Talent Management

Key to Success and Challenges

Key To Success

Active participation and championing by senior executives.
Alignment of the program with the strategic direction of the organisation.
Employee input, engagement, and participation.
Effective organisational communication of the program.

Challenges

Talent management is a process that has long term benefits – but many organisations only have the bandwidth to focus on the short to mid term.

Talent Management

Introduction

Talent management is a set of integrated organisational human resource processes designed to attract, develop, motivate, and retain productive, engaged employees. The goal of talent management is to create a high-performance, sustainable organisation that meets its strategic and operational goals and objectives.

Why

This toolkit talent management helps a leader to:

attract, develop and retain productive engaged employees.
identify, develop and deploy the right talent in order to meet strategic priorities of the organisation in the short and long term.
accelerate the development of employees by identifying opportunities for career growth and development within the organisation.
identify internal talent pools and transfer knowledge to others within the organisation.

What you can expect

In seven steps this toolkit will support you to attract, develop, and retain productive and engaged employees. Here you’ll find a step-by-step guide, tools, examples and other resources for managing talent.

Step 1: Identify Talent Needs

Create an organisational definition of talent in line with long term, strategic priorities – “What is the talent that the organisation needs?” The definition should reflect the organisations core values.
Identify critical positions based on the organisation strategy.
Identify and focus on critical capabilities.

This short video from LinkedIn Learning walks you through the basic steps of talent management:

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Step 2: Assess Talent based on Potential

Identify which talent gaps you have within the organisation. Will you be recruiting new employees or will you focus on identifying talent within your organisation?
Formulate the criteria and the process for identifying 'high potentials'. Potential is often assessed as a combination of the factors: behavior, values, attributes, stretch.
Identify high potential employees based on the process and criteria articulated.
Watch this short video from Canadian HR Reporter on how to identify high potential employees:

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Step 3: Define Talent Pools

Map your employees on performance and potential to perform into nine distinctive talent segments/pools as in the Nine Box matrix. Watch the short video below that explains the Nine Boxes in 90 seconds.
Create employee profiles with strengths and possible gaps based on this assessment for the 'High Performance, High Potential', 'High Performance, Medium Potential', 'Medium Performance, High Potential' employees.

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Step 4: Map Successors to Critical Roles

Map potential successors to critical roles identified, based on the employee profiles created post the assessment.
Why is this important? Watch this 'dramatic' video below to understand the importance of succession planning to maintain the talent within your organisation.

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Step 5: Create Development Plans

Create development plans together with each of the selected employees. These should be created focusing on areas of development identified post assessment to meet succession and career growth needs.

Step 6: Execute Development Plans

Execute the development plans for each employee. Development plans typically pick up two or three development goals. For instance continuous improvement could be a development area with development goals around formal learning, on-the-job activities, reflection exercises, coaching/mentoring etc.
Also, think about what courses, classroom or online, could support your high potential in their growth.