Diageo

Talent management and development, a cornerstone of any successful business, demands immediate attention. The right talent in the right roles is crucial for optimal performance. A robust leadership pipeline is the key to future growth and opportunities. 

From my experience of over 20 years in HR, this is the most strategic topic and, unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges nowadays. Succession plans that are well designed on paper but never go to life, talent judgment that cracks in the difficult-to-have transparency conversation, or organizations that wait for the perfect readiness moment to promote are the most common challenges; balance the present & future needs is the biggest challenge, and below are the key points to consider to make your plan with the best chance to win:

Volatility and Lower Loyalty

It is well-known that preventing future needs in a volatile world is complex. In addition, organizations have expected more personal accountability from employees in driving their careers and incentivizing them in past years.

Talented employees understand the message, look for different perspectives, and are open to changing companies as they have never done before. As a result, employee loyalty is down, but expectations are up, as reported by the most prominent global executive recruiting firms in their reports. 

It demands the highest levels of transparency in the process, clear conversations about ‘How am I doing? / Where am I going? How do I get there?’ and clear development plans aligned with employees and talents. 

The first critical aspect is transparency about employee potential evaluation, which is crucial. 

Critical Experience as a Way to Future Development

One thing is clear when planning for the uncertain future: Future success is about flexibility, learning agility, dealing with ambiguity, and a high level of judgment and integrity. Align all of it with your organization's culture and values. All other things are volatile.

With this in mind, and maybe contradictory, employees and the organization should design a long-term career development, not to be ready for the next steps but to create the best development opportunity to give amplitude.

As so well said by Richard Taylor (September 21) in his LinkedIn article ‘Became Senior Leader through critical experience,’ there are eight critical experiences, described below, that could make a deal breaker in career development:  

1. Start Something New / Lead a Start-Up: vision and mission, and learn how to determine a business objective and build resilience and perseverance quickly.

2. Lead in a Downturn or Turn-around Situation: critical competencies, identify mission-critical (and non-critical) deliverables, practice communication skills by delivering complex messages

"Future success is about flexibility, learning agility, dealing with ambiguity, and a high level of judgment and integrity."

 3. Lead in a P&L: balance numerous competing initiatives and allocate company resources optimally to generate near-term positive ROI while investing for long-term profitable growth. The P&L leadership experience is a crucial steppingstone to the most senior executive roles in the business. 

4. Lead in a Function:  Develop business acumen to support the ever-changing business best. This is a high-collaboration role.

5. Lead in a Merger of Teams/Organizations: Use business acumen and project management skills to determine how best to integrate separate teams to achieve the business goal while building diplomacy skills in communicating.

6. Lead in an International Assignment: their learning agility and personal flexibility to manage diverse relationships and deal with ambiguity. Cross-cultural sensitivity

7. Lead a Significant Change Initiative: Learn marketing and influence skills, managing stakeholders

8. Leading without Authority: influencing skills, motivating 

In other words, make the beat and create the opportunity to learn. Refrain from expecting readiness and certainty. Create the opportunity to learn so your talent can make the right decisions & judgments you need. 

Of course, it must be balanced. When planning, you can give this opportunity to the right talent and have other parts of the organization perform critical roles. 

Open Conversation about Diversity and Flexibility

Last but not least, open conversations about flexibility are even more critical for diverse talent. 

Mobility is down (including international ones), and hybrid and remote working considerations remain at the forefront of my mind–and are not always aligned. So, both organizations and employees should have long-term development career conversations to make their best career decisions. 

To cease transparency and long-term planning in two-way conversations between talents and employees is the most important element in defining the right critical experience for long-term career development.