Title: Developing Leadership and Talent for Organizational Performance

Author: Melinda Irene Netto

Affiliation: Student- MBA 2nd Year, St. Joseph’s P.G. College, King-Koti Hyderabad.

E-mail ID: melindanetto09@gmail.com

Mobile: +919502282706

ABSTRACT

Leadership and talent development are without doubt two of the most critical issues in

the field of Human Resources these days. As Jack Welch famously quoted, “the team with

the best players wins.” As a business leader, you are only as good as the team you lead.

Hiring the right people can make the difference between success and failure, and between

mediocrity and greatness. Talent builders identify the organizational capabilities and talent

that organization need to perform at a high level in today’s environment. Leaders need to

assess their talent against present and future projected requirements. Leaders who address

succession, career planning, and talent mobility with information and foresight have a ready

supply of successors groomed by strong talent development efforts. Such leaders contribute

talent across departments and geographies, enabling the organization to more rapidly fill

business needs. Business leaders who can effectively balance business objectives with talent

mobility strategies are more highly regarded both by senior executives and peers. When done

right, these talent management strategies can have a dramatic impact on revenue. The main

tools for talent management development and success are talent intelligence- data, insight,

and decision support at the point of action. Hence this paper focuses on strategies and tools

required for developing leadership and talent for the organization performance.

Keywords

1. Leadership

2. Talent development

3. Strategies, Tools

4. Talent management

DEVELOPING LEADERSHIP AND TALENT FOR ORGANISATIONAL

PERFORMANCE

In order to understand what a leadership strategy is, we first have to be clear about

what we mean by leadership. Leadership begins with individuals in leadership positions, but

it does not end there. The ability of an organization to accomplish its goals does not depend

solely on the force of will of a single great leader, or even upon the effectiveness of the

organization’s chain of command. These things are important, but don’t in and of themselves

help us understand why some organizations succeed where others fail. The changing nature

of the workforce and the dramatic rise in organizational complexity (with many organizations

shifting to matrix management and other more organic configurations) has necessitated a

more collaborative outlook vis-à-vis organizational leadership. Moreover the greater

dependency on technologies and the rise of distributed work arrangements have placed new

demands on how leaders interact with their people. A distributed view of leadership is now

on the rise, shifting the focus from the traditional single leader to an intricate and complex

web of leaders who possess a range of abilities and experiences necessary to ensure that the

leadership function is carried out to the benefit of the wider organization.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that the key to successful leadership today is

influence, not authority. Leadership is defined not by what a single leader does but as the

ability to collaborate, motivate and to manage networks. Today hierarchy is out and

influencing skills are in. Contemporary leaders don’t force people to follow-they invite

people on a journey.

In order to have an empowering influence on their people, a new set of qualities, going

beyond traditional managerial skills and knowledge, is needed. 21st century leadership

requires a deep understanding of the nature of influence processes, an understanding of the

forces of cooperation, and the ability to build collaborative cultures. These leaders must also

lead by pathos through the creation of a shared understanding, engaging and inspiring their

people, and paying attention to their professional and personal growth. Hence, leadership is

becoming more enabling, participative and distributive in nature as opposed to remaining

directive and performing.

DEVELOPMENT OF LEADERSHIP

Most organizations will not need the “Lone Ranger” type of leader as much as a

leader who can motivate and coordinate a team-based approach. Today, effective leadership

is commonly viewed as central to organizational success, and more importance is placed on

leadership development than ever before. Developing “more and better” individual leaders is

no longer the sole focus of leadership development, although it remains a critical aspect.

Increasingly, leadership is defined not as what the leader does but rather as a process that

engenders and is the result of relationships—relationships that focus on the interactions of

both leaders and collaborators instead of focusing on only the competencies of the leaders.

Leadership development practices based on this paradigm are more difficult to design and

implement than those that have been popular for the last several decades in which the

objective was to train leaders to be good managers.

Development today means providing people opportunities to learn from their work rather

than taking them away from their work to learn. A growing recognition that leadership

development involves more than just developing individual leaders has now led to a greater

focus on the context in which leadership is developed, thoughtful consideration about how to

best use leadership competencies, and work/life balance issues. Future trends include exciting

potential advances in globalization, technology, return on investment (ROI), and new ways of

thinking about the nature of leadership and leadership development.

