Talent Management Should Be A Compliance-Free Zone

In yesterday’s post, we emphasized that great talent management isn’t about complex compliance — it is about doing a few things really well. Leaders responsible for talent need to change their way of being and thinking. They don’t need another process. It’s all about the lens you use to look at what is happening in your organization.

Here are some other big failures we’ve noticed in the way leaders manage their talent, and how to correct them:

2. Feedback done badly

The most sophisticated talent management systems in the world are not going to deliver anything if those in the system and pipeline have no idea how to give and receive feedback.

Anyone can make someone cry or tell them the lies they want to hear. The challenge is to deliver feedback so that the next morning the person who receives it wakes up and wants to do something different or try something new.

To give constructive feedback you need to invest in deepening your knowledge of the person concerned. Most people need a careful mixture of carrot and stick.

What works best is a technique described by leadership expert and best-selling author Marshall Goldsmith as ‘feed-forward’. He recommends framing feedback using a forward-looking approach such as, ‘in the future, try x.”

Feedback should be continual rather than a twice a year process or an annual performance review. Providing feedback at a designated time of year does not allow someone to change their behavior or performance in a timely manner and in fact provides little value to them.

Managers need to give feedback in real time, capturing opportunities as they arise to point out where performance can be enhanced. This builds trust and higher performance – the individual knows that their performance is being continually and closely evaluated.

Most of us don’t like critical feedback. But if we want to learn, it is up to us to create a safe environment for feedback or ‘feed-forward’ to occur.

Feedback is always a combination of things you need to work on and don’t have mastery over, and people’s perceptions of you, sometimes correct and sometimes not.

You should ask clarifying questions and then be reflective about what you hear. Even if the feedback is not correct, you need to realise that it is someone’s reality, and therefore it’s critical you understand it and address it in a meaningful way.

If managers don’t bother to give feedback which will accelerate the development of their high performers, the danger is they will leave the company. You will then once again be ‘one short’.

3. The ‘not ready yet’ syndrome

One of the biggest flaws in talent management is the mindset that to fulfill the needs of a position, an executive has to be ready now. But in any form of selection and succession, no one is going to be ready now, and evaluating through this lens will always leave you one short.

We believe the best way to overcome this thinking is to look on selection and succession as a multi-person rather than a single-person event. For example, you should consider the strength of the team into which you are inserting a leader. If it’s a world-class team with a lot of experienced executives you can take more risk on the leader, compared with a ‘team in turmoil’ situation where you may need to ‘over-hire’ for the position.

What success looks like

Top people at the top of an organisation need to be developed properly – not through a stagnant, process-driven performance management system, but through a changed mindset which takes into account the broader context.

Change will take place one person at a time. It will take place as you define an open position and are then willing to embrace the risks of internal candidates and their readiness. While an external leader might be necessary for crisis or startup situations, very rarely is effective change brought about by a ‘big bang’ through one person. It is always a team and the way leaders are transitioned into their teams.

It’s only when you can get past the idea of being ‘one short’ and move to always being ‘just right’ that you will have changed your mind, and kept the change.

The second of a two part series from renowned leadership coaches Stephen Miles and Taylor Griffin.

Stephen Miles coaches chief executives and leadership teams all over the world. He is a vice chairman of the leadership advisory and executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, where he runs the leadership advisory services. Taylor Griffin is an associate principal at Heidrick & Struggles where she focuses on senior level executive assessments, CEO succession projects and board development work.