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Recently, I was asked a question which stumped me: "How do I know if I'm working in a resilient team?" This one question raised a host of other questions for me: What is resilience? How do you measure it? How is that different from my own resilience? What can we do to build resilience? After a couple of days of research and a lot of reflection, I've got a lot more clarity.

The American Psychological Association define resilience as "the ability to adjust well to adversity, trauma, and other stressors such as physical and mental health issues, job loss, or financial concerns". "Adjusting well" is still kind of subjective for me, and when I spoke to several people, I realized there are also some confusion between the understanding of resilience and endurance. Using a couple of images to illustrate this may be easier.

The left image on the header represents endurance. The feeling of trudging along, carrying the burden, coping. On a day like this, I get overwhelmed, frustrated and stressed. I’m carrying all that negative energy throughout the day, and my family knows it, even my dog can sense that and he will stay away from me. Often, when I speak to colleagues and friends, I'll ask them how they are, and the response is typically a sigh, followed by an "I'm ok". It just doesn't feel like people are okay, or in a good place, and I'm not surprised that mental well-being issues are on the rise. Definitely not a sustainable situation.

Conversely, resilience feels like the ability to bounce back (image on the right). With resilience, I’ll find a way to process the frustrations, get grounded, maybe through going for a walk or doing some mindfulness exercises, clear my head, dissipate that negative energy and find a different solution.

There's another beautiful analogy that I've heard from a life coach, Claire Breeze. Endurance is like being a rock in a river. You’re strong and unyielding, you sit staunchly and take the full blunt of whatever life throws at you. Resilience is like the river water. You’re free flowing and flexible, and when you come up against a hurdle, just glides past and pay no heed to it. In life, learn to let go of things that doesn't serve you. I love this because the rock and the water conveys such different energy and emotions. Its not to say that endurance is bad, but a balance between the two will give us much more resources to achieve mental wellness.

The other aspect of resilience that sometimes causes confusion is the difference between individual and teams. The difference is important to differentiate because the attributes and resulting actions required are also very different. Individual resilience often focus on the ability of self to mitigate stressful situations, for example mindfulness & well-being practices and work life balance. The focus is on things we do for ourselves. Team resilience on the other hand are grounded in team dynamics and often focus on creating psychological safety, providing support, empathy and understanding for one another. The focus is on things we do for each other.

Resilience is the current fad among corporate lingo, with the Covid pandemic exacerbating the challenges that employees are facing managing isolation and balancing work life priorities, and has pushed teams and organizations into unfamiliar territories. Unfortunately, most organizations I've seen only focused on individual resilience. This promotes unhealthy work culture because it puts undue expectations that employees has to be strong, or find ways to be resilient themselves, and not surprisingly, inevitably pushed most of them into the endurance spectrum. Let's face it, our existing work culture still promotes strength as a virtue for leaders, and showing vulnerability is a sign of weakness.

The focus on individual resilience is also not useful because even though individuals contribute to the overall team resilience, it does not fully translate, especially when team members are not aligned in ways of working or strategic direction. True team resilience is more than the summation of individual resilience. A resilient team often has more resources and teamwork to support individual team members in overcoming challenges that they struggle with. We are human beings after all, not machines, and we are vulnerable to different life situations and challenges.

Organizations should think about resilience from 3 systemic levels: individuals, teams and organization. This is important as work is increasingly structured around teams. Individual resilience focused on individual skills to mitigate stressors, team resilience is about creating the team environment that promotes psychological safety and support, and organization resilience focused on culture, policies and psychosocial safety climate priorities.

Now that we've got these concepts cleared up, let's focus on the question at hand. How do I know if my team is resilient? Resilience, like other aspects of team attributes, is often hard to measure and isolate. It still revolve around trust, healthy challenges, accountability, commitment and alignment. I will put it out there that a high performing team, a happy team, an effective team are generally proportionate to a resilient team. Any improvements made to the team ways of working in one area tends to benefit all the other areas. If we do want to be specific, LHH & Ferrazzi Greenlight has came up with a model through their research of key characteristics that defined resilient teams. Instead of measuring resilience, they chose instead to focus on measuring these characteristics, with the hypothesis that if these characteristics contributes towards team resilience:

• Candor – ability to have open and honest interactions with one another

• Resourcefulness – ability to find creative solutions, think outside of the box, ability to work independently from standard processes and practices

• Compassion – care for one another, strong team identity – we win and lose as one team

• Humility – Ability to show vulnerability and ask for help from one another.