Leadership development initiatives today typically offer performance support and real world

application of skills through such methods as training programs, coaching and mentoring,

action learning, and developmental assignments. Combining instruction with a real business

setting helps people gain crucial skills and allows the organizations to attack relevant, crucial,

real-time issues. The goal of leadership development ultimately involves action not

knowledge. State of the art leadership development now occurs in the context of ongoing

work initiatives that are tied to strategic business imperatives (Dotlich & Noel, 1998; Moxley

& O’Connnor Wison, 1998).

DEVELOPMENT OF TALENT

“It’s very odd to me. The assets walk home at night. If the people are your most

important asset, you ought to develop them. It’s Goldman’s philosophy that not only do

people have to be developed, it ends up being a huge competitive advantage.”

Steve Kerr

Chief Learning Officer

Goldman Sachs

The following statement captures the underpinning of any effective talent strategy:

“What’s needed is a deep-rooted conviction, among business unit heads and line leaders, that

people really matter — that leaders must develop the capabilities of employees, nurture their

careers, and manage the performance of individuals and teams.”

Simply put, leaders are responsible for developing the talent in their organizations. Yet, while

many acknowledge its importance, few deliver the coaching and training at scale to develop

their people.

Talent has become extremely popular in recent years. There are a growing number of talent

shows on television showcasing the incredible artistic performances of sometimes extremely

unlikely candidates. Talent in this regard appears to be seen as an exemplary skill that some

people possess: something Ericsson and Smith (1991) researched and concluded in the early

1990s. Malcolm Gladwell (2010) popularized his findings: talent is equal to ten years or

10,000 hours invested in a specific field. Consequently, you could rephrase the individual

definition of talent to be about focus, attention and dedication: ‘‘Choose any area (Sitskoorn,

2008) in which you want to increase your talent, invest at least 10 years, and ‘presto’, you’re

a talent!’’

Management science takes another perspective on talent. For both profit and non-profit

organizations talent has become ‘‘serious business’’, because talent is imperative for the

livelihood of organizations (Lawler, 2008). Optimizing talent determines whether the

organization in question grows, diverges or reorganizes. From this perspective, quite a

narrow view of talent is born, one where regular and careful talent reviews will yield an ever

increasingly accurate definition of ‘‘the right stuff’’. Especially when those in executive

positions within a company are about to vacate their jobs – for whatever reason – there will

be a substantial investment to find just the right successor, within or beyond the organization.

Create a culture of talent development

The most important competencies of leaders are their ability to build talent. In order to create

a culture of talent development an effective leader should:

Figure 1.1: Creating a culture for Developing Talent in an Organization

1. Act as a role model. Be transparent about your own need to learn and develop and

share how you are able to do it. Embrace vulnerability: leaders are never more

powerful than when they are shown to be learning.

2. Reinforce the value of learning. Go beyond the baseline conversation about goals.

Ask about what they want to accomplish and what they feel their gaps are. When

someone completes an assignment, celebrate both the outcome and the learning,

especially if the assignment wasn’t completed as smoothly as everyone would’ve

liked.

3. Build sustainable processes to support development. Managers should be expected

to coach and develop their people. At a minimum, everyone knows what areas need to

improve, and for those with particularly high potential, career tracks are developed

that give them a sense of where they can go inside the organization.

Talent Developmen

t

Act as a role model

Reinforce the value of learning

Build sustainable

processes to support

development

Reinforce shared values

Leverage problems as

opportunities

4. Reinforce shared values. Employees should be able to link their everyday tasks and

responsibilities to the values in the organization. People need to understand why what

they do is important.

5. Leverage problems as opportunities for real world learning and development.

What’s an acceptable failure needs to be clarified and that way, by incorporating

stretch assignments, employees can seek out challenges where they can develop

without feeling like mistakes will set them back in their career or jeopardize their job.

Learning organizations see problems as opportunities.

STRATEGIES AND TOOLS TO DEVELOP LEADERSHIP TALENT

If the objective of talent management is to ensure that organizations have the right leaders

in the right roles when they need them, then it is probably safe to say that for many the

process is falling short. Recent research by Hay Group and the Management Consultancies

Association revealed that less than a quarter of business leaders believed their organization’s

talent management processes would deliver the leaders they need. In fact, as many as 70 per

cent felt that their talent management needed a change.

For many organizations the problem lies in taking a tactical rather than strategic

approach, often because they lack the dedicated resources to develop a thorough

understanding of what their organization will demand from its people in the future. Instead of

identifying – and delivering – exactly what the business actually needs, they focus on

generically enhancing the overall supply of talent in the hope that this will meet future

demand. A strategic approach to talent management judges activities across several factors.

Figure 1.2: Strategy and Tools to Develop Leadership Talent across organizations.

