2023-06-01 17:11:00
The attraction, retention and development of talent has become a competitive advantage. Entrepreneurs have a task in this field.
In this Spanish group they recently appointed a family member as CEO of their largest company. This young entrepreneur knows the market very well and has a keen business vision.. Maybe he needs to grow a little more as a leader. His organization is evolving, his executives are now of a higher caliber, and he wants to transform his culture.
In a meeting recently we discussed your talent needs. I asked him: “How much time do you spend a month in meetings with your managers to discuss issues of personal growth?” He answered me: “Issues about what? I don’t spend a minute on that.”
I remember another businessman who, when I asked him that question, told me that he thought that was a waste of time. That “it was not work.”
In general, we have 6 major ways to detect the talents of our people, or of our talented people. I describe them.
Knowing the people. We can only do this if we get closer, if we talk with them about their challenges and shortcomings, their strengths and achievements, their concerns and desires.. How can we get to know them if we don’t deal with them, if all the time we only talk about issues related to their work?
This pathway focuses on our ability to observe and the time we dedicate to people away from the operation.
delegating. The assignment of increasingly complex and challenging responsibilities is the most effective growth path for executives. This also requires observation, but in this option we focus on noticing if the person develops new abilities when facing more demanding tasks.
There are collaborators who assume these new responsibilities slowly, while there are others who do it with great agility. It’s up to us to monitor their progress.
recommendations. A very common way is to take into account the references that a manager brings, whether they come from other institutions or acquaintances, or from executives of our own company.
It is common for us to give a lot of weight to what we are told about a candidate or an employee. Sometimes we do not validate the recommendations that they make us, and we accept what they tell us about the person as good.
Record. The background of a manager is perhaps what we take into account the most at the beginning of the talent evaluation process. The resume is probably the most common tool in the field of personnel management. Of course, it can be very useful for us to know the trajectory of a person, their family, their studies, their experience, their achievements.
But we must be careful in making our judgments on these grounds. Crafting CVs that present the image a manager wants to project has become an increasingly widespread art today. There are many resources available to make masterpieces in this field and it behooves us to be careful when validating the information they present.
psychometric studies. The instruments for measuring skills and personality today are capable of detecting an infinite number of personal characteristics in detail. There are so many that we have to clearly define the non-negotiable traits that we are looking for, in order to choose very well the tools that we are going to take into account.
Assessment Centers. The assessment centers consist of a series of exercises and simulations designed to measure the qualities of executives in key positions. They include a variety of methods and take hours of testing in which candidates are put through various situations where they have to demonstrate their skills in decision making, teamwork, communication, and more.
Identifying and developing talent has become a competitive advantage. Companies that excel at these practices learn faster, are more agile, and grow more easily. In my experience, all of them serve and contribute to the process, but when we talk about the development of our key people, personal treatment is an irreplaceable path.
Entrepreneurs need to give real importance to this task of discovering talent, and we have to dedicate quality time to it and observe our closest collaborators as the main way of their development in our organization.
Carlos A. Dumois is President and
Founding Partner of CEDEM.
#discover #talents