3 WAYS TO MANAGE
BY TONY PALLADINO
Does the organisation you work for practise talent management?
And if it does at what level of your organisation is this practise located? Do team leaders get involved for example? Or are discussions about talent management more likely to occur at senior manager or director level?
Talent management – a set of strategies to attract and retain a pool of people who will genuinely make a difference to the organisation – is a phrase beloved of many senior managers and executives and that is often the level at which decisions about the topic are taken.
It’s the fact that talent management has stubbornly remained a strategy that has made it the often exclusive province of the more senior people.
From HR Business Partners to Directors – talent management often sits with people who have long ago left behind the line manager role to focus more on creating higher-level policies that drive whole sections or even whole organisations.
People who are promoted into an organisation’s talent management scheme or who are recruited externally into fast track roles are often dealt with by these very senior members of staff – many members of a talent pool are more likely to report in to a director than to a team leader.
They are sometimes in fact not actually managed at all…
They may get someone who acts more in a mentor role instead of someone who actively manages them and are often more likely to receive “development opportunities” than coaching.
My question is whether this approach is actually setting them up for success or not?
At her end of year appraisal, one lady who was in the talent pool in an organisation where I worked was asked to sum up her year. She replied that it had been like the “partially sighted leading the blind” and explained that while she hadn’t expected (or wanted) to be spoon fed, that having some direction would have helped her enormously!
The people who join the talent pool will certainly benefit from having a mentor but they NEED to have a manager – someone who will direct their energy and set them up for success!
I’m going to suggest that to successfully manage talent – especially at the start of their career with your organisation – that there are three things which their manager can do.
Let them define themselves
You might view it as perfectly fair to identify the people in the talent pool as “different” but remember that they need to get on with all of the other people in your organisation and if you announce them to the rest of the organisation as “different” or “special” then the odds are good that you are setting them up for a fall somewhere along the way.
Just consider how a dyed in the wool manager (someone who has been there, done it and got the tee-shirt) will approach and deal with some shiny new graduate trainee when their preconception of that “special” person is that probably have nothing to offer but theory and book learning and in practical terms know nothing about nothing?
If you define the people in your organisation’s talent pool as “different”, “better”, “special” or – perhaps worst of all - “privileged” then (while you may help the morale or self-esteem of the people in the talent pool) you may well also raise the hackles of all the other people who have to deal with them.
Discuss with the members of the talent pool how they want to define themselves – let them develop clarity on who they are and what they are here to do and then introduce them to the rest of the organisation accordingly.
Management
14 | TRAINING MAGAZINE EUROPE Q3 2015
TALENT SUCCESSFULLY
BY JOHN McKINSTRY