Developing Leadership

Talent

Key Elements

Business Strategy

Talent Pool

Talent Growth

Talent Flow

Focus

1. Understand the key elements. You should consider four questions. How is the

business likely to be structured in future – will there be a change in strategic direction,

new operating models or new routes to market? What impact will this have on the

shape and number of roles required? What type of leaders will the business therefore

require to deliver future strategic objectives? How does this match up against the

company’s current supply of talent, and is there a gap between supply and demand?

2. Ask yourself: ‘So what?’ Companies need to understand exactly what they are

developing talent for, by decoding their business strategy as described in step one – a

task rarely addressed when strategic goals are being set. Once strategy is defined in

terms of the people needed to deliver it, the stage is set for defining the

accountabilities, the behavioral expectations, the interdependencies and the number

and type of leaders required. Yet most organizations fail to carry out this critical step

or pay inadequate attention to it.

3. Know your talent pool. To understand the people you have and the people you need,

an organization talent review (OTR) is crucial. Many organizations are familiar with

this stage of the talent management process, but tend to contract out this assessment to

third parties. Assessment centers and externally benchmarked OTRs can provide an

objective view. However, using these can hinder ownership of, and action on, the

results. With this in mind, we are seeing more and more examples of “talent

benchmarking forums”. These entail analysis of externally benchmarked data from

direct reports and peers on competencies, leadership styles and the climate a leader

creates, alongside what the organization already knows about its leaders. They

consider performance, functional and technical competencies, career track record,

ambition, mobility, learning agility, adaptability and potential career derailers.

Through debating and challenging diverse viewpoints on these aspects of an

organization’s leaders, you can make more robust judgments about talent. This, in

turn, will lead you to become more willing to act on the findings. You will be more

likely to take risks to place people with high potential in “stretch” roles.

4. Grow your talent. The next step is to close the gap between demand and supply. You

should buy in talent only where absolutely necessary. The best organizations enhance

their ability to meet future role demands through leadership development and careful,

supported placements. They invest heavily and regularly in growing talent from

within and developing people for the long term. They work hard to avoid the risk of

“tissue rejection” inherent in imported leaders. You should aim to grow talent using

role moves across business units, so that people with high potential experience the

challenge of delivering beyond their technical comfort zones before earning

promotion. This forces them to fall back on – and therefore build – their innate

leadership skills, before larger roles prevent them from taking such risks.

5. Make talent flow. By optimizing the deployment of talent across the organization,

you will enable future leaders to make the greatest possible impact. You can achieve

this through talent benchmarking forums, cross-divisional brokerage of talent and

action-orientated succession planning. You should be aiming to ensure that talent

flows to where it is most needed and where it can best grow. Successful organizations

give accountability for talent management jointly to line managers and HR. They

encourage action rather than merely analysis, through upward reporting on what has

been done to improve the stock of talent and how leaders intend to enhance their

supply to meet changing business demands. Critically, they also ensure that other HR

levers, such as reward and performance management, are all pulling in the same

direction. Getting this flow right requires an effective talent infrastructure. Secretive

line manager nominations, outsourced assessment centers where little is known about

an individual’s day-to-day performance, talent-hoarding by business units and “tick-

the-box” succession planning are not helpful.

6. Don’t lose focus. We typically find that most organizations are comfortable with the

“know” and “grow” stages of the talent management process, but fall down when it

comes to decoding strategy – the “so what?” step – and creating a “flow” of talent

around the organization. Addressing these issues allows talent management to evolve

so that it becomes more strategic and a real source of competitive advantage.

Key points

• Many organizations focus on generally enhancing talent supply without having a clear

definition of their future demand needs.

• When these are clear, review your workforce, organizational needs and structure to

identify talent gaps.

• Grow talent by identifying suitable role moves across business units that will challenge

people with high potential beyond their comfort zones.

• Talent should both grow and be deployed most effectively in areas where it can make

the most difference.

TALENT MANAGEMENT

Talent Management is a natural evolution of HR. It is a series of business processes --

not a "product" or "solution" you can buy. Organizations we speak to are focused on different

elements -- driven by their maturity and the urgent business problems they face today. While

a few mature organizations have dealt with most of the processes above, most organizations

focus on several of the key elements and build an integrated approach over time.

Additionally, Talent Management is a "forward-looking" function. Not only should talent

management improve your organization's flexibility and performance, it should give you the

information and tools to plan for growth, change, acquisitions, and critical new product and

service initiatives.

