7 Pillars of Talent Development
If you don't effectively assess, coach, and develop your talent, you'll work twice as hard and get half the results. If you don't effectively assess, coach, and develop your talent, your A players will leave and your C players will stay. So I want to quickly share with you today the seven keys to a talent development program, in no particular order:
Coaching. Coaching is not about you, the leader. Coaching is a regular program where the person you're coaching sets the agenda. What obstacles are they running into? Where do they want to go next week, next month, next year in their career path? It's their agenda. It's help that they need from you. That's coaching.
Accountability. This is very different from coaching, where it's the person you're coaching who creates the agenda - in accountability, it's about holding your team members accountable for their quarterly priorities, or what I call "rocks," for their key performance indicators, for the things they committed to achieve and the goals they committed to achieve as well.
Career/performance planning. Now, by that, I don't mean an annual performance review, but what I mean is periodically, maybe it's once a quarter, sitting down and reviewing how that person is doing, where they need to improve, what strings they need to leverage, where do they want to go in their career. It's not a big bureaucratic process, it's not something that happens once or twice a year. It's career and performance planning that happens throughout the year.
Informal feedback. Don't wait until a quarterly meeting. Don't wait until a biweekly accountability meeting. When you see someone do something really well, tell them. When you see someone screw something up, tell them. Not a week later, not a day later, but in the moment.
Learning and development. Do you have a learning and development plan for yourself for this year? Do you have a learning and development plan for this quarter? Conferences you're going to, books you're reading, new skills you want to learn? Number one, you need that plan, and number two, you need to work with the individual members of your team for them to create plans on their own. And I'm talking about professional development as well as personal development.
Upward feedback. How often are you asking your people to give you feedback on how you can do a better job as a leader, or on how you could do a better job as a company? Sometimes that is more formal 360-degree evaluations where part of that is getting upward feedback. Some of it is just more informally asking the question.
Regularly assess your talent. Again, I don't mean a performance evaluation that happens once or twice a year - but are you getting together with your team to assess who your A, B, and C players are one level below in the organization? Not so you can go tell them they're A's, they're B's, they're C's, but so as a team, you're assessing the level of talent, whether that talent is improving or trending the wrong way, holding each other accountable for leveraging A players, coaching B's to become A's, and making some hard decisions sometimes on your C players.