Aligning your people with your talent strategy

How do you get your business, and your employees, on board with your talent management strategy? Here’s how you align talent management with your business goals, and get buy-in from your internal stakeholders.

Companies that align talent with business strategy outperform others by 16%, retain 30% more top performers, and see 34% higher employee performance. Bearing this in mind, as well as new technologies and ways of thinking being popularised in the industry (see our article on Agile HR), it’s no wonder there is renewed urgency for HR leaders to refresh their talent strategy. With the current best practice in HR being to align HR processes with wider organisational goals, aligning your talent strategy in this way is not only recommended, we’d argue, it is essential.

Let’s explore how HR professionals can align people and business strategy with talent.

Building the foundations for success

To align both your people and your business, the first step you need to take is designing a framework for your company’s practical and measurable talent management activities. The foundations of which should be a custom competency model, built around your business’ needs.

In it, your competency model should be:

• Behaviourally anchored
• Focused on the ‘how’
• Be both observable and measurable (think about those SMART objectives)
• Reflect your organisational culture and values
• Directed towards the future of your business
• Clear
• Designed to be integrated into your HR processes

At this stage, it’s all about setting out what success looks like at various levels across your business.

Understanding your talent in context

The most crucial step here is to understand that every organisation is unique – no matter what your competitors or peers are doing, and how successful they are. Some external research will get you so far, but in reality, this needs to come from knowledge of your organisation rather than copying someone else’s method.

Therefore you need to sit down with your leadership team and understand their high-level approach to talent management and strategy. It’s also where you need to involve your HR and People Management teams, as this is the first opportunity where misalignment can occur.

You need to know, from management:

• How do they want to manage performance?
• How do you differentiate between high, middle and low performance?
• How transparent do you want your organisation to be?
• How will people be held accountable for delivering against these talent KPIs?

The next step is to conduct a context mapping workshop, where you can begin to understand the context of alignment within your business. By conducting this workshop, you’ll get the data to:

• Identify risk priorities and opportunity areas within your business
• Support both budget setting and allocation
• Help inform talent acquisition strategies
• Inform learning and development initiatives
• Inform succession planning

Doing this means you come out of the meeting with a unified, company-wide perspective that will help inform everything you do in the future.

Enhancing productivity and developing leaders

You can use what you’ve learned in your conversations and your framework to enhance your businesses productivity further. So once the internal analysis is done, you can then apply these learnings to your organisation by sharing what you’ve learnt and adapting your processes.

You’ll also have the opportunity to develop your internal leaders in four distinct areas, including talent acquisition, learning and development initiatives, promotions and succession planning. So you’ll have the ability to contribute towards these four areas:

Talent acquisition

• Support early-year talent
• Ensure experienced senior hiring
• Develop your company’s onboarding process

Learning and development initiatives

• Align your business with strength, and become aware of potential risk areas
• Create personalised learning journeys for your staff
• Deliver the potential of your team at pace to your business

Promotions

• Discover if the people in your business are ready/not ready for promotions
• Understand if you need to take a developmental approach

Succession planning

• Identify critical roles across your organisation
• Identify potential successors
• Develop appropriate development plans

Talking about the implications, James explained that all of this is driven by the availability of compelling data. Because of it, you now have data that can be used across the entire management cycle.

Using insight to unlock potential

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘knowledge is power’. The cumulative output of everything we’ve done is having the ability and insight to unlock your staff’s potential within your business. Ultimately, the data aligned to the framework is equal to giving you a measurable return on investment.

You can use the following insight methods to help unlock the potential of your team:

• 360 Feedback
• Surveys
• Productivity levels
• Promotion rates
• Retention levels

(Note you might need some good HR Software to discover these insights.)

Through the insights you gain, you’ll then have the ability to unlock the potential through the following business approaches:

• The talent management cycle
• Learning and development
• High potential staff identification
• Promotion planning
• Succession planning

Want to learn more?

Check out our article on developing a talent strategy for more on this topic.

Are you looking for HR Software that will help you align your talent strategy and other HR processes with your business goals? Then go to our HR Software page to learn more.