Organizations are made up of people: people creating value through proven business

processes, innovation, customer service, sales, and many other important activities. As an

organization strives to meet its business goals, it must make sure that it has a continuous and

integrated process for recruiting, training, managing, supporting, and compensating these

people. The following chart shows the complete process:

Figure 1.3: Talent Management- A Process

1. Workforce Planning: Integrated with the business plan, this process establishes

workforce plans, hiring plans, compensation budgets, and hiring targets for the year.

2. Recruiting: Through an integrated process of recruiting, assessment, evaluation, and

hiring the business brings people into the organization.

3. Onboarding: The organization must train and enable employees to become

productive and integrated into the company more quickly.

4. Performance Management: By using the business plan, the organization establishes

processes to measure and manage employees. This is a complex process in itself.

5. Training and Performance Support: Of course this is a critically important

function. Here we provide learning and development programs to all levels of the

organization. This function itself is evolving into a continuous support function.

Job rolesJob descriptions

Competency Models

Workforce Planning

Recruiting

Onboarding

Performance Management

Training and Performance

support

Succession Planning

Compensation and Benefits

Critical skills Gap analysis

6. Succession Planning: As the organization evolves and changes, there is a continuous

need to move people into new positions. Succession planning, a very important

function, enables managers and individuals to identify the right candidates for a

position. This function also must be aligned with the business plan to understand and

meet requirements for key positions 3-5 years out. While this is often a process

reserved for managers and executives, it is more commonly applied across the

organization.

7. Compensation and Benefits: Clearly this is an integral part of people management.

Here organizations try to tie the compensation plan directly to performance

management so that compensation, incentives, and benefits align with business goals

and business execution.

8. Critical Skills Gap Analysis: This is a process we identify as an important, often

overlooked function in many industries and organizations. While often done on a

project basis, it can be "business-critical." For example, today industries like the

Federal Government, Utilities, Telecommunications, and Energy are facing large

populations which are retiring. How do you identify the roles, individuals, and

competencies which are leaving? What should you do to fill these gaps? We call this

"critical talent management" and many organizations are going through this now.

IMPACT OF LEADERSHIP AND TALENT ON ORGANIZATIONAL

PERFORMANCE

Impact of Leadership on Organizational Performance

Former Honeywell CEO Larry Bossidy and management guru Ram Charan have identified

seven key leadership behaviors that have direct and measurable impact on organizational

performance. By practicing these critical behaviors, leaders can foster effective execution in

their organizations while avoiding the trap of micromanagement.

1. Know Your People and Your Business

Leaders should not only know their business, they should live it. They must be

engaged in the day-to-day realities of the business. This means having a personal

connection with the business and with the people in it. Detailed business reviews

allow the leader to understand the fundamentals of daily operations, uncover

problems, capitalize on strengths and truly get to know the people. In addition, it

affords employees the opportunity to get to know the leader and understand the

direction the organization is taking.

2. Insist on Realism

Leaders often are blind to the weaknesses of their organizations. They tend to

understand the strengths, but are reluctant to find out what could be improved.

Moreover, subordinates tend to stress the positive in communications with higher-ups.

To overcome this, leaders must be relentless in understanding how to improve their

organizations and in learning how they stack up against competitors.

3. Set Clear Goals And Priorities

Successful leaders focus on a few key priorities–the “Critical Few”–that everyone can

understand and pursue. Too many organizations have long lists of priorities that never

get accomplished. Success comes from execution of three or four high-impact goals.

4. Follow Through

Many organizations perform poorly because of lack of follow through. Successful

leaders make clear assignments, hold people accountable and establish regular review

processes to track progress.

5. Reward Doers

People perform well when they are rewarded for their efforts. Yet many organizations

do a poor job of linking rewards to performance. They make too little differentiation

in salary increases, bonuses and stock options between super stars and those who are

not. Successful leaders reward top performers for their achievements and ensure that

there is a clear connection between performance and compensation throughout the

organization.

6. Expand Your People’s Capabilities

Leaders who want their organizations to be successful spend considerable time and

effort in expanding the capabilities of their people, and coaching is their single most

effective method. Effective coaching involves watching people in action and

providing specific feedback. Feedback should include examples of behaviors that are

good as well as examples of behaviors that need to be changed. Skillful coaches ask

questions that cause people to think and to discover.

7. Know Yourself

Leaders of high-performing organizations have emotional fortitude. They are able to

be honest with themselves, they deal honestly with business and organizational

realities, and they give people candid feedback. They possess the confidence to accept

points of view that are different from their own and to deal with conflict. Leaders with

emotional fortitude practice self-mastery. In addition, they are authentic, self-aware

and humble.

