Partner Article

How to align your talent with your business

It’s labour market focus week on Bdaily. Here, Pip Clarke, business development director, looks at how to align your talent with your business.

In a constantly changing, and increasingly global economy, it is widely accepted that people are the key source of competitive advantage. It doesn’t necessarily matter what an organisation’s collective business ideas are, how well it plans and markets its products and services, or the strength of its relationship with customers. If it fails to invest in, and capitalise on, the value of its key employees, it will drastically reduce its potential to succeed.

Many business leaders are recognising that a highly skilled workforce is the critical success factor for organisations worldwide. Yet this talent is increasingly in short supply. And the challenge of attracting and retaining these workers is becoming more complex in a global labour market. The strategic management of talent has to become a priority for all organisations in order to thrive in this shifting economy.

However this challenge should not be addressed as a stand-alone process. Countless surveys on talent management practices have found that few organisations have coordinated approaches to developing, and nurturing, their next generation of leaders with business strategies in mind. In many cases, talent management is not a strategic activity built into business planning cycles; it is fragmented and often disconnected from key goals set by the top team.

A people strategy should be designed around business development; after all, you want your talent to help grow your company. But how can you ensure these two are aligned?

The key stages to aligning strategies

For any business owner looking to align its people strategy with broader business plans there are ten key steps to follow:

1. Get it on the agenda – Look at the needs of various departments. Take each of your strategic objectives, map the tasks and critical people you need to achieve them and ask the question; ‘what would happen if we were mediocre, or poor in these areas, or if we were to lose key people?’

2. Create your own talent map – Carry out a robust analysis of current resources to clarify the link between your human capital and the delivery of your business strategy. This will reveal where your critical talent needs and dependencies lie and as such, where the key focus should be.

3. Understand your reputation – Get a clear view of your reputation, how your employees perceive you and what they think of working for you. This step is often ignored, but this insight can be useful in terms of identifying your current employee value proposition – you may find it’s not what you think. If you want to attract the top talent to support the direction your company is taking, you must consider what will attract these candidates.

4. Identify your talent gaps - Define the capacity and capability of talent required to execute your business strategy. Gather internal data about the current work environment and benchmark this externally. Communicate with the senior team the importance of doing so and ask them to specify the quantity and quality of talent that your company needs to win. Ask the following questions:

• What are your most significant business challenges?

• Have you got a sufficient ‘talent pipeline’ to address these challenges?

• What may be happening in three to five years time that might impact the type and number of leaders you require to drive success?

• Where are your most significant leadership gaps? Do you fall short on the number of potential leaders required to undertake global assignments, for example?

• What sort of behaviours and cultural values do you expect your leaders to share?

• Have you integrated regular talent audits into your business and strategic planning process?

5. Scrutinise your current talent management processes – Ask serious questions about whether they produce the talent you need, when you need it and the extent to which they have identified the leaders of the future.

6. Focus on the people within – Review the process for supporting and fast tracking undiscovered talent in your organisation. You might find you have the best talent embedded in the business already, just in different departments.

7. Pull it all together – When you have clear actions from the above points, get the executive team together with a facilitator and agree how to embed people strategy in your business plan.

8. Prioritise your actions – Focus first on those areas that have most impact on your business strategy and look to ensure that talent is available.

9. Take an inclusive approach to implementation – See talent management as integral to the business, not something that is detached and owned exclusively by the HR team.

10. Continuous measurement – Build success measures around the needs of the business and the expectations of the top team. Use relevant metrics that are available in the business, and identify any areas where better data sources might be required.

The above steps are designed to help you map out your current skills and where there may be gaps in line with future company needs. Following these key steps will set you on your way to aligning your people strategy to support business growth. But my final piece of advice is this; act like your business depends on talented people to succeed – because at the end of the day it does!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by a&dc .