To be an effective leader requires developing talent management skills.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Harvard Business Review” (ID: hbrchinese) , author Thomas • Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Jonathan Kirschner.
Good managers are usually experts in their field. They have excellent past performance and want to play the role of responsible person. But to be effective leaders, they need to develop another skill that is often overlooked: talent management.
Managers must be able to discover talent from inside and outside before others, and release talent potential. Not only can they find the best employees in each position, but they can also find the best roles for each employee. This ability is first-rate for management. Your team matters. In short, good managers are also good talent brokers.
However, being a good talent broker is not easy, and requires us to be more open as leaders, and to abandon the recruitment strategy that is popular but actually outdated. Too many of us always look for talents in the same or even in the wrong direction, or follow popular concepts and judge the “best candidate” based on “best cultural fit”. These approaches undermine efforts to promote diversity and cognitive diversity, and will ultimately hinder innovation and creativity.
Although there is no “best” way to recruit people, there are certainly better ways than we have relied on in the past. Based on a careful study of the differences between good and relatively inferior managers, my colleagues and I make the following seven science-based recommendations to help you optimize your recruitment strategy and develop your talent management skills.
Long-term vision
Interestingly, during the interview, many candidates are often asked what their professional ambitions and five-year plans are, but few managers ask themselves what their five-year talent strategy is. Most leaders know who they are looking for now, but few will wonder if new hires have the skills that fit their long-term development strategy.
If your goals are clear, focus on those who have the skills, abilities, and expertise that match your long-term development plan in your recruitment process. Not youExisting employees will stay. You must balance both short-term goals and long-term development.
Focus on key traits
When doing competency assessment, managers often fall into two big misunderstandings: over-emphasis on employees ‘past performance (even if the evaluation indicators lack reliability), and over-emphasis on employees’ resumes, “hard” skills and technical expertise. According to the World Economic Forum’s forecast, about 65 percent of job types will disappear in 15 years.
This means that leaders should not place too much emphasis on the current education curriculum, as these courses are designed for current rather than future work. Although we may not be able to guess what these future jobs will be, it is clear that if we have certain soft skills, such as emotional intelligence, self-driving and learning abilities, we will be more likely to be competent for future jobs. These are the basic qualities needed to acquire new knowledge and skills. With the rise of AI, the basic traits of these talents may become even more important.
“First inside then outside”
Many companies still choose external recruitment when they can find better candidates internally. Scientific reviews indicate that compared to internal employees, external hires will take longer to adapt, their voluntary and involuntary turnover rates are higher, and their pay is generally higher. The “inside then outside” approach is more valuable. Internal employees have a stronger adaptability and success rate, they understand the company culture, organizational structure and behavior, and have higher loyalty. In addition, the promotion of internal staff also helps increase the investment of other staff.
Inclusive thinking
Managers tend to hire employees similar to themselves. This approach undermines the company’s diversity and hinders team performance. When hiring someone like us reduces the likelihood of creating teams with complementary skills and different backgrounds. The only way to think inclusively is to embrace people who are different from you and your existing team.
We even suggest that you boldly step out of the box and accept those who challenge their existing status. The engine of progress is change. If you only hire people who maintain the status quo, the engine won’t start and change is unlikely to happen. As we all know, companies with diversified talent reserves tend to have better financial performance.
Data-oriented
Everyone makes mistakes and makes wrong choices from time to time, and managers are no exception. But few people will acknowledge this, which is why prejudice is so pervasive in the recruitment process. Research surveys show that many managers prefer to overstate the performance of employees rather than admitting that they have hired the wrong person. Managers in positions of authority must be extremely strict and carefully examine our decisions.
For example, when you hire someone, make a clear assessment goal that others can easily understand, and check whether your assessment results are consistent with other people’s ideas and opinions. Similarly, when deciding to nominate someone as highBefore potential employees, managers can use objective facts and reliable data to ensure that their decisions are fair and reasonable. Finding and identifying talent is a process of continuous trial and error. The key is not to find the right choice every time, but to find a better option.
Multi-level thinking
We live in a world that often glorifies individualism and ignores collectivism. However, almost all valuable things are brought together by people from different backgrounds, and their unique talents are combined to form effective collaboration and co-creation. Therefore, when you think about the construction of talent reserves, you should pay more attention to the configuration of the team rather than the individual: will they cooperate well, can they complement each other, and can they fulfill their functions and psychology according to the needs of the team Roles.
Every individual in an excellent team is an indispensable organ that masters and performs different functions. They complement each other, so that the entire system works normally and produces results that are greater than the sum of simple individuals. Successful talent brokers know that for a team to succeed, everyone in the team must have a “collective over individual” attitude.
Help others become better
An excellent manager, like an excellent scout, has unique insights and is better at discovering people’s potential. No matter how skilled your employees are, you need to help them grow in new ways. No matter how struggling your employees are at work, you have a responsibility to try to help them find a foothold. As pointed out by Professor Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular: “In short, the role of managers is becoming a coach.”
This means that managers need to have the skills to provide critical feedback, be able to have difficult conversations with employees, and resolve poor performance. This means that managers need to predict future talent needs, so that they can be prepared before the talent needs come, while effectively ensuring that the team has always been a meaningful and valuable asset.
Manpower Group surveyed nearly 40,000 organizations in 43 countries, and the results showed that almost every two employers had feedback that their organization could not find the talent they needed, which showed that They are deficient in effective talent planning strategies.
All in all, a great manager should also be an expert in talent. Fortunately, decades of research in organizational behavior and business management have provided a good foundation for a well-established talent management science. But unless you know how to apply it, it will be useless. Managers can’t relax their thinking about the potential and talents of employees for a moment, because nothing is more important than that in building a high-yield team.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Jonathan Kirschner | Text
Thomas ChamoloPremzick is the chief talent scientist at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and Columbia University, and a researcher at the Innovation Finance Lab at Harvard University.
Jonathan Kosner is a business psychologist and founder and CEO of AIIR Consulting, a global company dedicated to leadership development and workplace coaching, and deploys science-based talent development Solutions to improve the performance and efficiency of leaders and their organizations.
Intern Chang Shuyang | Translate Zhou Qiang | School