Business and HR leaders are worried today about three broad areas:
- Accelerating development of leaders and succession planning at all leader levels
- Optimizing talent performance across all critical talent pools
- Matching organizational talent priorities with individual talent strengths
These three global priorities sort themselves into several other trends that are top of mind for HR and business leaders at high-performing organizations:
- The role of governance
- Workforce demographics opportunities
- Open talent marketplaces
- The rate of change in today’s marketplace
- Ongoing talent acquisition and development challenges, particularly in the BRIC countries
- Talent branding
- Flattening organizations and HR’s role in moving from a strategic partner to an internal advisor
- Executing on an integrated talent management strategy
- HR analytics
Each of the three broader areas or any of the nine trends embodies several discussion and decision points and a clear focus on: what they mean, what leading practices in each look like, how high-performing organizations are measuring their impact on the business, and what implications to the business exist if they are ignored or poorly executed.
As a first step to achieving focus, we use frames. Our workforces use frames to process information, simplify complexity in their work, and accelerate their individual success. Our organizations use frames to guide their business and talent decisions, diagnose skill and talent gaps, enable high-performance decisions and actions, and institutionalize integrated talent practices that are critical for business success.
In enters Brandon Hall Group’s High-Performance Integrated Talent Management Framework. Our framework offers strategic direction for how HPOs are retooling talent management processes, supporting technology infrastructure, and corporate culture to re-align with contemporary business challenges. Our framework includes a straight-forward, three-step process model for how high performing organizations approach business-driven talent management:
- Define organizational talent needs
- Define individual talent wants and strengths
- Align organizational talent needs with individual talent wants and strengths
H. Jackson Brown (an American author of a NY Times bestseller) said, “Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There’s plenty of movement, but you never know if it’s going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.”
While Brown was referring to talent in a slightly different way, the same can be said about the talent in our workplaces. Without a framework, a disciplined approach to managing workplace talent, organizations’ practices are silo’d, inconsistent, inflexible, and can significantly derail achievement of business goals.
Our framework is comprised of analytics-based leading practices, knitted together in three simple steps. Executing the three steps for high-performance is indeed a journey and requires the engagement of executives and business leaders. But this is not another ‘whiz-bang’ gizmo from the latest school of thought or pundit’s point of view. It represents an empirically based approach to managing people in a collaborative culture, implementing talent processes holistically, and enabling both people and process with technology for a promised outcome of improved business results.
In many ways, our framework is just another framework: others have them; they are all intended to be the roadmap of talent management, and many are allegedly built on analytics. In just one way – one BIG way — our framework is very unique: when used properly, you can bet your earnings on it to drive improved earnings next time around. After all, if it isn’t about business results, then why bother?
Our approach reminds me of my childhood. My parents always told me this: Friends are a dime a dozen; good ones are hard to come by – you just need one. Years later, I find myself saying this: Talent management frameworks are easy to come by; ones that make a difference to your business results are hard to come by – you just need one.
Until next time … [email protected]
