We’ve been on an exciting journey for the past 10 months, working as the strategic talent partners for the Imperial Group. We’re on a journey to embed an effective Talent Management framework with the goal of mitigating people-related risk and optimising opportunities of matching key talent to high leverage roles. We do this by ensuring the right people, with the right skills and capabilities, are in the right jobs, at the right time, at the right cost to deliver business results.
Using our experience of successfully implementing Talent Management with global clients, we have co-created an integrated Talent Management framework including an annual road map, principles, toolkits, and capacity building for both line and HR. Our talent resources are working across all Divisions, partnering with the HR teams within each business. A core component of our talent journey is to build capacity within each HR team to enable them to fulfill their roles as Strategic HR Business Partners. A key part of which, is partnering with line to embed Talent Management in their annual business-as-usual activities. Activities culminate in an Annual Talent Conversation and Strategic Talent Review to identify and review current and future potential talent, understand succession risk and make strategic development and resourcing decisions.
Some key learnings to date include:
- Change management is vital to ensure people understand the reasons for the change, what the future will look like after the change, and what they will need to do differently. In today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world, we need to create a level of change resilience for people to effectively handle change, and to minimize any resistance experienced. Read more here about Strategic Change.
- Stakeholder engagement requires focused attention, time and effort. We need to know who the key players are, what their needs are, what their level of commitment is to the journey, and how to leverage those already “on board” to influence those who are not. This ensures we build enrollment and visible leadership, both crucial to success.
- Communication is about key messaging. People hear and understand communication when it becomes personally relevant to them. Our job is to create key messaging that translates into the WIIFM (what’s in it for me?) for each affected person, and clearly articulates the journey. Timing is important: messages must be communicated “just in time” – not too early, not too late.
- Building the capacity of both HR and line is critical to ensuring they are equipped to participate meaningfully in the journey. A diagnostic assessment of current skills and capabilities is essential to create capacity building content that is relevant, practical and enables people to confidently take up the roles they need to fulfil.
We’re working collaboratively with QBIT Consulting, who are designing and implementing core People Practices across the Group. Two of which, Role Profiling and Performance Management, are integral to the successful implementation and delivery of Talent Management in the longer term.
We’re currently planning for Phase 2 which, in addition to rolling out talent management to the next level across the Group, will include developing key Talent Management strategies, viz. Employee Value Proposition, Strategic Sourcing, accelerated development options for talent pools, talent segmentation, Retention Strategies, amongst others.
Read more here about our Talent Management.
