Talent Talks
7
min read
10 second summary
- Talent development is a key priority and understanding the nature of it as a function of HR is evolving rapidly
- You need to understand the changing talent development landscape — from identification to acquisition to nurturing — and focus on competencies, employee value proposition and a technology led hiring infrastructure for best results
- For effective performance management, you need to focus on performance enablement with emphasis on co-creation of OKRs over traditional goal setting with a technology backdrop
- You must reimagine feedback to make it more frequent and structured
- As a fast growing organization, you should focus on preparing managers with proper training, self assessment and feedback
- Top 3 HR priorities for the future include: creating an environment where employees feel valued, leverage technology to fuel talent development initiatives, and, revisit models of work and workforce engagement
Here's a brief about our first Talent Talk guest
With talent management and talent development becoming a key priority for growing organizations, we invited Dr. Chandrashekhar Sripada, Practice Professor of OB and Strategic Human Capital at ISB to our first Talent Talk. He also leads the (HC&LI) at ISB as its Executive Director.
Prior to joining ISB in 2017, he spent 40 years in India Inc. and held the position of CHRO with companies such as NIIT, Reliance, Capgemini, and IBM, and retired from Dr. Reddy's as the President and Global Head of HR.
His current research interests focus on the interplay between human capital and firm performance and a focus on aligning talent development with performance in the backdrop of the future of work.
With his extensive experience and expertise, he shared with us diverse realms of the talent management and talent development ecosystem and how growing organizations can redefine their engagement, feedback and performance management practices for organizational success.
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Future of HR as a function and focus on talent development
Before covering different aspects of talent management, including the best practices, focus on manager development and employee engagement, Dr. Sripada discusses quickly how the future of HR as a function is likely to evolve and its impact on talent development.
Talent management as we understand today started as labor welfare in the early 1920s with the introduction of specified working hours, provisions of cafeteria, etc. The focus on employees per se then was merely transactional. However, as the deepening of the industrial economy and the focus on employees as personnel grew, the entire caveat of human resources came to the forefront. Eventually, the entire people side of the business gained importance and there were changes in the way businesses communicate the same, mentions Dr. Sripada.
While sometimes, human resource and talent management are used interchangeably with the assumption that each employee brings about certain talents, others feel that talent development is a subset of human resources. Referring to high potential employees. Dr. Sripada adds that the future of HR lies in aligning human resources and talent development under a single umbrella to focus on people-centric initiatives to facilitate individual and organizational success.
The sections to follow will highlight how the HR function has a key role to play and the best practices in facilitating talent management.
Top talent acquisition practices for organizational success
Talent development is essentially about enabling your workforce to perform to the best of their abilities, facilitating their professional growth as well as yielding business impact. However, if you look closely, talent management starts by acquiring talent in the most effective and efficient manner.
Here are a few key takeaways for growing organizations to help create the right talent acquisition strategies before talent development.
1. Acknowledge the changed talent acquisition landscape
Today, you need to understand and acknowledge that talent acquisition is not a simple contractual process between candidates and organizations. Employment or working at an organization is not the only way of being gainfully occupied in the 21st century. With options like entrepreneurship, gig economy, etc., talent today has a lot of varied opportunities. Therefore, you, as an organization, need to make your talent acquisition process highly robust to attract the best talent out there in the most efficient way suitable for your business.
2. Understand the talent requirements, skills and competencies
Once you understand the contemporary talent acquisition landscape, you need to pause and reflect on what kind of talent and talent development you need.
According to Dr. Sripada, in the world of specializations, you cannot hire the same talent for sales, marketing or tech. Doing so will defeat the whole purpose of talent management.
Therefore, for effective talent acquisition, you need to:
- Create a granular understanding of talent requirements for each role, i.e. what will it take to ensure absolute success
- Focus on both the functional skills as behavioral competencies for each job role
- Ensure your desired skills and competencies align with the overall expectations and culture of the organization
Read: How to use competency framework for talent development
3. Create an employee value proposition
Based on the identified talent requirements, you will go out in the market to scout for talent, but before that, you need to create a clear employee value proposition, says Dr. Sripada. With numerous opportunities available in the market, you need to:
- Have a clear value statement of why an employee should join your organization over others
- Differentiate yourself from other companies
- Illustrate what will you offer the employee in return for their value creation, in addition to the monetary compensation
4. Develop an employer brand
Now that you have a clear employee value proposition, you need to create a brand for your organization as an employer of choice.
The idea is to create a reputation that makes you the obvious decision for candidates.
