#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

When you ask CEO’s and CHRO’s what their key priorities are for the coming year, talent management always is one of the issues high on the list. Talent management is an easy and safe choice. Nobody will argue that talent management is not important. Supervisory Boards love to talk about succession and talent management. Talent management is generally seen as something long-term. When you hear terms as “strategic”, “long-term”, “future” and “investment”, you must be careful. For talent management this means: it is important, but not urgent. For the CEO, it means: I have ticked the box, but now HR can deal with it. Of course, I will visit the final session of the senior management program, of course, I will personally mentor one or two high potentials, but please, do not bother me too much about talent management, I have more urgent matters on my plate.  A big challenge for organisations is to make talent management urgent, and to make it a priority of today, not of the future.

One of the things that I’ve been doing is just looking at the language that HR people use. And even the people that are writing about the latest model of the competencies of the modern, future-proof CHRO—it’s all in the language of the “business partner.”

We need the CHRO to move from being a partner to the business to being a leader of the business. Therefore, we’re going to be using language that is leaders’ language. “We’re going to mobilize change. I’m going to be a mobilizer. I’m going to be a shaper of the organization.” It’s no longer change management and talent management and this kind of stuff.

The work of HR is going to change so it’s much more speed focused. And I think HR can become an operation that actually creates speed relative to competition by being able to reduce drag.

With talent shortages on the rise, learning leaders must change how they play their role during the talent management lifecycle.

I am a big fan of top 10 lists. I make them all the time.  To name a few: “Top song covers that are better than the original”, “Top hockey fights”, “Best movie sequels”, “Most underrated guitar players.” I could do that all day.  So when a friend of mine asked me what talent practices are on my short list, I jumped at the challenge of turning it into a top 10 list.  

Here are the criteria for the list:

Low cost and/or high return on investment – The cost of most of these are more about time than money, some may require investment but they are high return
Non-technology – There are many important talent management technology innovations out there, but that is a separate list
Not dependent on size of company - I tried to include practices that equally apply to large and small companies
Here is the list, it is numbered but that is not indicative of importance or value:

As Talent Analytics is catching up pace, I have seen and interacted with many of the HR folks, who struggle with understanding of technological maturity