Understand Talent Management to Accelerate Your Advancement

Wouldn't you love to know what executives are talking about in talent review meetings? Who are they talking about and what are they saying?

I help corporate women who want to accelerate their advancement and drive their own development. If you find this information to be useful, please share it with corporate women in your life who want to move forward.

So let's talk about it. I want to pull back the curtain a little bit, it's such an interesting process.

What is talent management? Talent management is a process by which leaders come together to review the pipeline of talent and to make sure that they don't have any big risks, that they don't have continuity issues and that they're preparing a great bench of future leaders to be ready to go when it's time in their organization.

So imagine you're an executive. You've invited all your team to come together. They come into the room with information about either their direct reports or their direct reports' reports, which are called two-downs. and you're going to talk about them: their performance, their potential, their strengths, their areas of opportunity.

You're going to think about what could be next for them and you'll calibrate with each other on what does everyone know and understand about each other's team.

So why do we do that? The Board cares that there's not big risks and they want to know that you're planning ahead. Also organizations, especially big ones, want to know that the leaders that are being developed are going to be culture carriers and that they're going to have ingrained the way of doing business that's favored by the organization.

Some smaller organizations can't afford to do that so they hire talent from outside from other established  leaders. But some organizations who are really dedicated to building their own talent this is a process that they do every six months or once a year. Processes are different in each organization but they probably all have a couple things in common. So I really encourage you to learn more about how your organization's process works I'm going to walk you through some of the key concepts and I have a cheat sheet of questions you might ask. If you want to grab it it's at fullpotentialrealized.com/talent

Here's how the process works.

There's a couple things that they're concerned about. One, they want to know about people's performance. To what degree did they deliver on their objectives? To what degree did they behave in alignment with the values of the company? And that's pretty much consistent with the performance management process so that's that's something that's been established and discussed over time.

And there's the potential. Potential is can you go to the next level above where you are now? Can you go two levels above? Could you go to the top of the organization? This is a subjective process but there are criteria and and they have been researched. For instance, a criteria that many companies use is learning agility.

To the degree to which people can learn in the job that they're in quickly, even if it's ambiguous and they don't have a lot of structure, and take those lessons and apply them effectively in the next job quickly and adapt. People who have that attribute or have that capability are often high potential because they can deal with more complexity and broader responsibilities.

Again, each company is different so something to find out is what does your company value and how do they determine who they believe is high potential.

Another thing they're concerned about is do all the executives have a successor? A successor is somebody who's ready to step in should the executive leave, if they retire,  if they take another job or if they win the lottery. Is there somebody ready to go tomorrow? Somebody ready now? Somebody ready in a year or two years? Or even three to five years?

And it's an interesting inquiry to find out how do people think about who their successor should be. Because somebody might be high potential and high-performing but still not designated as a successor. And so what does that take and how do executives get their successors ready?

Even though ultimately the successors are not decided by those executives because usually they have gone and somebody else is choosing them. But it's the executive's responsibility to prepare a cadre of bench strength to be ready to lead effectively.

Another thing that they're concerned about is mobility. Are people staying in place right now even and getting development with projects, are they ready to move laterally to get a broader view of the organization or are they ready to move up?

And and what should the timing be for all these things? So part of that is matching people's readiness to move laterally or up with available roles.

So all the the needs of the business have to be met by the leaders at the same time of doing the leadership development. The other thing as I mentioned is calibration. 

Usually the leaders start out by looking at their own people but then when they get in the room together now they start talking about each other's people and they're saying well I gave my person an excellent or exceeds (or whatever) and now I hear this other person had this performance or these are the evidence that they think this person has that potential and now these things don't exactly line up. So the whole group agrees in the end on where everybody belongs based on how they all relate to each other.

In the end they can agree to invest the the big development dollars in the people they think have the best chance of leading in the future and really giving those people more exposure and visibility.

So part of the question is how do you position yourself to be well regarded but another question is how do you drive your own development, wherever you are on the list, so that you get the lessons and experiences to build your own leadership capability.

If you want to learn more about how talent works in your organization, check out the worksheet - the fre cheat sheet with the 16 questions. And of course tailor it for your own organization but it's just to get you started. fullpotentialrealized.com/talent. I'd love to hear what you find out about how talent works in your organization.

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Getting Promoted Essentials: Talent Management Awareness // Something that will help you in getting promoted and could be considered key in getting promoted essentials is talent management awareness. Understanding how it works in your company can accelerate advancement, so go ahead and get the inside scoop on how to leverage your firm’s talent review process to get promoted. Use these questions to ask your mentor for understanding the promotion process. This career advice for women is meant to help bring gender balance to leadership teams at all levels.

For conversation starters you can use to learn more about how your company selects future leaders to invest in, download the free cheat sheet at https://www.fullpotentialrealized.com/talent