To show or not to show, that is the question ……for many HR leaders when discussing talent ratings.
Guests at our recent senior HR women’s network dinner discussed this dilemma. Many said their companies had debated whether to reveal talent ratings and the potential damage to ‘ordinary’ employees of knowing they are not on a ‘high potential’ or succession list. Companies vary in their degree of openness when it comes to discussing talent ratings; some are completely transparent, others completely secret, and many are in between.
For our senior women this policy is becoming even trickier to manage in the current economic climate. According to them, managers were generally unskilled at handling such conversations and this is exacerbated when the options for people to move role or to another company are limited. Line managers fear being left with a disgruntled employee, who in the past would have just gone to work somewhere else. A further complicating factor is the preference of generation Y employees for greater levels of transparency than past generations may have demanded. Put this together with a group of talented employees who may not want to climb the traditional corporate ladder, and talent strategy begins to require some new thinking.
One of the tools that can enable this is a ‘success profile’. This describes the crucial difference between what the very best do and the ordinary employees. The attributes tend to be in the area of clarity of job purpose and the values that drive the individual’s behaviour, motivation and sense of self. The profile is derived from research into what the organisation’s ‘exemplars’ (those who are already acting in the way required to execute the strategy of the company) believe and the skills they use. Making the profile public, alongside a suite of development options, enables employees to take greater control of their career within the framework of the company strategy.
Maybe this is the future direction for talent strategy: collaboration between the company and the employee, and a more open dialogue about career choice, rather than lists of high potentials and successors kept in a locked filing cabinet, or talent IT system.
I would be very interested to hear the views of other HR colleagues on this. Certainly our senior women could see the sense of this approach but recognised there would still be the hurdle of convincing existing management.
Jan Hills is a Partner in Orion Partners and works in Talent Strategy, HR capability and Change Leadership.