Talent Management - Tell Me About Me

- Narendra Patil Talent managers should emphasize the importance of employees receiving social feedback from co- workers, coaches, mentors and others to uncover hidden talents. Employees ping, tweet, post, “like,” chat and share every day. Although they can pick their social media outlet, be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or the like, they are part of a culture in which social networking sites are ubiquitous. Because of this trend, organizations spanning all industries are examining how these tools can be used to solve real business problems. Specifically, the idea of social business is spilling into HR departments, opening the door for a more collaborative approach to the way talent managers work. To illustrate how a social networking mindset can be effective in talent management, consider the following example. In 2002, the Oakland Athletics (A’s), with an approximate payroll of $40 million, were competitive in the American League with larger market teams such as the New York Yankees, who spent more than $126 million in payroll that season. Despite the A’s lower budget, they were able to grab key players who helped the team finish first in the American League with 103 wins. How the A’s pulled this off highlights a valuable lesson for the HR industry. The team was able to spot players undervalued by the market and unleash their skills for the team’s benefit, a skill missing from many HR departments. More often than not, professional sports scouts have clear visibility and insights into their organizational talent as well as the development trajectory of key players. This has much to do with the fact that those within professional sports constantly receive social feedback through coaching and mentoring, and actively network within the baseball ecosystem. Corporate talent managers can learn from their professional sports counterparts and take steps to gain visibility, uncover hidden talent and develop undervalued assets by developing the organization’s information brokers and key talent, and give business executives a sustainable competitive advantage. Relying solely on traditional talent metrics and performance management data is not sufficient to promote employee success. Instead, talent leaders should emphasize the importance of receiving social feedback from co-workers, coaches, mentors and others to uncover unique characteristics and hidden talents. Managers can then gather additional information about the employee, and combine performance management data with word-of-mouth information. For instance, talent managers can start looking at social feedback such as how connected, respected and influential an employee is in the business network to identify additional strengths or areas that require development or correction. Social feedback from an individual’s network benefits both employees and their managers. The HR team’s ability to uncover and refine undervalued and hidden talent, create a high-performance culture, fast-track high potentials and develop leaders in line with a company’s growth agenda has a direct impact on competitive agility and the success of their businesses. All information can be used to make important talent decisions about an employee related to areas such as hiring, firing and promotions. For example, instead of relying solely on annual or biannual performance reviews, organizations should look to implement a social networking infrastructure that enables them to gather social feedback about an individual’s performance year-round. Having each piece of information add a different nuance to the evaluation process can help teams develop more effective employees. As talent managers examine their increasingly global, connected, mobile and multi-generational workforce, considering different sources of social data can help them identify how social networking might play a greater role in aligning, nurturing and engaging top talent. Social Capability and HR Process Social feedback is just one example of how social networking is transforming the way we work. Many of the core HR processes, including performance reviews, goal alignment, succession planning and compensation management, can be transformed to achieve greater business results. For example, most companies are still stuck in the habit of using traditional annual report cards. UCLA professor Samuel Culbert wrote in The Wall Street Journal that organizations should “Get rid of the performance review! It destroys morale, kills teamwork and hurts the bottom line.” Culbert goes on to say the traditional performance review is “a one-side-accountable, boss-administered review *that+ is little more than a dysfunctional pretense.” Many employees agree. They feel a once-a-year performance feedback comes too late and doesn’t serve a purpose in correcting behavior or aiding in development. Further, employees often think appraisals rely too much on a manager’s memory, thus ratings are often based on only the most recent events. Since the review feedback comes directly from senior managers within the organization, the review does not fully capture all the work employees have performed with cross- functional teams, for instance. This can lead employees to view the annual performance review in the same way they did annual report cards from their grade school years — as something to be dreaded. As a result, the organization is left with disengaged, possibly disgruntled employees and a costly misalignment of resources and business objectives. Social performance management can eliminate many of these pain points by leveraging social networking to increase user adoption and frequency of use to help deliver the ROI from the solutions. In this approach, an organization uses social performance tools to examine employees and their connections to the internal social networking community. For example, by looking at how much an employee comments, rates and tags items, how many people “follow” that employee, and how active the employee is in the community, managers can find the key information brokers within an organization. These information brokers can then be placed in coaching and mentoring roles, allowing the organization to benefit from their natural skill. As coaches or mentors, these individuals can lend commentary and feedback to employees within the organization through a social layer as well in a traditional, in-person fashion. Too often, an employee only receives direct feedback from a handful of people. The mentoring and coaching available through the social performance approach builds a high-performance culture where everyone’s feedback counts, not only that from a direct manager. Continuous and honest feedback from the entire business network allows managers to immediately recognize valuable contributions to the organization and coach the team members to improve performance and achieve rapid alignment. This helps managers foster ongoing, constructive feedback and timely actionable coaching so employees can improve their performance more quickly. Essentially, social performance management captures the 360-degree feedback that happens every day instead of completing a random, formal process with a few chosen co-workers. With this constant feedback, management can more easily ascertain whether employee performance is aligned with business goals and can more swiftly make necessary changes to ensure business objectives are being achieved. Gaining Talent Insight Talent managers know ongoing dialogue between a manager and an employee helps the employee understand the direction for his or her work, which can drive engagement. The continuous feedback fostered in the social performance approach eliminates any surprises from the annual review. It could even eliminate the annual review or change its format to something more valuable. Continuous reviews and feedback are fairer and more actionable. Employees feel empowered since managers are not just communicating bad news, but instead are demonstrating a clear interest in improving performance by offering actionable coaching and connections to experts and mentors. To create bench strength for critical positions, talent managers must gain insight into their organization’s talent. It’s critical to identify gaps in the talent pool. By leveraging the enterprise social network, managers can uncover talent within the company that is not apparent on a resume or in a job description and gain visibility into the capabilities missing from their organization that must be filled. Apart from domain knowledge and functional expertise, the know-how and connections from key stakeholders play a critical role in new employees’ success. Forming support networks of employees who can attend new-hire training programs together, and lean on each other to help navigate within the organization, is playing an increasingly more critical role in faster on-boarding. Further, social networking allows new hires to connect with the right stakeholders, experts and mentors to leverage the power of community and rapidly build competencies and tacit knowledge needed for success in their new jobs.