We are now starting Module 3, building a high-performance team. This first lesson is going to be on talent management and developing organizational talent. The question is, why is this the first leadership topic we are discussing? I've set the stage, we've identified your strengths, your personality type, began to explore what the impact is on other individuals. We've talked about organizational structures and how leadership and strategy fit into that. But talent management is really the first skill that all good leaders need to embrace as job one because quite frankly, you are nothing without a team supporting you. You can't accomplish your goals, you can't accomplish what the organization needs you to do without the very best team underneath you. The question is, whose responsibility is it to put that team together, and then help develop their talents, and make sure that they have what they need to go above and beyond just giving you a day's work in a day, but giving you their discretionary effort and attention? That is golden. Talent management is job one for any leader. It has to be. It gives you a competitive advantage, but it requires an entire life cycle of attention. It's recruiting the right people, it's retaining them once you bring them into the organization, it's keeping them excited and motivated, and it's developing their next set of talents and strengths so they can move on. Given that, what do you think a leader's role is versus human resources? In most organizations, human resources owns the recruiting and the hiring process, and that is perfectly acceptable. Yet how do they know who to hire, where to recruit from? A leader in thinking about the strategy that they are trying to execute, needs a certain skill set, or many skill sets to accomplish those goals. This strategy is not just for next week or next month, but it is for next year and it's to grow the business over years. There's going to be critical skills required, and they're probably going to be aligned with emerging technologies. They also are probably going to be the most competitive skill set that you can hire because most other organizations within your market sphere are trying to hire those same individuals. Just assuming that your human resources department is going to know where to recruit these people, how to recruit them, and then how to hire them, is abdicating your responsibility as a leader in executing your strategy. You need to think about those skills and those individuals that are going to create and add value disproportionately from the rest of the team. They're going to be some critical skills, some innovators, some technology developers that are going to be game-changing. It's your job to go out and figure out how to find them, recruit them, and hire them. Not only that, as a leader, you must excite and motivate the team below you and the leaders below you to being accountable to do their own recruiting, development, engagement, and retaining that talent. It takes a long view. This is not about just filling a req. This is about understanding what your team needs to create value for the long run now and in five years. Let's start with recruiting. It starts with thinking about a pipeline, both internally and externally. These critical skills, these important individuals, are going to create value for your team or the organization. They exist internally, yet they may not have reached their full potential yet. However, with a little bit of development and a little bit of coaching, you can take an internal candidate and make them a star, as well as going outside into the marketplace. Looking for recent college graduates, looking for others within professional societies that are writing papers on the subjects that are of interest to you and will create value for you in the future. It is up to you to really scour the entire environment for trying to find these critical skills, because remember it is a competitive advantage. The other thing is, you need to have a consistent process that is thorough on how you evaluate them. You are going to run across many resumes. How do you go about finding those diamonds in the stack of hay in front of you. You need to, first of all, know the roles are going to add the most value and begin to look for critical talent in those roles. You have to look beyond the resume. You ought to have the courage to select someone different than potentially the last person that held a job similar to that. We always hire an electrical engineer for this job. I don t think we can not hire electrical engineer yet a resume will cross your path and you begin to look at the experiences, the learning agility of this individual, how they've gone out and created value for the organizations that they've worked for. All of a sudden you see something different, and you think boy, wouldn't adding this individual with these talents and strengths brings so much more to this organization. Who are you overlooking? What part of the job description is not including a valuable part of the population. It can't just be education and it cannot just be their last job. It has to be the entire set of experiences, education, skills that an individual brings. You have to look at the environment that your team has created and look for fit. Let's say you have two or three resumes in front of you, and you're thinking about how do I make a selection, these all look so good. You want the great one above everything else. I've said this before. Look for learning agility. Look for signs of a learning agility. Look for places where they've gone above and beyond to learn something different to solve a problem. You may have to tease this out during an interview. You might not be able to find it in a resume. You're going to have some really good resumes. You want that great candidate. Have them show you their learning agility. Recruit ahead of the plan, ahead of the curve. Know what you're going to need to execute your strategy if you're trying to enter a new market, if you're trying to supplant competitor, if you're trying to create something brand new, who are you going to need and have a five-year plan for that talent. Then finally, do you have the right EVP, employee value proposition, which is the mixture of the characteristics of the organization and the culture, the benefits that you offer well above just pay. That may be a hybrid work schedule. Other benefits that you have within your organization and ways of working as far as collaboration and teamwork. Do you have the right EVP, employee value proposition that gives you a leg up in trying to hire this critical talent? I love this quote, the employer generally gets the employees they deserve. Those that don't work very hard at hiring the best, will not get the best. Then we'll have to work through not having the very best talent, which is why this is your job as a leader. You need to build your team whether or not you inherited it because you've been moved into a