Your talent pipeline – whether you call it that or not – represents the process used to nurture, cultivate, and advance the people in your organization to higher levels of responsibility.
It’s what happens after you’ve brought someone on board and what enables an individual to work their way up from project assistant to regional manager or from summer intern to director of operations, for instance.
Great organizations focus on honing this process to produce success uncommonly often. Google/Alphabet applies the most analytic rigor I’ve ever seen to their talent pipeline.
Good organizations put varying degrees of energy and resources into the process with good results sometimes, but not consistently.
One flaw that I’ve noticed across dozens of industries with companies from 20 to 2,000 people is the over reliance and at times misuse of instruments or assessments. The HR field is littered with them.
In this post, I’d like to offer you 3 ways to think about these assessments that will help you make the most of your talent and not valuable people or opportunities because your talent pipeline process had a kink or two in its design.
First of all, clearly define what capabilities the next level of responsibility requires. Lazy descriptions are chock full of arbitrary experiences, such as “10 years supervisory experience” or “3+ years in charge of P/L or business unit” that can be reconciled with an employee’s resume and work log. What you want to do is ask what would that do, exactly? In other words, what would someone having 10 years supervisory experience be able to do, decide, or initiate that a peer with only 7 years experience would not be able to do or do as well? Is one of the key qualities being able to resolve disputes effectively? What kinds of disputes and under what circumstances? What is the business impact of successful resolutions vs. unsuccessful resolutions? Then list one of your criteria:
Having established respectful team culture that does not tolerate discrimination based on age, race, gender, religious or sexual preference. Evidence of being able to clarify company policy and report on successful handling of charged situations that were appropriate to the level of authority and responsibility.
Another
To recap:
- Establish your criterial in advance.
- Differentiate between criteria that are fixed and those that can be developed.
- Seek to define the capability that you want, not settle for an objective measure of years that only suggests that capability.
What’s required is to think through your process and desired outcomes to a deeper degree than might be the norm. Don’t despair – the effort is well worth it and you can get help to accelerate the process and provide better structure than if you’re doing for the first time.
Follow these three guidelines, and you’ll have a much stronger talent pipeline and a clearer way to grow business now.