You can achieve so by:
- Building a positive presence on platforms like Glassdoor and other employee review forum
- Focusing on digital engagement through platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram to become more approachable
- Communicating your values and branding as an employer of choice effectively
5. Set up the infrastructure for hiring by leveraging technology
Once the employer branding is in place, you need to focus on putting the hiring infrastructure in place.
Dr. Sripada mentions that this includes leveraging the right technology, creating processes and getting the right team to facilitate hiring.
To ensure the same, you may:
- Leverage technology based hiring which is more targeted, more predictable and more efficient by automating repetitive work
- Get the right set of people who have the skills to interview and understand the right methodologies for interviewing
- Create a robust process for recruitment lifecycle management — sourcing, engagement, job assessment, negotiation, to onboarding
With this framework, your talent acquisition will become seamless, as you will know:
- Who to hire
- How to attract high potential talent
- How to set up the right hiring infrastructure
- How to leverage technology to fuel your talent acquisition journey
Best practices for performance management as a part of talent development
Following the acquisition of high potential talent, you need to focus on performance management as a part of the larger focus on talent management and talent development. Organizations that seek to see their talent flourish and promote organizational success, need to take a holistic view of performance management by following the below best practices.
1. Rethink the meaning of performance management
Conventionally, performance management has been seen from a lens that employee performance needs to be managed. The entire system of performance management is premised on the assumption that employees may or may not perform and concrete steps must be taken to ensure high levels of performance. Furthermore, focus should be on comparing performance which forms the basis of rewards, recognition and incentives.
However, today’s workforce, especially in growth economies like India, is very aspirational. According to Dr. Sripada, employees do not come into companies wanting to be managed or waiting to be told or waiting to be evaluated, they come with the desire, hope and ambition to perform and make a difference.
Thus, performance management needs to now focus on not simply managing performance, but as a means to foster an empowering ecosystem for employees.
2. Facilitate performance discussions using OKRs
Taking cue from the point above, let’s discuss what actually constitutes creating an enabling environment for performance to flourish. You need to move above from the traditional outlook of goal setting where the leadership or managers set goals for employees, premised on the belief that managers know best.
Rather, there needs to be a focus on performance discussion, which focuses on:
- Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) over traditional goal setting
- Co-creation of performance OKRs between managers and employees
- Audit of performance management, not only limited to the co-creation, but also checking the availability of resources to achieve the set goals
Read: How to create a robust OKR process
A performance discussion must enable an employee to understand what constitutes high levels of performance, its potential impact and how it can be achieved, as a part of performance management.
3. Leverage the digital environment
Next, it is important to mature and evolve your performance management practices with increasing digitalization.
Dr. Sripada adds that the traditional system of getting people together in a conference room once in a year with the manager leading performance management in an intimidating manner is no longer sustainable.
Rather, you need to leverage the power of technology and use the digital environment to make performance discussion more streamlined, encourage dialogue and make it more consistent.
To learn how SuperBeings can help you transform your performance management practices, book a free demo today
4. Move from performance management to performance enablement
As it is evident, performance management must be reimagined as performance enablement. This requires a mindset change as well as a skill set change in terms of how we can co create goals and objectives. Finally, technology needs to be seen as an enabler to facilitate the entire process.
Feedback in the performance and talent management paradigm
Feedback is an important element of performance management as well as talent development. However, according to Dr. Sripada, in recent times, it has become a tool of anxiety more than an enabler for high performance.
Ensure that not every conversation is considered as a feedback or feedback doesn’t become a source of exerting authority
Here’s how you can ensure effective feedback in the performance management paradigm.
- Encourage the right skills and professionalism among those who are delivering feedback and ensure that it is constructive in nature
- Encourage the receivers to have the readiness and maturity to accept the feedback with grace and a positive attitude
- Ensure that not every conversation is considered as a feedback or feedback doesn’t become a source of exerting authority
- Diffuse feedback anxiety among employees by preparing all the stakeholders
- Adopt a continuous feedback approach over an annual one by leveraging technology to provide feedback in real time when it is relevant to facilitate immediate impact
- Calibrate the frequency of the feedback strategically based on the magnitude of the task, your company culture, context, etc.
Thus, you need to make feedback more effective to have an impact on performance management by making it a shared responsibility for managers and employees, facilitating a more continuous approach and leveraging the power of technology.
How to make managers better at enabling their teams?
A key component of talent development is how well managers enable and empower their team members.