When you look through these characteristics, I'm sure you notice the similarities to psychological safety. Having a resilient team is about creating an environment that allows us to be at our best, and it is ok to show vulnerability, its ok to put yourself out there with the assurance that you won't be punished or humiliated for making mistakes or speaking up with ideas, questions and concerns.

If you notice that there are elements within these characteristics that can be better in your team, here are some suggestions by Ferrazzi on actions you can take to improve them:

• Improve Candor by: building psychological safety – more listening, less judgement; encourage open sharing of opinions & feedback

• Build Resourcefulness by: creating more space for peer reviews and brainstorming instead of just execution; introduce continuous improvement mindset

• Show Compassion by: conducting regular temperature checks; show genuine interest in team members on work & personal challenges

• Encourage Humility by: showing vulnerability; encourage team members to ask for help and promote team work & collaboration

Building team resilience starts with yourself. How aware are you of your own behaviors, your assumptions and your beliefs? What are your habitual patterns and how does that influence work practices in your team? How well are you in demonstrating inclusive behaviors and creating a truly safe environment for your team?

Every team is unique and has its own strengths and challenges. Have this conversation with your team to ensure mutual understanding, and create the ways of working that will bring about a more resilient and higher performing team.

Learning is extremely important, both for the individual and for society. For the individual, it’s a critical growth enabler, and a key component to our overall motivation and wellbeing. For society, its literally what can ensure our survival and prepare us for the future. But as any learning practitioner can tell you, its difficult. Learning is a human process, and similar to any other human processes, its fickle and unpredictable, and you need to understand the human psyche in order to complement that to how learning technology has evolved.

The 2 biggest challenges has always been motivation for learning, and the effectiveness of learning.

From an analysis into natural human processes, the trigger for learning is all about contact - the interaction between your inner consciousness (assumptions, beliefs, motivations and needs) with the external environment. The theory of learning says humans has an innate curiosity and that learning can only take place when there are Anxiety/Excitement, Failure and Emotion. We need to be at our learning edge, an emotional state that can entice us to want to know more. That learning edge can be happiness, excitement, disappointment or even anger. Often, that happens when outcomes differ from our expectations. Remember the motivation that comes to you when you were trying to impress someone you like? Or when you lost a competition? The stronger the emotions, the stronger the desire to learn, and the stronger the experience of learning. Creating the environment that will naturally provoke these emotions will help us increase the motivation for learning.

Many of you would be familiar with the learning approach 10/20/70 created by Centre of Creative Leadership from the 1980s. This is a useful model which remains valid today. I've seen many organizations using the model to plan their learning interventions, but its often from the perspective of the organization and is activity focus - attend a training, do a project, change your role etc, and often do not take into consideration the perspective of the individuals. As a result, these activities becomes a check-box exercise, and the purpose of these activities, along with the effectiveness of the outcome, becomes greatly reduced.

When we start to look at learning interventions from an individual's perspective, we can be more purpose and outcome driven. The objective of the 10% or training is to acquire information. At this point, this is just a data source. To progress the learning journey, we need to develop personal insights. These are the ah-ha moments we have when we are thinking or talking about the contents that we've acquired. Finally, we practice by incorporating them into our daily work, and embed behaviors. Embedding behavior is a critical step because your skills or expertise, is not what resides in your mind, but a visibly demonstrated behavior that others can experienced consistently. When we start to think about learning from these outcomes and measures what really change when learning takes place, traditional learning becomes less relevant. We will be able to introduce more flexibility, and drive more personal accountability and focus into what individuals need, thereby improving the overall effectiveness of the learning experience.

Teams form the foundation of any organizations. When the teams are robust and performing well, the integrity of the organization is maintained and the organization can strive to greater heights.

Building a high performing team

Team development has certain similarities to individual development. There's a lot of focus on creating personal awareness and developing personal effectiveness. Bringing that to the team level allows the team to learn together and support each other on the journey with feedback and team reviews, and offers a safe space to experiment and practice. This often accelerates the individual development too if done right. The complication is that all the team members, including the team lead, would have to agree and commit to the efforts. Contracting is critical at this stage. Getting a clear consensus from the whole team of what the intent and objectives are, what are hurdles which might get in the way, what success will look like, and what are agreed elements to create the psychological safety to speak openly without repercussions and be vulnerable. Remember, psychological safety has multiple levels - sense of belonging, safety to learn, safety to contribute and safety to challenge (The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety, Dr Timothy Clark). Remember to document this!