Therefore successful organizational performance relies on the proper behavior from managers

and employees. Leadership can be an evolutionary process in companies. Business owners

who provide leadership can transform an employee from a worker completing tasks to a

valuable team member. Leadership skills can help change an employee’s mentality by

instilling an ownership mindset. Employees who believe they have a direct owner-style

relationship with the organization often find ways to improve their attitude and productivity.

Leadership can help a business maintain singular focus on its operations. Larger business

organizations can suffer from too many individuals attempting to make business decisions.

Business owners can use leadership skills to get managers and employees on the same page

and refocus on the original goal. Leadership skills can also help correct poor business

practices or internal conflicts between employees.

Impact of Talent on Organizational Performance

Managing talent is a powerful and important trend across the field of Human Resources and

Learning and Development. It changes the way you are organized, how you use technology,

how your resources are allocated, and how you measure what you do. If you are a training

manager, director, or CLO, talent management will impact your role. You may be asked to

integrate your learning programs with the company's performance management initiative.

Many organizations have a new job: The VP of Talent Management. This role typically

includes Learning & Development, Performance and Competency Management, and

Succession Planning functions. This is believed that this integrated “HRD” function is an

important evolution in the way HR organizations are run.

CONCLUSION

A deep capacity for leadership can be a source of competitive advantage and can help an

organization achieve its strategic goals and realize its mission. This paper has addressed the

aspects of leadership development, talent development, the various strategic tools that helps

developing leadership talent in an organization and the process of talent management. It is

important to reiterate that there is no one best way to plan for change or to develop a

workforce. Those decisions need to be made in the context of the organization’s strategy,

mission and culture. A clarification of what “talent” means in your organization by

formulating a crystal clear policy fulfills talent development efforts. Talent management

should be perceived as an integrated process and start organizing it as a coherent effort: from

strategic resource planning, to recruitment and assessment, pipelining, career planning, career

development, engagement, mentoring and coaching and (last but not least) learning and

development. Effective leadership is necessary in order to build a scenario wherein the

leaders are looked upon as role models and through this the organizational know-how of

talent is enhanced and business insight and accelerate their development. Leadership talent

harnesses the power of the talent pool, because talents working in teams under an effective

leadership could offer the company a huge and largely untapped cognitive surplus that could

aid organizational development.

REFERENCES

Leadership & Talent Development in International Humanitarian and Development

Organizations, Centre for creative leadership: www.ccl.org.

Developing a Leadership Strategy: A Critical Ingredient for Organizational Success,

White Paper by William Pasmore, Centre for Creative Leadership.

How leadership matters: The effects of leaders' alignment on strategy implementation,

By Charles A. O’Reilly, David F, Cadwell, Jennifer A. Chatman, Margaret Lapiz,

William Self, The Leadership Quarterly 21 (2010) 104-113,

www.elaevier.com/locate/leaqua.

Leadership Development: Past, Present, and Future, By Gina Hernez-Broome,

Richard L. Hughes, Centre for Creative Leadership.

Developing Leaders and Leadership Development, By Manfred Kets de Vries and

Konstantin Korotov, 2010/77/EFE/IGLC.

Talent Management: What is it? Why now? By Josh Bersin, Principal, May, 2006.

The Five Key Principles for Talent Development, By Evert Pruis, based at EMC

Leren, Groenekan, The Netherlands. Vol. 43 No.4 2011, pp. 206-216, © Emerald

Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 0019-7858.

The New Business of Business Leaders: Talent Management, An Oracle White Paper,

May 2012.

Developing Leadership Talent, By David V. Day, Ph.D. A Guide to Succession

Planning and Leadership Development. Strategic Human Resource Management

Foundation’s Effective Practice Guidelines Series.

5 Keys for Developing Talent in Your Organization, By Drew Hansen, Forbes 2011.

What is Leadership Development? Purpose and Practice, Leadership South West,

Research Report 2, By Richard Bolden, June 2005.

7 Guiding Principles for Developing Leadership Talent, Michael McKinney.

Leadership Blog: Building a Community of Leaders.

Leadership and Organizational Performance, By Wayne Smith, Demand Media.

Real Change Leaders: How You Can Create Growth and High Performance At Your

Company, By Jon R. Katzenbach.

Understanding and Managing Organizational Behavior, By Jennifer M. George and

Gareth R. Jones, 5E.

The Performance Factor: Unlocking The Secrets of Teamwork, By Pat MacMillan,

Nashville: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 2001.