Talent Management is about differentiation. We can talk about skills, performance, intelligence, commitment, leadership ability and so many other traits that differentiate the best from the rest. Indeed, it is challenging to differentiate among many talented people. In my 25 years in talent management in Global 100 companies, I’ve seen some talent meetings spiral into shallow thinking, strong biases and unqualified opinions on people whose careers hang in the balance.
On a practical level, no talent discussion is completely objective with all the necessary information, unbiased input and relevant evaluations to make it a comprehensive and complete process. Accepting that we will never have at our fingertips everything there is to know about a person, we can least approach talent discussions with a focus on what is most important and prepare accordingly.
The essential topics of a talent discussion are performance, potential, readiness and fit. If these factors are carefully considered, along with robust data and input, then successful talent decisions are much more likely.
Measure Performance
The starting point to any talent discussion should be performance. If a person is a strong performer, then it gives HR and leaders a reliable context to consider the person’s skills, abilities, accomplishments and the environment in which the person does well. The context is vital because it reveals what else may have helped the person perform well. One must consider how much support the person received from leaders, the strength, or lack thereof, of teammates, and what exactly qualifies the person as a strong performer. Did he or she work through adverse conditions, meet impossible deadlines, manage tough customers, navigate through complex work systems, provide brilliant solutions, and bring clarity and structure to ambiguous projects? What exactly makes the person a stronger performer than others?
Leaders must be careful not to accept a couple of performance ratings as the true story. So much compromise goes into the modern performance ratings. Since ratings influence compensation decisions, companies often mandate a specific rating distribution, which can sometimes obscure an individual’s true performance. Although forced distributions can serve as a proxy for comparison to peers, leaders must look beyond the ratings and discuss what characterises a person’s performance over at least the last 2-3 years. Talent discussions must include an understanding of achievements and insights into the context and ‘how’ (work style, behaviours, influencing skills) the person gets the work done.
When it comes to talent discussions, we also must understand that past performance does not guarantee similar future performance. Any discussion of future roles for a person must consider how similar the future role is to the current and past roles. What kind of challenges was there in past roles and is the person ready with the right skills, experiences, and fundamental knowledge to face a different set of challenges in the next role?
Lastly, a common mistake is when leaders think that their best individual contributor employees will automatically be their best people managers. Sometimes this is true, but it is certainly not guaranteed. Leading others is different than leading oneself. Being responsible for a team and having to set direction, delegate work, deal with HR problems and being held accountable for the performance of others is a different challenge than being just a member of a team.
Estimate Potential
Potential is fluid. A person’s potential for more challenging, complex and larger roles is not a one-time evaluation set in stone. Potential is an estimate of one’s ability to succeed in a future role. If the potential of Albert Einstein was estimated when he was a teenager in school, then it would have been below average. Even in undergraduate college, he was not seen as a superior student or one who had brilliant ideas. However, after college, he continued to study physics and then at 26 years old, he published some papers that revolutionised the way people understood the properties of light. He went on to fundamentally change our understanding of the relativity of space and time, and the dynamics of energy and matter.
Albert Einstein may be an extreme example, but the principle is that people indeed can learn, develop and improve. Thus, in talent discussions, leaders must be cautious to think of an employee’s potential as an estimate of potential based on what we understand about the person at that time, and then to re-examine the potential at least every three years.
How should HR help leaders approach a discussion of potential? After explaining that potential is an estimate rather than a rigid score or conclusion, then the next step is to frame the discussion around what kind of potential is being estimated. Are we talking about the potential for senior professional roles that hinge on education, consulting skills, complex problem solving and technical proficiencies? Or are we estimating leadership potential that is driven by ability to influence, assertiveness, ability to see the big picture, results orientation, and the capacity to think conceptually and understand more complex strategies, spot emerging trends, and identify risks? No one is perfect for every role. Talent management is more complex than placing smart and hardworking people in challenging jobs.
There is far too much to say about estimating potential than would be appropriate to write in this brief article, but here is some guidance to having meaningful discussions of potential:
What is the person motivated to do? Without a strong interest in the work or a drive to achieve, it is hard for a person to be successful.