There are many models of high performing teams, my personal favorite is the 5 dysfunctions model by Patrick Lencioni. In the model, Lencioni introduced a pyramid with Trust at the bottom, followed by Conflict, Commitment, Accountability and finally Attention to Results at the top of the pyramid. We shall explore each in more details.

Trust

Trust is the most fundamental interpersonal attribute to enable any kind of contact, but it is probably the most complex psychological state to demonstrate. At a basic level, Trust comes from relationships, and relationships comes from knowing about one another - what's visible (professional life, personal life, hobbies, demonstrated identities and affiliations), and what's not visible (history, experiences, assumptions, values and beliefs). At more advanced level, especially when we have an ongoing close relationship (like being part of a team), we need to deconstruct Trust into more measurable elements:

• Acceptance: "I accept people as they are." Accepting people as they are without judgement or prejudice and being able to differentiate between the things they do and who they are.

• Openness: "I share what think and feel." Allowing your thoughts and opinions to be known and not hiding information.

• Congruency: "What I say and do stay true to my beliefs and values." Being authentic to who you are and what you believe in.

• Reliability: "I do what I say." Following up and seeing through the promises and commitment you make.

A good exercise to do is a self-evaluation of how you demonstrate these 4 elements, share the results with the whole team and ask for honest feedback from the team: Which elements do you demonstrate more of, less of.

Its important to note that Trust is not liking someone. You could hate someone and still has trust and respect for who the person is.

Conflict

Conflict has a very high cultural distinction to it. In Asian societies, conflict is actively flinched upon, whereas in western societies, it is more acceptable as they have clearer boundaries between personal and professional spaces. Conflict as defined in the model, is about being able to have open discussions among the team, without fear or penalty. The team focuses on the issues, not personal attacks. Conflict is only achievable when a certain level of Trust has been built. A lack of conflict means its important to the team to maintain an artificial harmony, or team members refrain from speaking even if that leads to poor results or a substandard proposal.

Practices to promote open conflict includes:

1. Get into the habit of doing After Action Reviews (or team reviews) after every meetings, events or projects. List down what went well, and what could be different next time. An continuous improvement mindset will help create safety to voice improvement ideas.

2. Appoint a "Devil's Advocate". This rotating role's function is to critique and identify risks or obstacles that might derail the project. Making it a formal role sets the expectations for everyone that challenges will be made, and it also adds an element of fun.

3. Practice the Six Thinking Hats or Disney's 3 Chairs. Similar to a devil's advocate, this approach encourages everyone to see things in different perspectives and encourage open sharing.

Commitment

Commitment is about following through with the decisions that has been made. In our personal lives, we know how difficult it is when someone puts an expectation for us to do something - go on a diet, exercise, quit smoking. We find it very difficult to commit to that unless it is something that we've decided we want to do for ourselves. Similarly in a team environment, to get everyone working towards the same goal require the building of joint ownership of the decision.

Lencioni introduced an exercise to drive commitment, called the Commitment Clarification Exercise:

1. What is the decision that has been made? Be specific and test for understanding so that the team is on the same page.

2. Create clarity on the details - timelines, actions, roles & responsibilities, measures of progress and results

3. Highlight potential challenges or hurdles. What could possibly get in the way?

4. Invite the team to share their opinions, ideas, feedback openly. Give them time to digest the information and discuss with their own team members or other stakeholders. Arrange for another session of feedback if required.

5. As a team, developed contingency plans to address risks and issues.

6. Set expectations for the team members to communicate the final decision and details with their own team members so that the team presents a united front.

Team participation in discussing the issues and building of plans helps to foster joint ownership. Modify the exercise based on the urgency, complexity and emotional attachment of the decision that needs to be made.

Accountability

Accountability is often the direct result of how committed the team members are towards the decision made. However, with constant changes happening, priorities can shift and plans get delayed. Accountability comes in both sides of the coin - how do we hold ourselves and each other accountable?

A good practice is to introduce interdependencies in our project plans - whether an activity requires a precursor or is a dependency for another activity to be completed. A good project plan often focuses on constraints or dependencies, and these have higher priorities compared to other activities due to the risk of failure or delays if these activities are not done well. So do ensure there are sufficient resources placed on these critical activities.

The other good practice is to run regular reviews of outstanding projects. Most teams do this relatively well. One way of doing this differently to drive accountability is to embrace the "red is good" or embracing failure mindset. Team members should be encourage to share their challenges and openly ask for help. This is one area where the team lead should be actively role-modelling.

