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Manage Your Talent Pool For Stronger Results

Werner Jacobsen | Outcomes, Mar/Apr 2006

Talent Management: Why? Because it can be the single most impactful factor for organizations in achieving their goals.

Growing and successful organizations spend some leadership and management time on strategic planning: where they want to go, and how they plan to get there. They also spend a significant amount of time on their annual operating plan (AOP) or budget. But few spend an equivalent amount of time on planning the best ways to manage and utilize their talent—even given that it's their talent that will be the key management factor to achieving the strategic objectives.

Our premise is that organizational leadership should emphasize an Annual People Plan (APP) as a necessary and equal adjunct to the AOP and to the business objectives.

Successful organizational leadership practices stewardship: it's a biblical standard (1 Corinthians 4:2, KJV) and contributors expect it. That stewardship must also be evident in the managing of the organization's talent as a way to maximize the leverage of other resources and plans most effectively and efficiently. In addition, today's workforce is asking of prospective employers, "What will you do to help me grow and develop professionally?"

Stewardship then is also a stewardship of encouraging and coaching employees to develop to their God-given potential: an awesome responsibility and opportunity. It requires leadership and support at the senior executive level.

Talent management is not performance management, though there is overlap. In the latter, we focus on job performance compared to job expectations over the past year; in talent management, we look forward to define the talent needed to achieve the organization's goals and then build a plan to be certain we have that talent available.

The construction and implementation of an APP requires significant work and energy. For most organizations, it will be a major cultural change because its focus is new. Dealing with employee talent in a significant and new manner may also be uncomfortable for many managers.

On the other hand, the default mode is to do the same thing in the same way and—get the same results! This article will suggest some tools and perspectives on a process model that are building blocks for an APP.

First, senior executive and human resource personnel must be the champions of the APP. They must believe in and be committed to the stewardship activity, participate in it, and hold participants accountable for implementation and follow through. Depending on the size of the organization, the APP may be led only by the CEO or by the CEO and one or two other executive managers. (Note that the CEO, too, must be a participant in the APP as it relates to his or her responsibilities and direct reports.)