position where a team exists, there's always going to be openings. You are going to have a strategy in which you're not going to have exactly the right people at this moment. Who would you add and why? It is your job. It's not human resources' job. Human resources' job owns the process of recruiting and hiring, but you are responsible for finding the places where you can go get the right talent. Let's talk about talent development. Now that you've hired this terrific team, highly skilled, motivated, how do you continue to keep them and develop them? It has to be an organizational imperative talent development and it is absolutely crucial to retention and engagement of your workforce. You have to have more than one way to develop your team because they're all going to require something a little different to move them along in their career. You as the manager, you as a leader of a team, and the leaders below you, need to stay alert for stretch assignments within your team and outside of your team. How can you begin to develop your talent by giving them opportunities in other places to expand their exposure and their domain. Another way of talent development is thinking about who is going to succeed you as the next leader of your organization, who is going to succeed the leaders below you when they move on. It shouldn't just be one person. It ought to be a group of individuals that you think have the potential, yet may be missing one or two pieces, one or two experiences, need one or two more years within a given team to show some of their leadership traits. But look at a group of people that have the potential to be the leader that you are today an then assess them. Are they ready now? Are they ready maybe after one more targeted assignment that gives them this very specific experience or maybe two years and two more assignments of experienced needed? Then put together a plan that gives them the opportunity to get those experiences in those skills so that when the time comes, they will be considered for leadership. Know who your team is, know what they want. There will be some that don't want to be in leadership. They want to continue to expand in a technical area and maybe be the very best in the organization at that critical skill. That is a wonderful thing to know and there are certain things you can do to help them develop that. If they want to be leaders in the organization, then broadening their experiences and their exposures is going to be imperative. Performance management. This is an interesting topic. Every organization does it differently. But at some level, every organization has a way of assessing the performance of their workforce. In the best possible sense, this performance management system is linking what the company has as goals to an individual's performance. Theoretically, this getting feedback and internalizing that feedback should improve business performance. But it's all in the delivery, all-in how that individual receives that feedback and how the leader provides that feedback. Let's go back to LTO and that matrix structure. It's an interesting structure because it has to responsible elements for, let's say, any one job. Let's take an electrical engineering job. This electrical engineer is working on your program, you're the P&L leader, working on your program, working on your product. Yet he is resourced from the functional electrical engineering department. When performance begins to lag, the question is, is it the program's problem or the functional department's program? Who owns the responsibility to ensure that individual understands where they may be dropping the ball and what they can do to improve? When there's no communication in a matrix organization that poor individual may never know because either side of that equation may assume that the other one is giving that feedback or the other one believes that the other one should be giving that feedback. Most times, the performance management system is connected to compensation and you'll hear it defined as paying for performance. But what does that mean? Does that mean that you rank all of your team from one to n, and you give the top 10 percent a larger raise and you give the bottom 10 percent no raise at all. How do you go about paying for performance? From an employee's point of view, a fair process means so much more than some forced ranking. Needs to be both backward-looking and forward-looking. When you get feedback in this performance management system, you should never be surprised. I think that's the hallmark of a great leader, giving feedback more than one time a year. A leader needs to give feedback to their team as they see great things happening, and as they see things that may be need to be improved. But they do it in the moment, they coach in the moment, they mentor in the moment and it is not a surprise to the individual, let's say at the end of the year that they hear a little bit about a scenario and maybe where they've improved. But what a shame all the way to the end of the year and have a surprise conversation with someone that you work so hard to hire and retain and then you tell them long after the fact areas where they should improve. Going back to talent management and really talent development, there is one tool that stands out far and above any other in my mind, and that's the 70-20-10 development approach. Seventy percent of this approach is informal on-the-job training. You're either mentoring other under expert in the field that you may want to eventually be in, you may be given a stretch assignment where you have other responsibilities above and beyond those of your normal job, and you're being coached by an expert in that field but you're getting real hands-on experience. That has been shown that, that is the very best way to begin to expand how you think about things, as well as learn new skills. Twenty percent of this development approach is feedback coaching and mentoring by your leader. Answering questions, observing situations, providing feedback on performance and where you can improve. Just having honest open conversations about what is next, what will it take to take you to the next position with your leader is about 20 percent of that development process. Finally, 10 percent is formal education. Think of that as training classes where you either take them online or you go somewhere. It might be because you're learning maybe a new piece of hardware. You're learning a new software development tool and you need to gain this skill in formal education way. But the best attempt at success is on-the-job training and that takes so many different forms. But it takes an organization that is willing to put in the effort to find those opportunities and understand it is in the best interests of the entire organization to continue to develop our talent and find ways to help them develop in their careers. After this lesson, please watch the video on the 70-20-10 Feldman approach. Thank you.