Attention to Results

A team is only a team, and not a random group of people coming together, because they have common goals. As such, a good, clearly defined set of team goals is important to align the team in the same direction. This team goal should be held at the highest, above individual goals and agenda. Leaders typically wear multiple hats in an organization. They are team members of one team, and lead their own teams, or are matrixed members in other teams. It is not unusual for them to feel that they have conflicting priorities and focus on those that benefits themselves most.

Going through the above steps to collaboratively define the team goals is a good way to ensure team members are committed and accountable to drive toward these goals.

Team Ways of Working

It is important to remember that building a high performing team is not something that can be done overnight. Trust takes a long time to build, and its easily broken. Mindsets and behavioral changes takes time to embed. As we are embarking on the journey of building a high performing team, its important to develop an agreement of sorts that the team commit to trying. It could be specific behaviors like Be Respectful or Withhold Judgement, or it could be activity based like defining frequency and length of meetings, and doing AARs in every meeting. This agreement defines how the team agree to work with one another, and its fluent and dynamic - the team should review this every few months, to ensure that it addresses the areas that the team feels important to work on. Aim for continuous small successes rather than one big transformation.

Scaling the High Performing Team Experience

Building one high performing team is already quite challenging. Imagine if you need to scale this up in the organization to build hundreds or thousands of high performing teams.

This has been done in quite a few organizations, and there are some good learnings from the implementation:

1. Senior leaders sponsorship. Similar to any large scale organizational interventions, senior level sponsorship is critical for it to be successful. The most powerful way to do it is to get the executive leadership team to do it for themselves, so that they experience the shift it creates and the benefits it can bring.

2. This is a massive change exercise. Do the appropriate change management planning to ensure the organization understand what it is, what is the impact and benefits, and what is expected of them. Use narratives, personal stories, testimonials to gain interest and buy-in.

3. Develop a standard process that is replicable. Yes, every team is different, have different strengths and faces different challenges. The team conversations around the framework will allow the teams to identify the areas to focus on, and the team agreements they are building.

4. The effectiveness of this journey can be harness through good facilitators using coaching approaches. THIS IS NOT A TRAINING! This is not a download of information, but an exercise that requires full participation from all team members. And the facilitators would need to have experiences dealing with dynamics in the room, courage to point out what needs to be addressed, and to create a safe space to draw the team members to speak openly. Engage an external coaching company if you do not have resources internally.

5. Linking to the above point, running high performing team workshops for the whole organization can be very resource intensive and expensive if you're hiring external facilitators. Focus your limited resources on the most impactful, which are typically the top leadership teams, or project teams working on important initiatives. As the journey for each team could take months, be ready that scaling to the wider organization would be a multi-year effort.

Embarking on a high performing team journey is extremely rewarding and has enormous return on investment. You are not just solving a project issue, but building up the leader and team's capability to bring in their unique strengths and resources to overcome any challenges that they might face. Every team that goes through this journey makes the organization exponentially stronger, because they will learn not just highly effective ways to work within their own team, but also how team members work with other teams.

One of the challenges faced by business and HR leaders is to encourage learning in the organization, presumably so that employees can perform better in their jobs, be mobile in moving roles, and develop strong agility in the face of constant changes. The fact is that human beings are constantly learning, all the time. That's what give us a purpose for living and allows us to adapt and survive. Think about your own personal learning. What motivates you? Common motivation includes interest, purpose in life, fulfilling a need (learning how to cook because I'm not staying with mom anymore), progression, status, wanting to impress someone, or sometimes just unconscious mimicking of others.

The challenge comes when employees are NOT learning what the leaders want them to learn. I've seen a local bank making digital and data analytics a mandatory e-learning for all its employees. The contents added up to about 20 days of learning to go through, and 1 year to complete them, or else…. I believe I'm not exaggerating when I say 99% of employees do not remember a single thing after completing the e-learning.

Developing learning contents or delivering them is not a big issue for most organizations. There's ample resources and expertise to manage that. The issue typically is to get employees to bite. This is a noble cause. Although the organization's objectives are more business & performance driven, the benefits truly extends to employees as they pick up new skills and broaden their thinking. In order to embed this learning culture and promote learning practices, organizations will need to take a step back, and look at this more systematically and consider psychological human processes. Here are some considerations for organizations trying to embed a stronger learning culture.

