Content area
Full Text
Four challenges underpin any approach taken to develop an organization's talent. Talent building endeavors should be business driven, future focused, integrated, and deliver measurable results. In response to these challenges, and based on our work with a number of corporate clients, we have created the talent development framework (TDF) depicted in Figure 1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]. It provides a lens through which to view, organize, and monitor talent development activities. It can also be used to help guide the process flow for developing the right talents, in the right people, at the right time, in the right way, helping to insure that the talent pipeline has an abundant supply of "ready-now" executive successors and a cadre of emerging, high-potential managers. The TDF comprises four components that:
start with a thorough understanding of the will of the organization (i.e. the real business drivers);
bring to the fore the talent-development attributes via the learning model considerations;
reinforce continuous learning over the course of a development journey; and
focus on the results achieved.
This framework, and the other tools related to it, can be used to efficiently, systematically, and robustly establish a leadership development plan.
Organizational will
The TDF points first to the importance of developing an understanding of the business strategy, goals, issues, opportunities, challenges, values, and culture of an organization. Such factors of "organizational will" comprise the context within which talent development endeavors occur. Context provides the touchstone for ascertaining the appropriateness of learning venues, takeaways, and priorities. For some organizations, this first step is a confirmation of the work that has already been done to identify organization values, strategic challenges, or executive competencies. For others, this step reveals that the self-examination required has either not been done, or has grown stale. In that instance, the first step becomes formulation, not confirmation.
In order to flesh out "organizational will," a handful of focused strategic questions are useful. Consider the dozen below. We recently used these for a major, publicly-owned, defense contractor engagement to help them crystallize their talent development context. These questions were forwarded to the client's senior executive team...