Selecting Great Talent: Part One: Attracting talent
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As a manager it’s important that you’re able to attract the best talent into your team. Doing so means that you are more likely to get great results. If your team becomes known as a ‘nursery for talent’ -where high fliers want to be in your team, develop rapidly while there, and move on to bigger responsibilities – it’s likely to bring you to the attention of senior people engaged in succession planning. A great move for your career!
Here are three ways you can make sure your team is viewed as the number one destination by talented people.
1. Treat your people well and make sure you develop them
Don’t make the mistake of many managers, and try to hang on to good people because you can’t face the job of finding and training up a replacement. Managers often avoid career discussions with people they know are ambitious to move on. All this will do is mean you are blindsided – it will always be a shock when someone announces they have a new job, you’ll have to scramble to recruit a new team member, and your results will suffer.
Take the time to get to know your team members, find out who they are, what motivates them and what they’re trying to get out of their careers. Once you know what they want to achieve, be sure to translate that into a development plan that will actively help them to develop the skills and experiences they need to realise their ambitions. Importantly, have a discussion with them about not being indispensable – and get them actively working with you to train up their successor. When the time is right, help them progress – use your network to open up discussions for them, talk to senior management to alert them some months in advance. (This will also make YOU appear on their radar.)
If you can establish yourself as someone who genuinely works to develop their team members, gets the best out of them while they’re a part of your team, and then supports them in moving onto bigger and better things, you’ll quickly find talented people will want to work with you and contribute to your results.
2. Become visible to talented people
If you’re going to attract the best people to your team, you’ll want a lot of people to be aware of you. Take opportunities to co-operate with HR – for example, offering a graduate placement, getting involved as an Assessor in Assessment Centres, hosting events and mentoring high potentials. Actively approach people who are junior to yourself, find out about them and their achievements. Would they be an asset to your team? Could you help them with their career? If you are clearly enthusiastic and achieve a lot yourself, you’ll be more likely to find talented people want to work with you and be a part of that success. This is especially true if you can share the work you are doing with them. Consider how you are viewed: by HR, graduates, high potentials, people at a more junior level. Is it as a positive, can-do person who is interested in their career?
3. Have other people in your team who are good at building talent
As a manager you can’t be completely responsible for developing talented people yourself – you need a team of people around you who can help you grow talent. With that in mind, be on the alert for people who are good talent spotters, when getting people into your team. Work with them to create an environment where talent can thrive. Build a culture of “Champions” – high performers who are really good at what they do, who you can rely on to support people and to mentor them. Remember also that having responsibility for inducting, developing and supervising a team member will be attractive to a team member who is happy in their role and doesn’t want to move on. It will also look great on the CV of an ambitious team member. Getting your team to mentor people is a win-win.
TAKE AWAY
What goes around comes around. If you’re seen to treat talented individuals well and develop them, you’ll attract more talented people and start to appear on the succession planning radar.