Strategic Intent:

What is the real purpose of driving learning? I've seen many organizations not being clear about their intent, or unable to link it to the strategic direction. The result is that it becomes a hollow call to action, and an uninspiring task for employees to complete. Being transparent about the challenges faced help employees understand why it is important, and encourage them to step up to take ownership of organization learning, offering resources, contents and solutions. I've seen a CEO sharing an impassioned plea to his organization about the need to drive innovation in order for the company to survive. As a result of that, there were circles of learning popping out in different parts of the organization in various shapes and forms from innovation workshops to ideas competition, all self-driven.

Leaders & Managers:

Leaders dictate the culture and managers shape the immediate work environment for employees. If something is worth doing, it should be worth doing for everyone in the organization, starting from the top of the house. I'm sure you have experienced the leaders who wants something implemented for the team, but don’t feel its relevant for themselves. This delegation of tasks will propagate throughout the organization and everyone will know this is not important. Proper role modelling behaviours includes putting this as a strategic priority (if it really is); getting involved personally by attending learning events; sharing their own stories in learning and how it helped them; creating sufficient space & time for employees participate in developmental work; and creating psychological safety for their teams and employees to learn. The last point is really important, and warrant a separate category to discuss further.

Psychological Safety to Learn & Contribute:

Yes, we do need psychological safety to partake in learning at work. Some of the typical factors which discourages learning are: employees are only allowed to do "approved" learning; they need to report back on progress; sometimes they are expected to share the learning they attended; learning content is not aligned with their current job role; and undue expectations that results improve immediately. Learning is quite a personal endeavor for individuals. They learn based on their motivation, and often in their own time and own methods. To build the learning culture, we need to ensure that learning is made fun and encompassing so that it feels safe to explore all different types of learning. The important thing here is not to control what to learn, but to build the learning habits, so that employees can start to apply this in both their personal & professional lives.

Learning is effective and meaningful only if we can do something with it. Herein lies the second part of psychological safety - safety to contribute. After acquiring knowledge, we need to have opportunities to practice what we learn, or else it will quickly be forgotten. Creating opportunities for employees to participate in project teams, stretch assignment, secondment, with an explicit acceptance of risk taking and addressing failure with a learning mindset rather than penalty is the best way to promote safety to learn and contribute.

Processes & Systems:

Having an accessible learning resource is a minimum requirement. Imagine the reaction of an employee who's interested to learn something but have to go through hoops just to enroll in that learning. Obstacles could include needing approval from managers, lack of availability, costs involved, system is difficult to navigate, unable to find the learning contents that they want. Having said that, learning has never been more accessible as it is today. I would challenge you to find a topic that you can't access for free either on a search engine or YouTube. Finding a perfectly curated content is time consuming, and certain topics do required a more experiential approach, but this should not be considered a show-stopper.

Another process which is critical to get right is the performance & development conversations. As part of the managers' responsibility too, the important point to note here is having a balance view on both performance and development and regular check-ins throughout the year, rather than just a single year end review. The manager should remember that developing the team is part of their primary responsibility, and have clear expectations from the organization to do so. A coaching approach here is very useful for managers during such conversations: How are you doing against your objectives? What's going well and what do you find challenging? What resources and support do you need? What have you learned about yourself? What are your developmental focus? How can I support you?

Recruitment Policies:

Among all other related people processes, the organization's philosophy to hiring and internal mobility is the most impactful factor to drive a learning culture. For most employees, opportunity for progression is ranked among the top motivator for professional learning. Organizations who value the right attitude and relevant skills in their hiring and internal mobility practices generally promote a much higher learning agility within employees. Think of organizations like Shell, GSK, Unilever where employees are actively encouraged to move roles every few years. In addition to promoting lifelong learning, these organizations are developing the right leaders - leaders who have shown agility to be able to perform in different roles working within different environments, who have extended their knowledge of the company and be able to widen their perspectives, share best practices, and develop a more enterprise mindset. Compare that to organizations who still practice number of years of experience as the pre-requisites for roles. What kind of leaders are you cultivating when you only value individuals who have done the same job for a number of years, and expect them to continue doing the same job for the future?

A great development that supports the democratizing of hiring is the skills-based economy. Basically what it means is that as an individual, you focus on developing skills rather than experience to fulfill different job requirements. These skills are badges that you earned and can be rated by others. Organizations use the matching of job requirements to skills to shortlist the most appropriate candidates. This development is useful because of the pace of change happening. A sales manager today uses very different skillsets from a sales manager 10 years ago. And by focusing on the right skills for the job today, we can put the right person in the right role.

