Posted by Cabot Jaffee on Tue, Jun 15, 2010 @ 12:57 PM
"A mind is too valuable a thing to waste" -anonymous
Today's challenging business environment is a stark reminder to HR organizations of the need for better talent management. Appropriately deploying employees' skills and personalities to optimize performance is a critical and difficult task. Furthermore, identifying and developing executives who have leadership potential, is a demanding process that is both an art and a science. More than ever before, businesses today rise or fall on the strength of their people; the onus to build and nurture this strength is on HR.
To carry out this mission well is to fully appreciate the wide range of competencies necessary to have effective leadership teams that can withstand the test of time and market ups and downs. Operating excellence, technical competence, marketing savvy, passion, energy and drive are always important, but today's knowledge- and talent-intensive organizations also require the "soft" people skills that facilitate execution across functions, departments, regions, and operating units.
Understanding and Implementing Talent Strategies
Understanding the importance of all these skills is one thing; being able to put this understanding into practice is another. How many corporate leaders today can say with confidence that their management team has the complete package of skills to take the company forward? How many are certain that their executives are deployed where and when they can put their specific talents to the best and highest strategic use? And when a leadership need arises, how many can accurately discern whether it's time to promote an individual or if that executive needs further development? Until they gain strong insight into the talent in place within their organizations, senior managers are essentially handcuffed with what they can accomplish now and in trouble when it comes to succession planning for the future.
Compounding the difficulty is the sheer size and complexity of many contemporary business organizations, which make it no simple undertaking to gather the information that will enable senior leadership to craft a winning talent strategy. And without robust information and analysis, leaders have little basis for deciding when and who to develop internally.
A Strategic Tool
One information-gathering tool that many corporate leaders are finding useful is the executive assessment, which evaluates and measures an organization's management talent in three key dimensions: against the organization's current and future strategic needs; against the competition; and against the overall talent marketplace. Properly performed, such assessments can help form the foundation of a winning talent strategy. They can produce the information that corporate leaders need to put the right people in the right positions at the right time, and they invariably clarify the processes that monitor performance and develop capabilities. Corporations can use executive assessments to build a database to model the skills and competencies that their business strategies demand, and to help them determine whether they have talent in-house to match their needs and the level of professional development that may be needed. Assessments also allow companies to maximize the value of executive education programs, creating custom-fit learning strategies for their next generation of corporate leaders.
Most importantly, by partnering with a third-party expert to conduct executive assessments, senior managers can counteract the "in-house" bias that all too often leads to sub-optimal decision making. By approaching talent management in this manner, companies can better target retention, career development, and succession planning efforts on their stars of the future
Talent management takes on a new dimension in today's competitive market- place. It requires an understanding of corporate strategic goals and of the role that talent plays in reaching them. And it requires a nimble organization with the expertise and resources to identify talent needs and quickly decide whether to meet them from within or draw them from out- side. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the future belongs to businesses that can weave talent and strategy into a seamless whole, and in the process build an organization with not only optimized performance but also with a significant competitive advantage as well.
Posted by Cabot Jaffee on Thu, May 20, 2010 @ 02:46 PM
The assessment center process has a long and well documented history as a highly valid process for obtaining accurate information about individual's skills and abilities - be it for development, hiring, promotional, career-pathing and/or succession management purposes. Unfortunately, ever shrinking headcount and the mandate to do-more-with-less-resources which have pervaded most organizations for the last decade make the process a more tenuous undertaking for more and more organizations.
Applying its more than 30 years of consulting experience with the assessment center process as a foundation for change, AlignMark recently redesigned a corporation's assessment center process used to annually assess 200+ managers for promotional and developmental purposes. The redesign effort significantly reduced time and expense of the process, while also enhancing the measurement soundness of the process, and is summarized in an AlignMark White Paper.
Click HERE to download the whitepaper.