G U E S T EDITORIAL Talent Test Drive: Does Your Talent Have the Horsepower You Need? It’s time to take a critical look at your talent and start asking the tough questions. Is the talent that you have today ready to meet your business needs of tomorrow? It’s not an easy question, and it’s fairly subjective, but you have to do it. Most importantly, you have to critically analyze your talent with partnership from the business. A full- scale talent assessment requires that you spend some time conducting a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis of the business with specific focus on how the talent level is in concert with current and future plans. This creates alignment with your business and its strategic direction. From this analysis, you should learn the overall direction of your company, its market and its competitive set. You’ll also be able to build out a plan for what the critical skill sets are that will help your company stay competitive in that space. Once you have this in hand, it’s time to start looking at the talent and the skills that are internal to your organization. If there’s misalignment, you’ll have some heavy, but vital, work in front of you. A surface scan of your talent can give you a general idea of what your perceived internal knowledge, skills and abilities gaps are. However, the challenge that most organizations face, when it comes to talent management, is that the data that they have on employees is incorrect, or incomplete. You may know what roles employees have held, and from that you can make assumptions about their skill sets, but that picture isn’t always complete. Most organizations I’ve worked with don’t have a clear view into what their employees have done prior to coming into the current organization. This leaves a big gap, and potentially leaves you stuck in the middle between whether to hire from outside or, instead, to look for skills that already exist within your organization. To prevent this from happening, many organizations are using co-ops and internships that allow them to see more clearly into what other skills their organization needs to possess. It’s important to over- turn those rocks and search high and low. You owe it to your employees and to the organization. You never know what you may find; you may be pleasantly surprised. Success stories are useful ways to examine the role that talent man- agement can play in the growth and develop- ment of an organization. For example, Southwest Airlines, which has a robust talent manage- ment program, is the largest domest ic air carrier in the U.S. Yet, it is also the only one that is, and has been, consis- tent ly prof i table for several years. Talent practices and Dr. Curtis L. Odom, Stuck On Start Coaching, Prescient Strategists and Northeastern University Talent practices and integrated talent management are important today because they address vital strategic and organizational issues. integrated talent man- agement are important today because they address vital strategic and organizational issues. It is not because these are human resource or training priorities; it is because they directly impact intangible assets and an organization’s ability to compete. For boards and CEOs, the driver of mitigating risk through stronger talent pipelines is close behind productivity improvement (and, in some cases, is the number one driver). Organizations are stuck in the middle if leadership and critical roles are unfilled. Historically, the economy has gone through several stages in which success has been defined differently. Each stage has had its own structure, governing patterns, roles, talent practices and assumptions about people. The Industrial Economy was when the economy was manufacturing oriented. A few people made decisions, command and control was vital, and employees were like replaceable machine parts. People were considered a cost to be controlled. In the Industrial Economy, it was all about economies of scale, efficiency and control. Because this defined economic success, this is what managers were expected to do. As the economy moved to the service sector, success meant something different, and mana- gers had to adapt and adjust. The Knowledge Economy developed as the economy became more service-oriented. Decision-making was pushed down the organization and to more people. The knowledge worker phrase was coined, and people were viewed as potential assets. In the Knowledge Economy, success was charac- terized by innovation, agility and speed of choice; all of which are highly talent-dependent. The manager in the Talent Age needs to become a talent leader to unleash and leverage the capabilities of people. And to do that, talent leaders need to also become experts at workforce planning. In the Gig Economy, success is defined differently. To be successful, organizations must innovate, be agile, respond to change quickly and encourage creat ivi ty. Organizations are no longer huge and monolithic, but rather consist of value chains of various companies, countries and suppliers. In this economy, the “right talent, and not all employees,” is the most valued asset. Workforce planning is still an underdeveloped practice in most Gig Economy organizations. This stems from the fact that talent management has not been viewed as a strategic process but rather as people practices that are administrative and operational in nature. DEEP FOUNDATIONS • SEPT/OCT 2018 • 117
