It is no longer news that the greatest assets an organization can ever have are the right mix of people, what is news now, is the ability to harness and effectively utilize these talents. It is one thing to have a pool of talent, and another to bring out the best out of the pool for the common good of the organization and its stakeholders.
Talent
management in both small and medium organization is source of concern
as either the boss becomes a mini dictator or doesn’t understand the
concept at all. The 21st century entrepreneurs that must be
successful should posses or imbibe a skill for finding the right people,
then motivating and managing them to achieve greater significant
results. The best way to achieve this is to come up with a simple but
effective system.
THE TALENT SYSTEM
A
business or organization needs a Talent System that is based on the key
principle that there are three elements to the expectations from staff.
These elements are:
Attitude
Skills
Responsibility
Attitude
is far more important than anything else. It has to do with honesty,
enthusiasm, friendliness, desire to learn and a host of others.
Skills
are what the people need to know, what they need to be good at, in
order to do their job effectively and efficiently. Examples of skills
may include: communication skills, networking, writing letters,
programming computers, data analyses, operating machines, driving a
vehicle and a host of others.
Responsibilities
are our expectations from them at different times and levels. For
instance it is the responsibility of a marketer to meet his/her
marketing target every month. This responsibility can only be carried
out effectively amidst the right attitude and with the right skills.
Talent
management all starts with attitude. If employees are recruited based
on their attitudes, then trained with the necessary skills to take on
responsibilities as there come, it will be a lot better and easier than
having employees with the right skills then trying to ensure they have
the right attitude afterwards. It can be frustrating. Imagine having a
staff with the right skills but very dishonest and fraudulent? It is
better to have one without the skills but honest, dedicated, and
upright. He can learn the skills on the job. Employees with the right
attitude will pick the required skills at a fast pace because the
attitude usually determines the altitude. But it will be
pretty difficult if not impossible to change one with terrible attitude.
As entrepreneurs, one of the most important signposts to watch out for
in all dealings is the attitude.
Your team and the future
Most
start-ups hardly imagine that there would be anyone other than them
handling the business, as such fail to do a holistic plan for the
future. It is honestly very easy to fall prey of never designing what
the company will look like in future. Some people just add one person
here, one person there, without recourse to planning. It would help most
businesses if at the early stage, the owners can develop the structure
of the kind of company they are building then work back from there to
how it should be now. Ie, designing your business in reverse – see the
end from the beginning.
You
could start by itemizing the responsibilities that will need to be
taken care of when the company eventually blossoms. The responsibility
list for the big picture might be:
· Manage existing customer accounts
· Identify and research new customers
· Approach new customers
· Win business from new customers
· Communicate with local press
· Communicate with shareholders
· Do newsletters
· Update the website
· Manage external supplies
· Recruit new talent
· Train talent
· Effective and efficient administration
· Invoicing
· Debt recovery
· Pay suppliers
· Plan finances
· Manage finances
· Prepare monthly management accounts
· Test products for quality
· Provide certain services
· The list is endless
It
is certainly not the case that each responsibility represents a
person’s job; it is just that it needs doing by somebody. Each employee
will of course be saddled with many responsibilities. It is then
important to allot these responsibilities according to groups as
represented in the company e.g marketing, production, finance, sales,
administration, support services etc. At least you have a rough
organi9zational chart for the future with all the tasks broken down to
the various groups. Copy onto a sheet of paper to keep and make
reference to.
The present team
The next step in this system is to repeat the exercise above only this time to fit the current organizational circumstances.
Go
through the list allotted each department, unit or group and begin to
remove the tasks that are not currently needed in the business. Once
that is done, you would be left with responsibilities that need to be
fulfilled now.
The Talent cake
As
a result of the way some start-ups commence their business, they usual
do not see the need to put in place a formal system to define jobs and
assess the performance of employees. Honestly it is not everybody that
can handle freedom as such people need to be guided and controlled. The
only way to do this effectively in a company is by setting up a simple
system to outline expectations and requirements. To get a good system,
you have to look out for one that will strike the balance between
simplicity and effectiveness, and avoid creating boring, complicated
paperwork. Let’s consider the talent cake system.
Picture the Talent Cake
The
talent cake is three layers stacked one above the other, getting
smaller as they go up. Usually drawn on one side of the paper, it is
everything need to define the employee’s job and make your assessments.
Each cake is divided into slices, with each slice representing one part
of the layer.
As stated earlier, the expectations from your employees re based on these three factors:
Attitude
Skills
Responsibilities
Attitude,
is the bottom cake, the base on which everything is built. If their
attitude is poor, then their output will be dissatisfying. Likely
attitudes for team work include:
Honesty
Enthusiasm
Helpfulness
Keenness to learn etc
Divide
the layer of attitude into slices of qualities you expect from your
team. The quality of attitude should be such that fit into your company
attitude generally.
With
skills, you identify the range of abilities you expect the team to
display during the course of duties. Skills can be learned, so the team
members can grow their skills as they are in the organization. The range
of expectations could include: Proficiency in the use of MS-Word, Corel
draw, power point presentations, data base management, concept
development, etc.
Responsibilities
are on top of the cake, which rests upon Attitude and Skills, because
being able to meet their responsibilities depends entirely on the other
two. Responsibilities are particular tasks and assignments or
expectations of work. This layer might include: meet monthly marketing
target of N2, 000,000.00, produce xyz quantity of goods every two weeks,
increase profit by 20% every quarter, etc.
