Talent Optimization: It’s Not Just About Your Team

Identifying leaders from within can help companies be more effective.

Talent optimization strategies often focus solely on new hires and employees, but that’s only part of the picture. Unless companies are optimizing their leadership talent, they are failing to maximize their potential for success.

Optimizing leadership and management development are every bit as important to a company’s success as optimizing new talent during the hiring process. Developing a leadership pipeline is the next step after a successful new hire process.

Creating a Leadership Pipeline

When companies consistently hire top talent, they can cull the best leaders from that talent to move up the ranks and eventually become leaders in the company. Managers may notice and identify workers who manage their time well and have an aptitude for working well with others at the entry level. Many times, leaders emerge naturally from among the ranks as the need becomes apparent, but this is not always the case.

Talent assessments are often used to identify a candidate’s probability of success in a job or to match a candidate with a position that is a good fit for them, but these assessments can and should also be used to identify aptitude for leadership among employees. A talent assessment can be the first step to filling a leadership pipeline that can funnel future leaders toward filling a company’s needs.

Understanding company culture is an important part of training leaders.

Once leadership potential has been identified, incremental training can get future leaders ready to step into new roles as they become vacant, lessening the need for expensive recruiting and hiring of outside talent that may not have been prepared so specifically to take on a particular leadership role.

Training Talent to Be Leaders

The first step in preparing talent for a leadership role is often missed by those training leadership recruits. To lead an organization effectively, talent must have a full and thorough understanding of company culture and strategy. Without this understanding, you will get generic leadership that fails to meet and empower others to meet the specific challenges you face. You may get people with good interpersonal skills, but who don’t know how to direct those skills in a purposeful way.

Once the culture has been fully dissected and understood, training in leadership techniques like planning and assigning work, motivating team members, and assessing employees can begin to take place. Leadership skills appropriate to a given level of management can be taught and built upon as the leader progresses and is ready to take on more.

A leadership pipeline has benefits beyond cultivating a ready supply talent from within that can lead to fewer hiring headaches. When you train leaders in your pipeline according to how you want them to lead, it will increase the effectiveness of your company overall and lead to fewer missteps along the way. Leaders trained from within will be able to get up to speed in a new leadership position faster and better since they are already entrenched in the culture and have been trained specifically within it.

Learn how Narish International can help you build higher-performing teams today.