• Level Insight 3: Position your top talent for the upturn…and strengthen your successor pool at the same time

    Now more than ever the identification and nurturing of top talent are critical for organisations to ready themselves to take advantage of the upturn.  Leveraging the strengths of your top performers, ensuring that all of their motivation, commitment, creativity and most of all, hard graft, are fully focused on the delivery of the pivotal elements of your business strategy is central to driving growth.  It is also central to the creation of a strong bench from which to select successors for your most important senior roles.   The importance of growing your own leaders was highlighted in a recent Harvard Business Review article which reported the results of a study of the best performing CEOs in the world[i].  The long-standing debate of whether insiders or outsiders make the best CEOs was one of many areas addressed by the article.  In the analysis of almost 2,000 CEOs, the study determined that insiders tend to perform better, ranking 57 places higher on average that outsiders on the full list.  Quite compelling food for thought when it comes to how strong your successor list currently is or is not.

    The following are 3 key steps for positioning your top talent in the best way and creating a strong bench of successors:

    1.    Classify your talent

    The first step to getting the most out of your top talent and creating a strong pool of successors is getting to know who you are working with – what does your talent pool look like.  Classifying your talent pool into categories of performance and potential allows you to identify your high-potential population, i.e. those people who have demonstrated high performance and have also shown potential to grow and take on bigger roles.  A great instrument we have found is the use of the ‘9-box’ in matching performance and potential.

    2.    Groom your high-potentials for future leadership positions

    Once you have identified your high-potential pool, you need to nurture their development and growth using a tailored and supported process.  One of the most important elements of any such process is ensuring that you have a clear view of where the business is going and a solid framework of the competencies and values that will need to be displayed in any future leadership positions. A future-focused assessment for development programme is a particularly useful process for this.  The main aim is to effectively benchmark your high-potentials in order to deliver the following:

    • Individual and group profiles of areas of strength and areas for development against the leadership framework – this will enable the execution of tailored individual development plans.
    • A gap and risk analysis of areas that you may need to deliver specifically focused development programmes for, or indeed that you may need to backfill for future successes.
    • An overview of your options for mobilising your talent across your business and the readiness of the people in your high-potential pool to take on bigger roles.

    3.    Mobilise and align your talent along the way

    People, especially high-potential people, learn best from challenges they experience along the way.  So, don’t wait until someone has reached superior performance in all areas of the leadership framework before mobilising or promoting them.  The best development programmes are those that integrate learning and individual development plans with everyday challenges and opportunities that exist in the business.  You should identify key projects and initiatives that will help achieve your business strategy and align each high-potential’s individual development plan accordingly.  Working on exciting and relevant projects/initiatives with the support of a senior leader/coach will enable you to mobilise your talent quickly – you will get more out of them as they grow and develop into future leaders and your business and your talent will be poised and ready to take advantage of the upturn.

    [i] Hansen, Morten T., Ibarra, H and Peyer, U.  (2010).  The Best Performing CEOs in the World.  Harvard Business Review, January – February 2010.