The business needs we need to predict
are more complex than any contemporary
forecasting techniques can
handle: markets contain more competitors
that innovate faster, businesses
react to their competitors’strategies
more quickly, and the options
for doing business (outsourcing, joint
ventures, acquisitions, etc.) are
greater. Long-term succession plans
in particular are mistakes because
they assume that we know which
jobs will need to be filled in the future
and which current employees will be
around to fill them. Many companies
update their succession plans every
year to try to keep up with the fact
that jobs change and individuals
leave. As a practical matter, how useful
is a plan if it must be changed every
year? What problem is it solving?
A better approach is to take that uncertainty
as given and find ways to
manage it. One way to reduce the effects
of uncertainty is to use the principle
of portfolios. To apply this concept
to talent management, consider
the idea of talent pools, where you
avoid developing employees to fit
narrow, specialized jobs. Instead, you
develop a group of employees with
broad and general competencies that
should fit into a range of jobs. Once
the candidates are developed, you
can allocate them to the actual vacancies,
as opposed to trying to guess
years in advance where vacancies
will occur and which individuals
should slot into them. The fit between
candidate and specific job may
be less than perfect. But just-in-time
training and coaching can help close
the gap.
Principle 3: Earn a Return on Investments
in Developing Employees
How can we recoup investments in
employees when the need for their
skills is uncertain in the long run and
they can walk out the door, taking
those skills with them? One way to
improve the payoff fromdevelopment
is to rely on shorter, more accurate
forecasts and improve the odds that
the investments will pay off. Lessons
from supply chain management can
help here as well. Consider the problem
of bringing a new class of candidates
into an organization. For those
employers who hire people directly
out of college, an alternative arrangement
hires half the new class in June
and the other half at the end of the
summer in September. Instead of one
hundred developmental assignments,
now the program needs to
find only fifty in June and then rotate
the new hires through them in three
months. The June cohort steps out of
those roles at the end of the summer
when the September cohort steps
into them. Then rather than having to
find one hundred permanent assignments
in September for the June cohort,
the organization need find only
fifty, and so on. The more important
advantage is that hiring forecasts can
be shorter and more accurate. This
eases the match with the first developmental
assignment and then with
every set of assignments along the
progression of that cohort.
An important way to deal with the
problem of recouping investments in
development is to get employees to
share the costs. Employees are now
the main beneficiaries of investments
in their development because of their
ability to cash them in on the open
market. The simplest way that individuals
contribute to the costs of their
own development is by taking on
learning projects voluntarily, perhaps
in addition to their normal work. Assuming
that the candidates are more
or less contributing their usual performance
in their regular jobs and their
pay hasn’t increased, they are essentially
doing these development
projects for free. Several companies
now offer promising employees the
opportunity to volunteer for projects
done with their leadership team,
sometimes restricting themto projects
outside their current functional area
to broaden their experience. The employees
get access to company leadleaders,
a broadening experience, and
good professional contacts, all of
which will surely pay off later. But
they pay for it. Similarly, tuition reimbursement
programs in which employers
pay college tuition and the
employees attend classes on their
own time offer another way to share
the investment in development.
The most important approach to developing
employees increases the
value of employee contributions by
speeding the process that gets themto
jobs that add greater value to the organization.
This approach requires that
you spot talent and potential early
and then give the employees opportunities
to advance faster than they otherwise
might. Many companies are
moving away fromthe difficult task of
attempting to predict who is ready for
which new job and toward a selfnomination
model. The best of these
provide opportunities to literally try
out a role and see how they do. If you
want to see who can lead a team,
there is nothing better than giving
various people the chance to try it.
Finding opportunities like these, in
which candidates can fail quickly and
cheaply, is a key element of developing
talent and an important task for
line managers in the talent management
process. That takes us to our
final talentmanagement task.
