Talent Management creates a healthy leadership pipeline

There is hardly a document in the last 5 years that hasn’t indicated that executive boards have a primary focus on the area of talent management and thus succession planning.

As an executive coach I often work with a business to enable the development and release of talent, though what is often clear is that whilst most senior managers understand the need for talent, they often are unaware of the dangers of not valuing talent as a primary business focus.

1. Succession planning should be done at every level, not just at the senior tier:

• This enables the business as a whole to feel this isn’t just an elitist activity
• Educates people to a process that will enable them to contribute as opposed to just be told
• Gives new team members a sense they are entering a transparent environment

2. It is also key to build an executive’s reward around their capability in locating, developing and promoting talent:

• This in itself promotes a culture of sustainability and legacy
• Starts to address the “I’m in it for the short term” mentality that many executives have cultivated over the last decade
• Breeds behaviour that is geared to a learning organisation that achieves through the development of its people

3. Talent Management should be reviewed twice a year

• Of course the a persons development should be continually reviewed, but twice a year it should be a board review
• Executives should feel comfortable talking about success and failure in terms of developing their team, to learn from each other
• “How often, if ever, is someone maneuvered around the organisation in order to grow them?”
• It is key that people are not owned by a Director, but seen as  business resource

Talent management has become a high profile concept, though it should be an easy process. Sometimes the documentation looks great when you consider just one person, but when you are generating these things at a business level it can be very labour intensive:

Top Talent Management Tips:

1. Let the individuals own their profile, they keep it up to date
2. Use a simple 4-9 box grid.
3. Ask people where they see themselves on that grid and discuss the fact you agree or disagree
4. Make it an open and transparent process
5. Consider do you want your potential career value to be a secret: No! So make it an open process
6. Have the painful conversations, the business will only have to do it once, then it’s done
7. Do this process at the same time as Reviews, so it’s seen as one activity
8. Don’t make out it’s a grind, this is someones career you are talking about

In the end, remember that Talent Management is part process and part culture, it demonstrates that as a business leader you understand the difference between the short term and the long term.

Leadership Responsibility and Stewardship

There is no doubt about it, that being a leader has responsibilities and most of them are obvious, but still many leaders see their responsibility as being a very finite level, generally being what they have direct control over.

The reality is that leadership responsibility is horizontal and not vertical, meaning that leadership looks across the business as opposed just up and down it, the Executive Coaching Guru developed the TLeadershipModel to simply illustrate that where as management has vertical responsibility, leadership has a horizontal one.

The very essence of management is the achievement of outputs through the management of resources, the very essence of leadership is the achievement of outputs with the continued sustainabiltiy and legacy of a business. What’s important to understand is that leadership by its very definition entwined with responsibility and a sense of purpose that goes beyond the pure achievement of the task, leaders give value and reason to a business, aligning the everyday tasks to something that has a greater value and thus bringing value to all people at all levels.

Understanding this is very important as we hear about ‘credit crunch’ and the leadership of the financial markets, that is effecting the world currently, how has this come about? At its most basic it is a disregard of the TLeadershipModel and a limited focus on the horizontal.

People can at the most senior or junior levels can:

• become enamored by their own agenda, yes at a daily transactional level, but also on a more personal level that can flow between fear around capability, through greed and a personal agenda that has no interest in the business other than a mechanism for increased financial gain.
• see their value as being one of stewardship and development.

As an executive coach it is paramount that we advocate for the horizontal as well as the vertical, that stewardship and responsibility are our natural antidote for the current chaos and crisis that we see within the world markets and that as the pressure of the everyday transactional, output lead environment places pressure on the most authentic of leaders , the executive coach uses personal authenticity to enable senior managers to navigate their path.

Consider the following, that if you have ‘leadership’ within your personal self-definition, then you have responsibility to others, if you don’t see this as the case not only are you wrong, but you aren’t a leader, you are just a manager who has (unfortunately) control.

Leadership Skills: Dealing with team Blockages and Stuckness

Executive coaching places you into the heart of some most diverse and ambiguous places, often as an executive coach I find myself talking to senior leadership teams in a moment of great situational fluidity (which is management speak for ‘their up against it!’).

As an individual when you are being paid a big salary it’s sometimes difficult to admit to yourself that you are stuck and then by definition even harder to bring that to the table with colleagues. As a team its considerably more complex to have the observational insight to see the team is stuck and even when you can, having the personal elegance to bring it into focus, in the moment with colleagues and a boss who may or may not be operating from the same place of personal insight as yourself.

1. Trust your instinct: If something feels wrong, then it probably is.
2. Test the water: You may need to broker your observation at a coffee break, but it’s worth understanding where the rest of the team are.
3. No room to test?: An elegant – “Can I get some clarity around….” or “How would I explain this to my guy’s”. Is a great way to get a sense of whether you are the one that doesn’t get it, or you were right in the fact no one else has a clue either. 
4. Bring it to the table: When all is said and done, you are a leader so be one! If you think the team is stuck say so. A great way to do this is to state it as an observation of fact – “It feels like we can’t make headway with this, can I get a sense of where you guy’s are” (That’s a statement not a question).

So it’s out in the open, you highlighted the ‘elephant in the corner’, the key thing about being stuck on something as a team is getting the darn thing recognised and if you are can make that happen then any success after that can primarily be linked back to you.

Of course then it has to be dealt with and that’s something else entirely, which will owe success as much to the behaviour of the people involved as to the tools you may utilise to solve it.