Article · 6-minute read
Competition for talent is currently fierce. It’s therefore arguably more important than ever to ensure that you are looking after the top talent you have within your organization; identifying high potential individuals and developing them effectively.
In this article, we look at some of the common pitfalls we see when it comes to talent development, and how to avoid them!
When certain roles need filling, the temptation might be to immediately put out a job ad and try to hire in someone with the requisite experience or select someone doing a similar role elsewhere.
However, research suggests that not only is it more expensive to hire in someone external (placing job ads, paying agency fees, running assessment centers and often having to agree to higher salaries), but you run a higher risk of them not being quite the right fit for your organization, or simply not settling, and leaving, compared to someone that you have developed and nurtured internally.
Current employees have the benefit of already knowing the company’s goals, standards, and are (hopefully) already motivated to achieve them. This is particularly pertinent at a more senior level, where you may want a leader who is familiar with your current organizational culture and values, and will embrace them, rather than potentially overhaul or disrupt them. To paraphrase Olympic Gold medallist Helen Richardson-Walsh at our recent Saville Assessment conference, “It takes years to build a culture, but it can be knocked down in a moment”.
Research also suggests that increasing the number of homegrown leaders by just 10 individuals could save organizations up to £1.3 million a year.
“By instilling your company’s cultural DNA in your succession plans early, your future leaders are also growing into future brand ambassadors and internal role models,” says HR Zone.
When it comes to top talent and high potential individuals, one clear way to keep them ‘on board’ is to present them with a clear path for progression and letting them know what they need to do to achieve it.
It’s important to seek out the full potential in your team, to understand their hopes for the future, and encourage this growth within individuals.
Indeed, a recent survey found that one-third (33%) of UK employees wanted to leave their job due to a lack of opportunity for career progression (Allen Associates).
“Employees want their careers to move on an upward trajectory. Whether or not they aspire to climb the proverbial ‘corporate ladder’, people want to grow, personally and professionally,” say BetterUp.
Offer both formal and informal opportunities to talk to your people about how they see themselves progressing, and support them by giving them time, skills and training to take these steps. With three in four (77%) of workers surveyed reported that they feel like they’re on their own in determining their career development (Bridge), as an industry, we can do better!
When it comes to internal progression, organizations are increasingly wanting to move away from looking purely at experience and move towards a more skills- and potential-based approach to talent management. Whilst experience and readiness are still a factor, especially when it comes to succession planning for senior roles, focusing on potential and skills development provides individuals with clarity of career path, wherever they may end up (everyone has potential for something!). It also helps organizations spot under-the-radar stars and provides better D,E&I outcomes.
We helped technology-giant Ricoh look at the full potential of their workforce in-line with the shifting nature of the organization, away from a print-based business towards a digitally-focussed enterprise. We designed an assessment process through which Ricoh could identify high potential individuals for their now award-winning reskilling development program.
Ricoh’s Director of Talent, explains more: “One of our greatest success stories is that a colleague who was seen as low potential by his line manager was identified through the data Saville provided. We were told they shouldn’t be invested on in this program. They have since progressed through the development program with flying colors and are adding serious value in an incredibly strategically important role. If it weren’t for using Wave, this person would certainly have left.”
You can find more about this in the case study, or in the below episode of our Deep Dive podcast with Mike Rugg-Gunn, author of Managing Talent: A Short Guide for the Digital Age.
For more on our approach to skills potential, you can download our recent whitepaper The Science of Skills here.
Often, when it comes to internal promotions, we see an over-reliance on ratings and anecdotal evidence from individual line-managers, rather than organizations using real data to take a more holistic view of potential.
The problem with this is that managers are not skilled people-judgers, favoritism and bias come into the equation, and managers are unable to look at individuals’ skills and behaviors objectively, in line with wider organizational goals and needs.
“Every single human alive today is a horribly unreliable rater of other human beings,” says Marcus Buckingham, Head of People and Performance Research at the Roseland, ADP Research Institute. He explains that people bring their own backgrounds and personalities into play and that ratings managers give on others are more a reflection of themselves than of those they’re reviewing.
We did a really interesting piece of research for another global technology company that demonstrated just how wrong managers get it. We found that individuals rated as high potential by managers were scored as low potential by our data and individuals rated as low potential by managers were scored as high potential by our data. When we dig into this we found that managers tended to view genuinely high potential individuals as difficult-to-handle mavericks (they were usually change agents who could see ways to make improvements that managers couldn’t). Low potential individuals were viewed by managers as ‘helpful problem solvers’ (that often made their managers look good!)
Our Wave Leadership Potential dashboard gives you a clear, incredibly nuanced overview of the potential in your organization at both a group and individual level, allowing you to understand the types of leadership roles in which individuals would be most likely to thrive.
Using in-depth data from a tool such as this promotes inclusivity and diversity by removing factors such as similarity bias, helping you to build more diverse pipelines and ensuring key talent isn’t overlooked.
These tools are not just about identifying high-potential individuals or future leaders either, they can help you give career paths and coaching to those who fall into other buckets, allowing you to keep them engaged and move them into roles where their skills are most suited.
You can find out more about this in our article Mobilizing a Wider Talent Pool: Retaining and building talent not identified as high potential
Moving away from relying solely on manager recommendations and using tools such as ours can save you significant time and money when it comes to retaining top talent within your organization and providing high potential individuals the career progression they desire and deserve – our team will be happy to tell you more!
Our seamless solution provides a structured and scalable approach to unearthing true potential.
Richard is Marketing Manager at Saville Assessment and heads up our training and product marketing activity, as well as helping to organize virtual and face-to-face industry events.
You can connect with Richard on LinkedIn here.
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