As business picks up, many businesses and consultancies alike start to try harder to poach the top talent from their rivals. Understandable - when the opportunities arise, they want to have the foresight and brainpower to seize them. But as a recent book by Bill Conaty (ex-Head of HR at General Electric) and Ram Charan (Corporate Leadership Consultant) sets out to demonstrate, the businesses that are best placed to seize the advantage consistently are those that can harness their existing abilities effectively.
The thrust of their book, The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers, is concerned with identifying and developing high-
flyers, and the pitfalls and advantages of doing so. But there are also two other very important messages – firstly that those individuals who are outperformed in one area can excel in another, and also the ability of businesses to recover very quickly when team members are lost, e.g to other companies.
Therefore, businesses need to keep the work of their employees as varied as possible. Not only to keep the staff interested, motivated and continually challenged, but also to identify the key strengths of staff members. Also, they should consider methodologies for consistently identifying the talents of each member of their team. This does not mean one-size fits all blanket training schemes, but individualised approaches. We’ve all heard of the PDP (Personal Development Plan), but how often is this shoe-horning an individual into one of a small handful of prescribed training sessions as opposed to a much more tailored and personally consultative approach?
At PVR, we are seeing trends that point towards more engaging employee development programmes. There has certainly been an increase over the last two years of consultancies using psychometric profiling (Insights for example) as an integral part of staff development.
These types of profiles, rather than setting out to identify what a person is like, try to identify why they are like it. Its usefulness lies in its ability to highlight an individual’s work style to that individual. When compared to the modus operandi of their colleagues, it can help staff to understand both themselves and each other, and gives a rough rule-of-thumb guide as to why they might work better with some co-workers than others. The profiles can also point to different training styles required for individuals. They may be able to suggest the best ways of working to overcome difficulties that can arise between personality types, and also where people work best together – and can generate the quickest advantages. In addition, these next-generation profiles take into account that we all have a shifting, complex set of motivations and emotions, and therefore seeks to identify individuality, rather than pigeon-hole.
Many consultancies also claim to have a ‘great’ team atmosphere, ‘collegiate and meritocratic’. But these are standard lines. The consultancies that can back this up with hard data – through employee feedback surveys, or a PRCA audit, really stand out from the crowd when we are briefing candidates on vacancies and clients. It demonstrates not just the ability to back up claims, but the fact these companies have made an effort to try and measure sentiment in their own organisation.
Rob Morris, posting an interesting review of the book on The Employee Engagement Network, highlights the handy 5-point plans Conaty and Charan suggest for both the organisation, and individuals, to put in a framework for talent development:
An organisation should:
- Get all senior leaders centrally engaged in talent recognition and selection
- Hire for demonstrated leadership, not just for credentials
- Learn as much as possible about values and behaviour before hiring
- Be humble enough to hire "outsiders" but ensure cultural assimilation
- Be totally honest about who has greatest leadership potential
Individuals should:
- Make talent development an obsession
- Drill down deep to the specifics of his/her talent and potentiality
- Give frequent, honest, and specific feedback
- Make talent development a core competency with accountability
- Provide intellectual challenges and opportunities for additional growth
Such measures would also raise the game of the industry as a whole, with a greater number of more well-rounded candidates rather than individuals too highly specialised to gain jobs in different PR sectors. Maybe then we can break out of the mindset that pigeon-holes candidates in sector exclusivity, and broaden our scope to look out of the box at ‘PR all-rounders’.
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