Focus on Your Desired Business Outcomes for Success

Focus on Your Desired Business Outcomes for Success

The driving philosophy behind DDI’s approach to talent management is quite simple: It must begin with the end in mind. Specifically, effective talent management must be relentlessly focused on your organizations’ desired business outcomes. This differs from past views of talent management in that traditional approaches to talent selection and development focused on worthy, but HR-centric goals such as building a leadership bench, training and developing managers, or selecting the right people for the right job at the right time. Often these practices were functionally siloed, regionally fragmented and stood apart from other business practices and financial metrics.

To ensure perceived (and real) relevance for contemporary talent management practices, the shared lexicon in many organizations needs to shift dramatically. Everyone engaged in developing and implementing talent strategies must start by thinking as a Board, a CEO, or an owner of the organization. Walking in their shoes quickly reveals that their priorities, which can include such strategic priorities as driving revenue growth, penetrating new markets, horizontal integration, and driving cost efficiencies, have a decidedly different, business-oriented ring. Thus, DDI’s talent management approach zeros in on four bottom-line concerns of these stakeholders:
The business landscape in which the organization is operating: Among the business landscape issues that are front of mind for key stakeholders: shifting market/ consumer demands, new competitive challenges, economic realities and uncertainty, global complexity, as well as the internal stresses within their organization. And most important, how these will influence the imperatives for leaders throughout the organization.
The talent needed to win: Key stakeholders are aware, as we discussed earlier, that it is human beings—talent—that will make or break their organizations. The question is: What kind of talent, in which key positions, and how much of it is needed?
The game plan to make it happen: The specific processes and activities that will ensure the organization has a sufficient quantity and quality of talent ready and able to step up to new business challenges and opportunities.
An insurance policy to sustain execution of the game plan. Key stakeholders recognize that the key to competitive differentiation, even basic survival, is not strategy, but the ability to get it done— to execute—day after day. the successful management of talent.

Talent management has never been more of an immediate concern than it is right now. But in the rush to fill a perceived talent management void, organizations must be careful not to rush into implementing initiatives or programs that are more about taking action than about implementing a well-crafted solution.

Careful planning, culminating in a sound talent strategy that is tightly connected to the organization’s overall business strategies and business needs, is required for talent management to become ingrained in an organization’s culture and practices. Only when this happens is it possible for talent management to be both effective and sustainable.