What's Your Talent Strategy?

What’s Your Talent Strategy?

Asking colleagues and HR professionals, what’s your talent strategy, has created a visceral reaction or response along the lines of fear and loathing with some of them. I have always enjoyed the talent attraction and recruitment side of things which doesn’t necessarily come naturally to most people. But it is only one small piece to the larger landscape of people system strategies.

System work:

·        Sourcing

·        Engaging

·        Hiring

·        Onboarding

·        Training

·        Managing

·        Attrition

·        Developing

·        Retaining

·        Promoting

·        Succession Planning

·        Knowledge Transfer

·        Transitioning

This is a long list but not it’s not comprehensive. I’m sure others would chime in with additional components to their people system strategies. These can be tailored to fit a business’s culture and system approach.

Employees, team members or workers are typically a company’s largest investment or expense.  What percentage of management team and/or leadership team is viewing their people strategies as an integral part of their company or department success? Whether you are a nonprofit or for-profit company your bench strength of talent is your competitive advantage. Your people drive your success, programming, projects, innovation, problem solving and brand awareness. Why not cultivate them?

One of the biggest areas of challenge most companies/organizations are facing is their retiring population and the potential knowledge and expertise that is ready to leave the workforce. Developing a game plan to address this challenge is the first step and could include multiple strategies for engaging and developing team members across your organization.

Identifying your subject matter experts (SMEs), high potentials (HiPos) and tech savvy workers to develop a system approach for tackling this challenge could build an amazing framework to develop your bench, knowledge transfer strategy and succession planning model.

Tackling these challenges head-on with authentic and transparent dialogue can create stronger teams and management structure. Being mindful of areas for improvement is crucial throughout the process while also focusing on continuous improvement of the processes being developed.

Your talent strategy should be built across your organization and not simply siloed in human resources. The strength is in your people, trusting that and tapping the full potential will reap many rewards.

Don’t wait…build it now!