plans. Start by finding out an employee’s career-development goals and how they plan to contribute to the company’s success, then give them developmental tasks associated with their aspirations and your vision for them. If you want an employee to become a team leader, give them short assignments running a team to gradually develop their leadership skills, and use project check-ins to advise on areas of weakness. Keep the development tasks ongoing to build one good skill after another — it benefits staff in the long run and gives you a good return on investment.

Measure productivity

Quantify your staff’s performance to gauge their progress — divide goals into quantifiable tasks and give them a timeframe. Measuring productivity gives employees a way to gauge progress and a sense of pride when they meet targets; it sharpens their skills and competence and gives you a way to identify and develop excellent talent while ensuring accountability. When measuring performance, it is essential to give constructive feedback based on performance data so employees can identify mistakes and improve. Where excellence is identified, enhance it by recognizing and rewarding good work; where reprimands are necessary, deliver them with the aim of helping employees better themselves, not to put them down.

Create beneficial connections

As a leader, you must have connections to mentors, experts, and role models in the industry that your staff can benefit from — make a point of linking your employees to such people. Helping employees associate with skilled and respected people improves their skills and knowledge, and creating beneficial connections is also a brilliant way to market your business and build an industry network. Beyond connecting employees to experts, expose them to coaching opportunities, workshops, and training programs they can use to improve.

Navigate organizational bureaucracy

Every organization has some form of bureaucracy, and yours probably does too. Regardless of a worker’s skills, if they cannot work with the office culture they are unlikely to succeed, so teach your staff how to deal with any bureaucracy in your organization. At the same time, removing barriers that lead to workplace difficulties makes developing staff simpler. Ensure your employees’ rights are not infringed upon — for example, promotions should be given on merit, and access to higher positions should be open to all regardless of gender, race, or any other barrier. Create an open work environment that doesn’t require employees to be wary or constrained all the time, so they feel free to explore their talent, suggest innovations, and work hard.

Last word

When all is said and done, a company needs a return on investment for the resources spent on employees, and developing excellent staff is the best way to achieve this goal. Use these tactics consistently as an investment in the future of your company.

Succession planning is an integral part of talent management

Talent management is all about fulfilling the organization’s business objective by acquiring, developing, and deploying the employees with the highest potential. The responsibility of HR is to create an environment where these high-potential employees can learn, develop, gain on-the-job experience, and progress in their careers, with the expectation that some of them are destined to play a significant role in the future growth of the organization.

Succession planning is a process for identifying and developing new leaders who can replace old leaders when they leave or retire. It increases the availability of experienced and capable employees prepared to assume these roles as they become available. Those organizations that can nurture and manage their talent well are the ones that can identify and develop future leaders. Succession planning forces an organization to introspect carefully on its available talent, build constructive appraisal processes, and ensure they are applied fairly across the organization.

Most small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) very rarely have formal talent management and succession management processes. Even though these are prevalent among large enterprises, SMBs lag behind in this respect — and even those that have incorporated succession planning find that getting an effective business outcome and doing it right remains a challenge. In the last few years we have seen increasing interest among SMBs in recognizing the importance of talent management and succession planning; however, there appears to be a substantial gap between intention and reality. It is one thing to have these processes implemented, but the real question is: do they deliver?

Implementing a succession planning process usually involves significant cultural change, and SMBs find it harder to embrace such change, as some have grown over the years without any formal process. Sometimes they face challenges from traditional mindsets that prevent the modern performance-based appraisal processes necessary for creating a fair system — and a modern performance process is the backbone of talent management and succession planning. Finding potential successors who are ready to take up new responsibilities when their time comes requires discipline, consistent processes, and organizational commitment, mainly from senior leadership. Succession planning is a top-down approach at first, even though the actual realization happens at the grassroots level.

Approaches to succession planning and talent management

At times succession planning is misunderstood as a procedure in place only for the highest level of executives. This is a flawed concept. Succession planning must be driven from the top, but its primary purpose is to ensure that a pipeline of talented (high-potential) individuals is always ready and in place.

