Think of a system and what comes to mind?
Hopefully some form of activity, pursuit or device with several component parts but where they are complementary and, when operating correctly, work together in order to achieve a desired outcome.
Countries have economic systems or legal or governance or education systems.
Organisations should be one big system of people and processes working together to achieve a vision and strategy and plan. But get beneath that level and systems are trickier to see, especially within the so- called softer skills.
Units within organisations, however, do have functions and ideally these functions or disciplines should work together to operate their system in pursuit of their strategy and plan. Comms and HR should be no different but often are. Why? Well, it’s partly because what they do is harder to measure and manage and partly because of the people they employ who, let’s be honest, like to hold onto notions of intuition, gut and art and resist process management and the science of their functions. Be honest, they do! Sadly, in a world of KPIs, agile and continuous improvement, this makes projects based on the people functions harder to lead and manage using tangible data.
Talent Management is a case in point. Some view it as a skill. Others delegate it to specialists. Some devolve or outsource it. But few take responsibility for it as a system. So it remains elusive, inefficient and a source of much malcontent.
Our Mosaic model of Talent Management suggests that there are seven fundamental steps or stages or components in any Talent Management system. None are rocket science, yet fail to address any of them or take your eye off one in favour of another and…the system fails leading to disengagement and employee churn with the best ones leaving first. But take a comprehensive strategy with a few punchy goals in each area and ensure that a single team owns them all and it can be one of the most powerful systems in the HR space, especially in devolved structures where HR reps live on and at the front line.
You may think of yourself as a “Compensation and Benefits” specialist or you may have “Learning and Development” experts within the HR team.
Unless you have covered at least these seven bases, however and more importantly have a systemic approach underway at line manager level, there will be fundamental failings across the employee life-cycle and that will eventually lead to culture, engagement and performance problems. It’s like having a great sales force but awful marketing. Lots of creative energy wasted because nobody is priming the talent pump at the right time.
If you would like to know more about this model or our approach to systemic talent management, we’ll be glad to share case studies. Or why not sign up to one of our masterclasses or even a coaching course?
However you decide to address your talent management challenges, we hope that you’ve found the last five minutes……… or so thinking through the issues, with us (via this and our other blogs) a useful investment of your time…
Until next time…..
Kate and the Mosaic team.