Talent Management: practical steps in getting started
INTERVIEW | Melanie O'Connor, NSW TAFE Commission Board
Listen to the interview here
Maret talks with Melanie O’Connor, NSW TAFE Commission Board member and Managing Director of The Academy Network. Melanie is highly regarded for her work in talent management and capability strategies for organisations, which align people initiatives with strategic imperatives. She is considered by many to be one of the foremost advisers in this field in Australia.
I really enjoyed interviewing Melanie O’Connor. She is passionate about talent management, has a wealth of experience in both public and private organisations, and provides some excellent, practical advice about talent management. Melanie covers what organisations should consider, how they need to plan for it and the importance of ongoing review and evaluation.
According to Melanie, talent management is the key differentiator for business success. I was keen to explore this further, particularly after the research I had been involved in (Life Based Learning, 2006, co-researchers Marie Jasinski and Robby Weatherley), where we had identified talent management as one of the key strategies for capability development in VET (vocational education and training) in the Knowledge Era. I wanted to find out from Melanie how we could achieve its promise.
I spoke to Melanie about the various approaches she’s seen to talent management, how it’s different to professional development, how a TAFE institute could get started, and key advice for success.
I highly recommend that you listen to the pod cast. It may well get you started! Or in addition, you may wish to read the summary that follows.
Talent management is not well defined
Despite the increasing focus on talent management in the last couple of years, Melanie believes that talent management is not well defined. She feels this doesn’t really matter, as it’s far more important to focus on choosing your talent management strategy and making sure that it fits well with your organisation’s culture and that it’s strongly aligned to your business strategy for moving forward.
Key question: who is your talent?
The first question you need to ask yourself is: ‘who is your talent?’ For most organisations, it’s not just about a select few or ‘A’ performers, it’s also about others who are critical to the success of the organisation – sometimes referred to as the ‘B’ performers. These people need to be attracted into the organisation, fully engaged and then retained. Not many organisations can afford to only employ ‘top’ performers. It can also be about the ‘C’ group, even though they may not be labelled as ‘talent’. It’s important for an organisation to consider their motivation and skills development.
How do we approach talent management?
There is no one way or no right way to approach talent management. There are as many approaches as there are organisations. However, the organisations that most successfully implement talent management are those that have questioned their assumptions, articulated the assumptions, discussed them with senior management and translated it into practical plans.
Talent management involves 3 key steps:
- design a strategy that fits your organisation, culture and business strategy
- question your assumptions and develop practical action plans
- implement, evaluate and review.
Who is, or who is not involved in the talent management strategy varies. Processes may be open and transparent in some organisations, while the boundaries between who is involved and who is not may be more blurred in others. Some organisations involve all staff and allow all to have their skill sets assessed, while others choose only a select group. Melanie has seen all these approaches work well, dependent on culture and need. She is not a proponent of any one approach, but rather wants to see organisations select a talent management strategy that works for them.
How is talent management different to professional development?
Talent management provides a far more comprehensive approach than professional development. That’s because talent management:
- is more closely tied to the future business needs of organisations and establishes core competency requirements across all levels within the organisation. Talent management supports people in acquiring those core competencies, whereas professional development focuses more on the individual’s skill needs for the job they are in.
- has a stronger focus on developing people on-the-job in relation to core competencies the organisation is trying to acquire. Around 80% of all talent management strategies that Melanie has seen involves practical skills development for the job. Professional development is seen to focus more on courses, workshops and sending people away from the job for development.
- horizontally integrates all the different people management practices within the organisation. Once the core competencies are identified, these become the competencies on which you recruit, promote and reward performance. Professional development tends to be more about the learning and development component of those people practices. Talent management is a more comprehensive approach of trying to build those competencies.
How might a TAFE Institute get started?
Step 1. Identify where you need to be:
- most importantly, start by examining your assumptions
- spend sufficient time thinking through the issues and what you want to achieve
- know your business strategy
- identify the capabilities you need to develop and how they translates into the core competencies that you need to develop.
Step 2. Audit where you are now. This will tell you the level of competencies you have in the organisation, at each level. The competencies are core and need only be half a dozen or so of the most important generic competencies required across all levels in the organisation. You only need to assess at levels, eg. what core competencies do head teachers have? There is no need to identify individual assessments.
Step 3. Identify the gap. This will suggest the strategies you wish to undertake. It will help you make decisions around whether to recruit or develop internally. Organisations may decide to recruit when the gap is large, and develop internally when the gap is smaller. It’s a way of identifying appropriate strategies and activities.
Step 4. Identify the types of developmental strategies you wish to put in place. Will it involve course work or a component of coaching and mentoring, or actively moving people around the organisation? Or a mix of all and more.
Step 5. This is the most contentious part of the process. It involves the design of the strategy. Who is the talent? Will it be open to all or only a select few, will staff rotate through it, what is the timeframe and will the processes be transparent or not? How will staff be assessed? There is no one answer. People within an organisation need to be involved in brainstorming the options and considering the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and the implications.
Is this a short term or long term investment?
Talent management requires long term investment because developing skills of people in your organisation is a long term investment. Many organisations take a short term view, particularly private organisations, and this is probably why so many talent management strategies are not successful. This is now shifting with the increasing shortage of talent and the expense of buying in talent from outside the organisation. In blue chip companies, developing talent and skills has now gone from being a cost to being a return on investment.
Any advice to Institutes as organisations within the public sector?
Melanie was adamant that being a government organisation is not a disadvantage in regard to talent management. Some great examples of talent management come from government organisations. In the pod cast, you will hear Melanie describe a public sector organisation initiative that she was involved in, and talk in detail about:
- identification of capabilities and skill sets
- use of assessment centres
- rang of developmental opportunities that can be made available.
What advice do you have for success?
Melanie’s key advice for success is that at the beginning you need to work out your metrics, what success looks like for you and what your objectives are. Commonly used metrics include numbers applying to be involved, how many apply for promotion, how quickly people perform when promoted, retention of top performers. However, your metrics will depend on what your objectives are, for example, whether you want 50% promotion from within or 100% promotion from within. It all comes back to step 1 – good planning.
What would you like to emphasise?
Melanie passionately believes that talent management is the only differentiator. You can have a fantastic business strategy, fantastic technology, fantastic capital and finance resources, which are all necessary but not sufficient. Unless you have the people who can do the jobs, you won’t have a successful business strategy in place. We know there are fewer and fewer talented people available to organisations and the competition for those people is fierce. Being intentional in how you attract and retain that talent is a key business differentiator.
There is still a window of opportunity for organisations such as TAFE to work out how to do this and to get it right and then to be able to help other businesses do this. Melanie’s final words of encouragement was for us to just get in and do it.
I hope this has wet your appetite enough for you to now listen to the pod cast!