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Talent Management for Tough Times
How to identify and retain your best people in a difficult economy

When the going gets tough you need a great team around you. And as we enter a challenging economic climate, staff must be focused, determined and aiming for clear and agreed corporate goals. They also need to be demonstrating the unique behaviours that will lead to your success.

But how do you manage the talent within your organisation without first defining and understanding what talent you need?

At Bowland Solutions, we stress to our clients the need to develop a tailored Competency Framework (or revisit their existing one) and ensure this is genuinely customised to their organisation.

Assessing your people talent against your competency framework identifies the gap between current behaviour and the required behaviours that will create sustained success. In turn this helps define highly tailored learning and development programmes right down to each individual.

But how do you establish an accurate measure of each person’s behaviours against the agreed criteria?

Most HR professionals favour either 360 degree feedback or an appraisal with competency assessment.

By receiving feedback from their peers, line managers, direct reports and themselves (i.e. self assessment) 360 degree feedback is certainly the most all-encompassing route.

However, as long as more traditional appraisal techniques are applied to a competency framework, both competency-based approaches will deliver accurate results.

Most important is that adopting this process enables you to identify very specific, individual learning and development needs. By doing it online, the data can also be aggregated in real time providing you with instant trends and development needs across key groups.

But what does this all deliver in terms of tangible improvements to your business performance?

High quality feedback fuels meaningful conversations between individuals and their line managers. High performers need this feedback as they want to know how they can align their behaviour to bring even more success.

In other words, all staff who have the determination to improve will enjoy pinpoint clarity as to how they can channel their behaviours to deliver improved business results.

Similarly highlighting, managing, and developing your weaker individuals in a targeted way is just as essential when creating a truly 'great team' during difficult economic times.

For line managers, it gives them a clear framework which is objective (and therefore not subject solely to their own opinion) and enables them to take an active interest in their employees’ careers.

And at a corporate HR level, the aggregated data will help with the deployment of correctly skilled resource during re-organisation, minimise the need for external recruitment with all the associated costs, and ensure limited training budgets are prioritised against clear organisational training needs.

The combination leads to highly targeted development, performance improvement and engaged talent, and a 'must have' for these potentially rocky times ahead.

Author: Brendan Walsh, Managing Director, Bowland solutions
www.bowlandsolutions.com