Talent Management Recipe for Success: Surprising Research

Do You Know the Talent Management Recipe for Success?
Many people leaders acknowledge that the talent management recipe for success often feels elusive — especially in high-growth organizations. At its core, talent management should be about driving and sustaining organizational excellence through people:

• Attracting.
• Developing.
• Engaging.
• Retaining.

the top talent that aligns with your business strategy and reflects your unique organizational culture.

The Talent Management Recipe for Success

When executed effectively, talent management can set your company apart from competitors, thriving in both favorable and challenging market conditions. When mismanaged, however, inconsistent or misaligned approaches can stall growth and undermine performance.

For a sustainable and profitable talent management strategy, three critical ingredients must be in place — Strategy, Culture, and Talent — and they must be fully interconnected and aligned. Without this alignment, even the best initiatives will fall short.  The surprise is that talent is only effective when strategy and culture are clear and aligned enough for that talent to thrive.  “A players” cannot overcome strategy and culture misalignment.

First, Your Strategy Must Be Clear Enough for People to Commit To
Our organizational alignment research found that strategic clarity accounts for 31% of the difference between high and low performing companies.  Successful leaders know that strategies must be clear enough for people to commit to them.  Likewise, talent management plans cannot succeed unless they are purposefully linked to the strategic priorities of the business.

Fundamentally, strategy is about making hard choices and focusing — almost ruthlessly — only on the areas with the greatest leverage. If your strategy is inconsistent, unclear, or not being successfully implemented across the company, you have some strategy design and strategy cascade work to do before you can focus on an effective talent management plan for success.

Second, Your Culture Must Be Aligned with Your Strategy
Once your strategy is clear enough to act, you must ensure that your culture is aligned with your strategy.  We define workplace culture as how work gets done on a day-to-day basis.  Your culture can either help or hinder your ability to execute your strategy.

Cultural alignment accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing companies in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.  Your culture provides the glue necessary for any talent strategies to stick.  It is a mistake to invest in big talent management initiatives before your culture is aligned enough with your strategic priorities.

Third, Your Talent Makes It All Work
While we believe that the purpose of creating a differentiated talent management strategy is to drive organizational excellence, we were surprised to learn that Talent only accounted for 29% of the difference between high and low performing organizations.  While it makes sense that even the best people can get derailed by unclear strategies and misaligned cultures, we thought that talent would have a bigger impact on performance.

While it is still true that organizations can ill afford to hire wrong or to lose current players that matter, we now know that your strategy must be clear enough and your culture must be aligned enough for those talent management strategies to pay off.  Once your strategy and culture are in sync, building a high performing workforce has four main building blocks:

1. Attracting Top Talent
   Have a clearly defined employee brand that aligns with your overall company vision and brand promise. A clear, compelling, and differentiated employee value proposition can help your company stand out in a crowded market while attracting the necessary talent that fits.

   Then define the profile of a successful candidate and the organizational culture in which they need to succeed.  Selecting new employees is one of the most critical decisions an organization can make.  Invest the time required to get the job profile right, conduct thorough behavior-based interviews, hire smart, and increase speed to productivity and engagement with a quality on-boarding program.

2. Developing Top Talent
   Effective training strategies ensure that each and every learning and development initiative can demonstrate a measurable contribution to the business. To develop top talent, you must change both on-the-job behavior and performance. To change behavior and performance, you must treat learning as a change initiative, not a training event.

   Our research of over 800 training measurement projects has shown that only 1-in-5 people change their behavior from training alone.  Start by identifying the specific business metrics that you want to improve with your key business stakeholders.

   Make sure that you identify key business and learning objectives, agree to leading and lagging success metrics, calculate desired targets for each metric, complete a high-level business case that aligns with company priorities, and draft a high-level project, communication, measurement, and change management plan.

   In other words, treat training like any other business initiative, not an employee benefit or one-time event.

3. Engaging Top Talent
   Based on employee data from over 5,000 employee engagement surveys annually, we know that engaged employees are more productive, more profitable, more customer-focused, and more likely to stay.  Start with understanding your current organizational culture. Done right, they can paint an accurate picture of your employee brand, your true culture, gaps that need to be addressed, and your value to prospective new hires.
4. Retaining Top Talent
   More than 50% of highly engaged organizations report lower attrition rates. It has been well documented that unwanted employee turnover negatively affects customers, employees, productivity, and profitability. If your company’s turnover is too high, it’s time to understand why.

   Use a combination of  Employee Exit surveys to get a complete turnover picture, Employee Engagement surveys to discover where you stand, and Targeted Action Plans to retain top talent.

The Bottom Line
If you want your talent management strategy to create organizational excellence, start with the business strategy and the organizational culture.  Then you can confidently create an aligned plan to meaningfully attract, develop, engage and retain top talent.  That is the Talent Management Recipe for Success.

To learn more about how to get the most out of your talent, download The 3 Areas that You Must Get Right for Your Talent to Perform at their Peak

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.