What kind of work does the person consistently perform well? Does he or she excel at managing others, dealing with complex projects, or problem solving? Has the person shown resilience and the ability to persist despite resistance and insufficient resources?
Do they show key leadership traits such as influencing and motivating others, building cohesion on a team, managing expectations, giving feedback and controlling emotions?
How broad is their experience? Have they succeeded in various environments, under multiple leaders, have they worked in staff and line roles, and have they built a function or only managed mature groups and functions?
What do appropriate and highly validated psychometric assessments say about the person’s aptitudes and personality traits? Do they suggest that the person has the capacity to manage the complexity and the personality traits to work through the pressures of the role?
Do we have a process and tool for guiding the potential discussion and peer comparisons such as a 9-Box, 11-Box, or 16-Box model with multiple dimensions (performance, potential, leadership behaviours, age, etc.)?
Assess Readiness
Readiness is about how prepared a person is to assume a new role. Readiness must be the focus in succession planning discussions and include comparing a person’s experience, leadership style, motivation and competencies against possible next roles. The best indicator of readiness is if the person has spent significant time acting in the role or has held similar roles at comparable companies.
For technical roles, the readiness is more easily assessed based on a person’s technical competence and proven capabilities. Many high-tech sector companies include in their interview process actual work challenges such as fixing programming codes to demonstrate competence.
For leadership roles, however, it is wise to invest in a strong leadership assessment process to determine readiness. Leadership assessments involve developing an intensive process that may take between 1-4 days that begins with psychometric assessments that look at intellectual aptitude and capacity as well as personality factors and work style preferences. Next, the person goes through an assessment, usually in person, that could include all or most of the following assessment methods: interviews, work simulations, problem solving, business case interpretation, role play situations, group exercises and other challenges that reflect the type of work expected for someone at the targeted leadership level being assessed.
Common leadership competencies that are assessed include the ability to build relationships at all levels, drive for results, make good decisions, resolve complex problems, focus on customers, think strategically, develop talent, influence and inspire, and be agile learners, to name a few.
The discussion around readiness needs to look beyond recent history and look at 5-10, or even 15 or so years in the past to see if the person has foundational experiences and knowledge for the role. Was the person an engineer who worked on systems design or process engineering or was he or she a mechanical engineer who did more problem analysis? The foundations are different and could yield insights into how they think and may approach work challenges.
Consider Fit
The final consideration is fit. Considering how well a person may fit into a certain role is less straightforward than measuring performance, estimating potential and assessing readiness. It is often the one essential talent factor that derails a career.
To effectively discuss how a person may fit into a certain role, team or organisation, leaders need to understand his or her career motivations, leadership style, personality, attitudes, work history, values and adaptability. Thus, it is vital that people who really know the employee well weigh in on the discussion. If the person is being hired from the outside into a senior leadership role, then it is critical to have comprehensive reference checks that look back more than 10 years to understand a person well.
Many great leaders have been hired into companies that did not fit their values or leadership style. In succession planning discussions, it is important to discuss how the potential successors compare to the incumbent in the role and how a change in leadership styles and personality will mix with the key stakeholders and direct reports. People who have high self-awareness, good relationship skills and strong emotional intelligence can more easily read a situation and adapt to fit into a new team or organisation.
From an organisation perspective, what kind of leader is best for the current business challenges and future strategies of the business? Where do you want the business to go? Do you need a transformational leader or a growth-oriented leader? Do you need someone who will downsize the organisation, sell businesses and ensure organisational survival? Talent discussions too often fail to consider fit carefully. HR and executives see a strong leader with a great track record and hastily conclude that he or she will have as much or more success in a future role. The reality is that leaders are not successful on their own. It takes others to help make them successful.
In conclusion, talent discussions are some of the most important meetings that happen within an organisation. Sadly, though, they can often be filled with shallow thinking, assumptions and biases that put an organisation at risk of bad decisions. Human Resources leaders need to prepare well for these meetings and challenge everyone in the room to carefully consider the essential factors of performance, potential, readiness and fit to ensure the best talent is differentiated from the crowd.
McIntosh is HR transformation leader.
