Developing a Winning Talent Strategy

By Carol Bergeron

Having the right people with the right skills at the right time, ready to deliver results critical to your organization’s success, is today’s most significant leadership challenge. This is true when implementing a new business strategy or solving a business problem. So why not use the same talent strategy development approach for both situations?

Understand the Business

Building a talent strategy requires understanding the business. Failing to do so usually results in a well-intentioned but floundering workforce, poor use of resources and sub-optimal performance. Confirm your business knowledge by talking with people, reviewing business documents and metrics, and answering several key questions:

It is important to recognize how the answers to these questions are related. The customer value proposition drives the core business processes. They, along with other initiatives you implement to achieve business objectives, impact what you expect and need from your employees.

Determine Root Causes of Business Performance

Failing to determine cause-effect relationships that drive business performance often results in investments that address symptoms rather than solve problems. But understanding the interdependencies within an organization requires collaboration. Be prepared to ask employees lots of questions like:

Consider using root-cause analysis techniques, such as fishbone diagramming and systems thinking, in focus groups and interviews. Couple your inquisitive conversations with targeted data gathering. Together they will help you and interested employees identify cause-effect relationships. Agreement on the root causes and most promising solutions allows you to define the organization’s future talent needs.

Define Future Talent Needs

Articulate what you expect and need from employees so that they confidently and successfully execute your most important business objectives. Start by nswering these questions:

Honesty is required to identify gaps between your employees’ current skills, knowledge and behaviors and those they will need to realize the organization’s vision.

Create an Action Plan

Once you have determined where to invest resources to better prepare employees to meet business objectives, brainstorm around the four major components of the talent strategy: acquisition, cultivation, retention and organization.

The output of this phase is the documented action plan called the Talent Strategy.

Implement the Action Plan

A well-conceived talent strategy is useless without putting it into action. It consists of a series of projects that will be completed in order to position your employees to perform their jobs well. Thus, the output for the implementation phase can be achieved using the tools and techniques of project management.

Measure, Analyze, Modify Approach

Measure individual projects in your talent strategy and related business outcomes. Consider a mix of strategic and operational measures as well as lead and lag indicators. Here are a few examples:

Avoid trying to measure too many metrics. Pick true indicators of business performance.

Analyze the results. When actual results are not moving in the right direction, ask why. More root-cause analysis may reveal reasons for nexpected results, leading you to rethink initiatives and the context in which they were derived.

Modify Your Approach

Given your understanding of the business results and what is driving them, determine what you are going to do. If the variance between actual and targeted results is insignificant, you may choose to do nothing. If the variance is significant or the trend is in the wrong direction, you may decide to take action. Sometimes, the results indicate a shift in the business environment or the need to change your overall business strategy.

Conclusion

Studies have concluded, in quantifiable terms such as sales, profits, market share and shareholder returns, that organizational excellence requires a deliberate connection between people and the business strategy they execute. Making this connection is no longer reserved for strategic planning. It must occur on a routine basis as your organization deals with complex business problems.

Carol Bergeron founded Bergeron Associates in 1998 and has over 20 years of experience in organizational effectiveness consulting. She can be reached at carol@bergeronassociates.com or via her web site, http://www.bergeronassociates.com/.