We Don’t Develop Our Talent!

We Don’t Develop Our Talent!

What organization or its leaders would express such a people strategy? Talent development strategies are sometimes communicated this time of year when annual performance and talent reviews are conducted in many organizations. Most companies express a commitment to developing people as essential to building employee engagement, securing a competitive workforce, and growing a pipeline of future leaders. Investing time in talent strategy meetings, management processes, and tracking systems are evidence of this commitment. Yet, the intention to develop people and the actions taken by leaders don’t always line up. While few, if any, leaders would purposely not develop people, any number of actions will adversely affect the impact of talent development strategies. These breakdowns in developing people happen when, as leaders, we…

• Limit conversation about development to once a year, typically in conjunction with an annual performance review.
• Avoid  challenging people. We know they have a lot on the plate already, so let’s make the development goal a “slam-dunk” success.
• Don’t hold people accountable. Everyone knows job results come first. Missing a development goal because of other business priorities is not a problem.
• Send an employee off to a course and never follow-up by asking, “How can you apply what you learned?” (And mean it!).
• Dismiss your own development because you are too busy; don’t want to take scarce budget resources or admit you have areas for development yourself.
• Pull people out of internal development programs because a fire needs to be put out.
• Postpone development initiatives because other priorities are more important (year after year).
• Don’t connect development to your business context.
• Micro-manage to the point where the development plan is yours not theirs.
• Don’t  differentiate talent –one size fits all development. Everyone should get an equal share of development resources –regardless of performance or potential.

It is putting together the day-to-day actions of leaders that ultimately translate talent development strategies into reality. Great leaders are always focused on developing talent.