Are You Missing Key Capabilities When Assessing Talent ?

Many companies today have adopted Session C, GE's rigorous performance management process that includes a "nine block" for ranking employee performance and a "bottom 10" for getting rid of talent that fell in the bottom 10 percent of the nine block.

What may be missing from this equation is a talent strategy called "4D" - which was developed by NexGen Advisors and includes four dimensions - that is critical to the future of any business and talent management process.

Implementing the following steps can help a company identify not only employees who will be future leaders, but also employees who may not be future leaders but are nonetheless integral to driving growth and allowing the business to operate efficiently.

High potentials and these employees are very different, so managers should think twice before using a standard nine block that may not give them the full picture of the company's human capital strengths and weaknesses.

1. Performance:
This piece of the equation is usually weighted the most and has the most focus. It is simply: How did the employee perform against goals and objectives? It's rather straightforward and represents the "current" state of an employee's performance. The key here is to see consistent performance year over year.

2. Promotability:
The "future" aspect of the equation is the promotability factor. If the employee has consistent performance year over year and exhibits the competencies the company has identified as critical to the business, then the employee has a high chance of being promoted or moving up the career path. A big mistake companies make is to only have one career path, which leads to managing people. Companies must have a career path for experts (technical, scientific, engineering, etc.) in order to have a promotability factor that does not include managing people. Not all employees are good at managing, but they may be highly proficient at their discipline.

3. Growth:
In today's economy, one of the most important skill sets is the ability to grow a business. As revenues plummet and margins compress, companies need to look at ways to grow the top line. Whether operationally, by reducing costs to increase profit, through innovation of products and services or through expanding in new markets and regions, growth is the name of the game. Companies that excel at this will ultimately win over competitors.

4. Risk:
The other side of the equation is risk. Most people are aware of how crucial it is to assess financial risk when managing a company, but how many understand it's a crucial ingredient when assessing talent? Another factor to consider is the loss of legacy knowledge when long-tenured employees are laid off. Unless a company has a knowledge management database, they lose this valuable knowledge forever, which in turn can hurt productivity and business continuity. It's often easy to understand the impact to a business when it loses a strong leader, but the risk of losing a plant manager can also have a similar impact.

Compiled by; Hemant Gade
Hemant@JobsEnsure.com
http://www.jobsensure.com

[About the Author: Carla Zilka is the founder and principal advisor of NexGen Advisors LLC, an advisory firm specializing in business restructuring, talent management, organizational efficiency and business process improvement. She was a former vice president of HR at GE.]