Organizations should help managers understand the various stages in the life cycle of evolving from an individual contributor to a manager or a leader and support this critical transition
This requires the right set of skills, competencies and attitude at the end of the manager. However, across India Inc., there are several challenges when it comes to effective management says Dr. Sripada, including:
- A paradox about who is responsible for taking care of managing the employees, the HR team or the direct/functional team leaders
- The title of manager is accompanied by the tenure and seniority and not on the basis of capability to manage and empower team members
- Becoming a manager is an incidental occupation and an accidental privilege, without the right training
To address these challenges and make management effective in your organization to enable and empower team members, you must:
- View the HR function as a support system and enable to assist, advise and counsel team leaders to manage their teams and not directly play that role
- Adopt a scientific approach to the preparation, development and training of managers
- Help the manager understand the various stages in the life cycle of evolving from an individual contributor to a manager or a leader and support this critical transition
- Document key managerial competencies, generic and function specific, based on global benchmarks and your organizational context
- Focus on training and self-assessment for managers on the key competencies
- Enable budding managers to leverage technology platforms to assess their competencies and educate themselves to bridge the gaps
- Provide feedback post managerial training and assessment to ensure high level of management success
Thus, Dr. Sripada shares that a structured approach, fueled by the power of technology and continuous real world interventions can help you prepare managers that can enable and empower high performing teams, leading to effective talent management.
Redefining employee engagement for talent development
Any discussion on talent development will be incomplete without focusing on employee engagement. Unless your workforce is meaningfully engaged at work, it will be unable to perform to its complete capacity and talent development will become increasingly difficult.
However, according to Dr. Sripada, over the years, the meaning and nature of employee engagement has become highly diluted. Entertainment components like team lunches, retreats or budget for other such activities are being considered as engagement efforts. While these are important to keep the team morale high, they alone cannot achieve high levels of employee engagement.
It is important to gauge a more comprehensive meaning of employee engagement that promotes talent development. This requires an important and strategic investment towards employees to enable them to believe that your organization cares about their development beyond fun activities. To facilitate engagement in its true sense, Dr. Sripada says, you need to:
- Focus on forward looking career development initiatives for your employees
- Encourage employee learning to hone skills for the future
- Encourage your managers to connect with employees on an emotional level, beyond just transactional work
- Understand career roadmaps and career aspirations of employees and guide them in the right direction
- Leverage technology to enhance engagement and measure it for success
It goes without saying that disengaged employees are a liability for any organization. Therefore, you must relook at your employee engagement efforts to make them more meaningful for your workforce to facilitate effective talent development.
Top three priorities of the HR function going forward
Up until now, we have discussed different aspects of talent management and talent development, right from how to get the right talent onboard, to how to engage them, manage them, provide feedback and much more.
In this last section, we will uncover the top priorities for HR in talent management that are likely to define the future for growing organizations. Dr. Sripada mentions that it is true that organizations in different contexts and with different objectives may not have the same priorities. However, we will talk about some priorities from a macro level that are likely to impact the HR and talent development realm as a whole.
Invariably, as an organization, if you wish to facilitate effective talent management practices for HR, you should:
1. Create an environment where employees feel valued
Focus on creating an environment where employees feel valued and cared for, mentions Dr. Sripada.
As an employee function, HR and people managers need to focus on developing an empowering ecosystem for their workforce as the primary priority.
Other tasks like performance management, etc. will form a subset of this primary agenda.
2. Leverage digital transformation to fuel your efforts
The HR team and people managers in your organization must become enthusiastic adopters of technology and should understand, decode and embrace technology in the interest of your employees. Thus, whatever efforts your organization is working towards for talent development, technology must fuel each element for greater effectiveness.
3. Embrace the news ways of working
Finally, you need to acknowledge that the talent development ecosystem is transforming. According to Dr. Sripada, the workforce today doesn’t consist of the old career seeking employees who join as a management trainee hoping to retire as the chairman.
With the advent of freelancing, gig economy, joint working opportunities, etc. have created a very transient relationship between the employer and the employees.
Thus, with the new talent ecosystem, as well as an offshoot of technology and the pandemic, leading to the rise of remote work, you need to explore new ways of working including dynamic ways of workforce engagement as well as hybrid work flexibility, as a practice.
Thus, you need to focus on creating an empowering and valued environment for employees, leverage digital disruption to power your initiatives and revisit work models to attract the new potential talent, says Dr. Sripada.
Suggested Reading
How to use competency framework for talent development
7 developmental goals for managers
How to go from performance management to employee development
How to measure manager effectiveness: 11 key metrics
How to improve leadership effectiveness at your organization
