How to Maximize Employee Potential

How to Maximize Employee Potential
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Can Your Approach to Talent Management Maximize Employee Potential?
Savvy corporate leaders know how critical it is to maintain the skills and motivation of their workforce to ensure employees have the confidence and competence to meet current and future business needs. This requires leaders to effectively manage both day-to-day needs and to invest time, money, and effort into future workforce planning and strategy.   

Steps to Maximize Employee Potential
What are some of the best practices involved in creating a comprehensive and effective talent management strategy for your business now and for your business in the future? Not surprisingly, you need to start at the beginning with a clear view of your business strategy and agreement on the specific skills and attitudes are needed to support it within your unique workplace culture

Here are the steps to take:

  1. Know Where You Are: Assess the Current Situation
    For any change to succeed, those affected by change need to agree upon where you are before you can thoughtfully design, communicate, and implement the new ways of thinking, behaving, and working.  Without a strong foothold in reality in terms of strategic priorities, cultural norms, and employee performance, it is difficult to maximize employee potential. Assuming your corporate strategy is clear, you need to know where you stand from a culture and talent perspective.

    To do this, start by assessing your current organizational culture to identify current levels of organizational health, cultural high performance, and strategic alignment.  Next, assess the performance and potential of employees against a proven standard to identify skill, attitude, learning, and knowledge gaps.

    This “reality” sets the foundation to maximize employee potential.
  2. Know Where You Want to Go: Build a Talent Management Strategy
    In order to ensure your talent strategy is forward-looking enough to meet future needs, you need a thoughtful people plan with clear and specific goals.  Most companies agree upon the new capabilities and roles needed to achieve a 5-year strategic plan and identify business-critical positions that require “ready now” candidates in terms of succession planning.

    You will know you are on the right track when you agree upon the key personality, cognitive, learning, motivation, leadership, functional, and technical capabilities needed in the future to be successful.

    This sets the desired endpoint to maximize employee potential.
  3. Know How to Get There: Implement the Talent Management Strategy
    Effective strategy execution requires that your key stakeholders are actively involved, fully engaged, completely accountable, and proportionately rewarded.  Start at the top and follow a disciplined and agreed-upon talent management strategy execution process which actively and transparently involves, engages, and holds accountable the entire organization

    You will know you are on the right path when goals, success metrics, roles, responsibilities, scope, and interdependencies for each stream of work are known, committed to, and consistently tracked.

    This enables you to make progress, learn, and adjust.

The Bottom Line
Clear strategies combined with healthy, high performing, and aligned corporate cultures set the stage for talent to shine.  A strong plan to help employees to perform at their peak for your unique situation is based upon knowing where you are and agreeing upon where you need to be to execute your business and people strategies.  Where do you stand?

To learn more about how to set people up for success, download Succession Planning Traps to Avoid for HiPo’s

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