Tag Archives: talent management
For Your Own Talent Management & Career Ascendancy – Choose Your Boss Well
Tribal Leaders are talent magnets, with people so eager to work for the leader that they will take a pay cut if necessary.
Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization by Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright
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Ok, I’m ready to give the biggest and most important career advice I have ever given. If you don’t own your own company, and you ever change jobs again, follow this advice. There is nothing else this important.
Choose your boss well.
That’s it. Because your boss means everything. The wrong boss can be a disaster. The right boss can shape your career for the better for the rest of your life.
So, what do you look for in a boss? Mainly, you look for the qualities you want to learn and emulate when you will move up to your next position as the “boss.” Here are some qualities to look for:
1. Choose a good teacher. If the boss wants to develop the talent of those who report to hem/her, then the boss needs to be a good, effective teacher. So, choose a boss who has much to teach you, and, knows how to teach you – is good at teaching. This is important because you have much to learn, and someday you will have much to teach, and people to teach it to.
2. Choose a good “carer.” (“Carer” is probably not a word, but the idea is clear — choose a boss who cares for people – genuinely, deeply. Because after all, a boss leads real people, and the ability to care for each person is really critical. You need to develop this trait. And it helps to learn from someone who is good at it.
3. Choose a good team leader. If a boss is good at building a team, then the future will be a lot better. You need to be part of a team with a good leader, so that later you can be a good team leader yourself.
These are just a few of the traits to look for in your next boss. There are probably a few more just as important as these, like: choose an ethical boss; choose a boss who cultivates an environment of fun; choose a boss who is a good coach as well as teacher… You can add to this list.
But this I know for sure – choosing your boss well is really important.
Talent Management’s New Assignment – Building Confidence in Anxious and Uncertain Employees
Definition: Talent Management refers to the process of developing and integrating new workers, developing and retaining current workers, and attracting highly skilled workers to work for a company.
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Talent…Management. The two words say so much. One, that everyone who works with you/for you is “talent.” Next, somehow, the talent has to be managed.
But, as we all know, there is no magic formula. There are only guidelines – hints. And many of these are quite good, like:
• only hire people who can to the job at hand very well
• only hire people who can get along well with others
• make sure that each person is doing what he/she is best at
• give people the training and support they need to get better at their job
• recognize and reward excellent work
• praise in public; criticize in private
• if you’ve got the wrong person in place, make a change in the next 3 seconds – every second, every day, you delay, you drag down the morale of everyone. (This is a remarkably consistent theme in many books we’ve presented over our 12+ years).
In other words: hire well; train well; encourage well; recognize/reward well… and keep in touch with the current thinking of your “talent.” Know what their strengths are now, their weaknesses, and their concerns.
These are all wise suggestions/reminders, and we have presented a number of books at the First Friday Book Synopsis over the years to help you better “manage talent.” My favorite is still the classic Encouraging the Heart: A Leader’s Guide to Rewarding and Recognizing Others by James Kouzes and Barry Posner, which I presented more than a decade ago (hard to believe!), and recently Karl presented his synopsis of Make Their Day!: Employee Recognition That Works by Cindy Ventrice – a very fine, practical book.
But here is my latest thinking about talent management. We have to add an element right now that is crucial. People who manage talent have to read the current state/mood/thinking of the talent they manage.
Here is why. This is an era of great uncertainty and anxiety. We all read the news. Companies are reluctant to hire (even companies with plenty of cash available); and joblessness continues to be a pervasive problem. And though the unemployment rate for college graduates is still low (4.5%, much lower than the overall unemployment rate), a growing number of college graduates are “settling” for jobs that are not what they had hoped for/signed up for with their college and/or graduate school education. It really is an age of uncertainty and anxiety.
And an anxious employee is uncertain, tentative – not at his/her best. Uncertainty breeds loss of confidence, thus loss of competence.
Successful Talent Management is going to increasingly require leaders — all those who supervise others — to help people survive and successfully navigate such uncertain waters. People need to feel secure, and then confident in their abilites (and their company).
Talent Management, more than ever before, is going to have to add “confidence building” to its list of practices.
