Every week, I review blogs that cover talent development to find the very best talent development posts. This week, you’ll find pointers to pieces about JK Rowling and talent management analytics, the cornerstone of integrated talent management, the secret to high retention and performance, and keys to effective on-boarding.
From DDI: What J.K. Rowling Can Do for Your Talent Management Analytics
“New writers are taught to consider 6 elements before composing a story: Characters, Conflict, Setting, Plot, Point of View, and Theme. The best stories share these elements to keep you turning pages until the end, but this doesn’t happen by accident – the authors have taken the time in advance to make sure that all these elements are in place. If you want people to sit up and your message to soak in when you’re presenting on strategic workforce planning, employee engagement trends, the cross-organizational impact of your new hiring system, or other talent management analytics, you need to think and plan like a novelist would.”
Wally’s Comment: Evan Sinar, Ph.D., Manager of the Assessment Technology Group at DDI, starts by equating “characters” with data and goes on to present an insightful analogy that will give you ideas about how to tell the story to others that your analytics tell to you.
From Mark Vickers: Do You REALLY Want to Know the Cornerstone to Talent Management?
“Whereas talent management seems strategic and professional – with more than enough ambiguous luster to make it respectable – performance management is just the opposite. It’s tactical, hands-on and usually depends on lower level managers. Even worse, employees and their bosses alike often resent it, especially the appraisal portion, which can create hard feelings.”
Wally’s Comment: In this superb post, Mark Vickers points out that doing often avoided and maligned “performance management” well is the key to talent management. He suggests four important things to do.
From Beth Armknecht Miller” The Secret to Higher Retention and Performance
“Ultimately, it is the employee’s manager who is the key driver in employee engagement. The CEO’s responsibility is to insure that managers are provided the development opportunities to increase their leadership capacity. Because managers are the ones who directly influence employee opinions and attitudes, their development is critical.”
Wally’s Comment: If managers are the key to performance, morale and retention, it only makes sense to pay attention to their growth and development.
From Leaderchat: Three Keys to Effective On-Boarding
“Some organizations do a great job helping employees get started in a new role. In other companies, people don’t even have clear job descriptions, so the on-boarding process is a little bit like being thrown into a salad spinner.”
Wally’s Comment: One client of mine described an on-boarding process he experienced as “filling out forms and listening to poor readers read from their PowerPoint slides.” Unfortunately, his experience is fairly common. David Witt shares some wisdom from Madeleine Homan-Blanchard about how to do on-boarding well.
Carnivals, Lists, and Such
Leadership Development Carnival hosted by Jason Seiden
From the Social Workplace: Employee Engagement Statistics (August 2011 Edition)
