The Soft Side of Managing Talent is About Making Hard Choices

The manager/coach accepts the personal responsibility for making tough decisions about who is going to be on the team, and who is not. In the book “The War for Talent,” authors Michaels, Handfield-Jones, and Axelrod provide a straightforward approach for “assessing performance” to enable your organization to strengthen itself with the best talent.

As manager, you can strengthen your talent pool by: investing in A players (the best 10 to 20 percent), developing your B players (the mid 60 to 70 percent), and acting decisively on C players (the bottom 10 to 20 percent). This is not about passing judgment on people. It is about taking a snapshot in time and assessing the bench strength of your players. This process is not about using people simply as if they are merely a means to an end. It has everything to do with populating your team with solid talent, and then coaching and inspiring that talent to self-actualize, which will help those people create meaning for themselves and the organization.

Once you have identified the different levels of talent, you can then begin the dialogue with each player at each level that will allow you to drive his or her level of performance in a direction that will best meet both personal needs, and the business objectives of the organization.

This approach amounts to:

• Looking out for and strategically placing your very best talent • Challenging the mid-level talent to get better • Deciding what role, if any, your least talented players will have One of the greatest barriers to optimum team performance is having people on the team that are not capable of pulling their weight. Keeping the wrong people around is unfair to the right people because they see their hard work impeded by those who cannot or will not perform as needed.

Note: This process of ranking your players is directed at evaluating and assembling the best talent for your specific team and placing the right person in the right position for the overall benefit of the person and the organization. Borrowing from the GE play book, any replacement players brought on to the team should be better than your best players, thereby raising the bar of performance for the entire team.

The law of “competition for talent” may sometimes be hard for the individual, but it is best for the organization, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department. While you would like to keep a stable work force, this is just not realistic and you will always have employees come and go. Just like the sports coach, your job as manager will be to continually look for great talent and shed poor or average talent so you can beat the competition.

You MAY reprint the information contained in this article as long as no portion of the contents are modified and it used “exclusively” within your organization. You must also give credit to information by including the tag line...Roger M. Ingbretsen, Author, Speaker, Leadership Coach, Organizational and Career Developer.



The Soft Side of Managing Talent is About Making Hard Choices - To learn more about this author, visit Roger Ingbretsen's Website.

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