As resources are scarce among SMBs, proper coordination among the talent acquisition team, training team, and succession planning team will ensure that you get your internal employees ready to take up newly available opportunities. Organizations should go to external candidates only when no internal candidates are available — this is where succession planning saves the organization thousands of dollars in onboarding, training, and making a new employee productive.

The most progressive SMBs focus on continuity and sustainability, so most of their succession planning programs reach right down through the organization — identifying promising talent from managers, middle managers, and senior managers to recent graduates, and seeking opportunities to develop that talent. A typical approach uses organization and development reviews to identify the areas in which the organization needs to excel, what the implications are for leadership, and where those leaders could be found.

Once the requirements are clear, the next step is to capture a range of information about the successors — such as year-on-year performance rating, internal and external career moves to date, perceived strengths and weaknesses, language ability, and mobility. Some organizations “force-rank” successors based on a range of criteria. The next step is to categorize people by timeframes and readiness for positions in 0–2 years, 2–4 years, and 4–7 years, which helps create relevant career planning steps so the successor is ready within the stipulated timeframe. Ultimately the business strategy will determine what kind of skill set the company needs in the future and where people with those skills can be found. Leadership is not a fixed concept — and especially with all the changes around us, new management skills will be needed — so flexibility is essential to ensure your talent management practices keep evolving as the business changes.

The role of competencies and competency models

Competencies and competency models have become very sophisticated over the last decade or so. Some are specific to internal processes like leadership or talent acquisition, and some are specific to a particular industry segment. Large organizations usually spend much time and effort building these for themselves, but most SMBs cannot build something on their own and may end up with homegrown competencies across various talent management processes.

To be successful, SMBs should pay attention to competency models that are uniform across all talent management areas and explicitly link performance and succession together. They should look at building or acquiring competency models aligned with their overall business strategy. Competency models designed to evaluate performance appraisals tend to be reasonably mature and consistently applied, but not so much in other areas. Depending on maturity, organizations may use traditional annual appraisals, 360-degree reviews, or continuous performance management (CPM) practices — most often with the same competency model. Increasingly, organizations link appraisals to bonuses, connecting compensation models more closely with competency and performance issues; that said, succession planning is not always related to the competency model, and organizations should pay attention to connecting the two.

Building a global talent pool

These days it is not uncommon for smaller SMBs to diversify outside their country boundaries, and depending on the industry, they may have teams based in offshore or nearshore locations. The post-COVID-19 environment will force SMBs to recognize the importance of developing an all-inclusive global talent pool capable of meeting the post-pandemic situation as well as future challenges of organizational expansion and diversification. A structured succession planning process keeps track of who may be suitable to take up international opportunities, helping organizations plan better by understanding the availability of talent across the globe.

Is your succession planning in line with your diversity policy?

On paper, all companies have a diversity policy. Still, implementing it consistently across hiring, promotion, job rotation, and succession planning is certainly not done systematically. In most US-based organizations, race and religious diversity are generally less advanced than gender diversity. The lack of women’s representation in senior roles has already created much bad press in the last few years, and movements highlighting racial justice will push organizations to be more proactive — not only maintaining a healthy diversity policy but applying it to all areas of HR, specifically the future succession planning process.

Most SMBs do not pay much attention to job rotation

Once the organization finds the right candidates, it should put programs in place to make them ready in the stipulated time. It is an excellent opportunity for SMBs to consider job rotation or secondments as a positive, desirable thing — some companies even make this a prerequisite for taking on senior roles. This is also an excellent way to give experience to high-potential candidates.

Conclusion

SMBs can look to the many strong talent management and succession planning programs in place across large enterprises and adopt some of the best practices. Many modern-day HR and talent solutions like SAP SuccessFactors are based on industry best practices, which can certainly help kick-start the succession planning initiative for your organization.

Tag: Leadership

Leadership tactics for exceptional employees