Conclusion

Overall, developing a learning culture is no different from other enterprise change initiatives. What's important is for us to build & support advocates and enable them to be successful, while trying to remove resistances that can impede the process. Once there are sufficient advocates for learning to reach a tipping point, it will automatically entice others to join the journey.

People are the most important asset a company has. They create the unique differentiating advantages that can deliver the business strategy and bring the culture to life. In any organization, there are always different segments of employees. 90% of employees are those that come to do their job, 9% are leaders who play a more significant role setting directions and ensuring deliverables are met, and then there's the 1%. This 1% is what makes the difference whether it’s a good company or a great company. We have all experienced what can happen when there's an amazing leader in the organization. However, leaders and talents are mutually exclusive as not all leaders are talents. Its only when we allow these two groups to overlap (ie. Talents = Leaders) when we see the true potential of the organization emerges. CIPD came up with a definition of Talent & Talent Management which speaks to this nicely.

• Talent refers to individuals who can make a significant difference to organizational performance. This may be through their immediate contribution or, in the longer-term, by reaching their highest levels of potential.

• Talent management is the systematic attraction, identification, development, engagement, retention, and deployment of those individuals who are of particular value to an organization. This may be through their high potential or because they fulfil critical roles.

(https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/strategy/resourcing/talent-factsheet#gref)

In most organizations, we do have appropriate developmental strategies for these different segments of the population, commonly differentiated by learning, leadership development and talent development. Learning is a low touch intervention that aims to improve the general organizational capabilities in skills and behaviors. Leadership development is a much more focused approach to target specific leadership attributes and a good program can be quite a transformative experience for the participants. Talent management & development has similar elements to leadership development, but with a higher emphasis on stretching and exposing, which will be covered in more details.

Generally, the strategy of talent management and development follows the typical employee life cycle: organizational planning, attracting, developing and retaining. In a people-centric company, employees experience growth and development and the working environment allow them to bring the best version of themselves. The difference comes from the fact that talents are talents because of who they are. They are not your run-of-the-mill employees who's just here to get a paycheck every month. Talents want to make a difference to the organization, and they have high ambition and aspirations for themselves. In a larger and more complex organization, the ideal employee experience is difficult to scale due to the wide spectrum of employees and manager capabilities. As such, to optimize the return on investment, talent management and development are dedicated to a selected group of people whom the company deemed to have the highest impact or with the greatest chance of success.

We will examine the talent management and development strategy to identify critical considerations that will allow us to uncover the true potential of the talent pool we have.

Organizational Planning

Before we decide on any actions, the understanding of business strategy and organizational requirements is a must. Whether the company has a specific challenge to overcome, a transformative journey, or just pursuing an organic growth, the requirements to the organization is distinct. All forms of people & organizational development initiatives have certain value. But to have highly impactful results and be able to gain strong support & ownership from the business require these strategies giving the business exactly what they need. Talent management and development programs typically addresses acquiring of specific critical skills, retaining strong performers, strengthening the succession pipeline or simply developing better leaders. The more we are able to engage business leaders to gain clarity in these requirements will allow us to design interventions that hits the mark and provide the correct outcomes.

Sometimes it is not easy to identify what is needed. A good practice would be to engage the senior leadership team to define the requirements together. In addition to the collective experience and intelligence the team can bring in, this engagement serves mainly to ensure the outcome is a collaborative team decision, so that everyone is on board the eventual design.

Attracting

Build, borrow or buy? This is a question often pondered by leaders when they observed a talent drought. The obvious answer is that it depends, and often a blended approach is preferred. Having too many external hires can be quite discouraging for employees, but yet some is needed to develop generative capabilities - we always want new perspectives coming into the organization.

Whether internal or external, identifying a talent is probably the most difficult thing to do. A common way of assessment consider performance and potential. Performance is straightforward. It measures the ability of the person to deliver and exceed the objectives set. Potential, however, is more difficult to ascertain. Clinical psychologists & psychometric assessments are used to ascertain aptitude, ambition and other factors that might predict future success. But it is really important to do the assessment in relation to the organization's working culture. A poor culture fit is the fastest way to failure, both for the individual and the organization.

One consideration which is often difficult to overcome is around learning agility. Broadly speaking, most job descriptions require a certain number of years of experience in that role. That is what hiring managers want as well so that they can be sure the person coming into the role is able to perform the role requirements. But therein lies the conundrum - if a person has done the same job for the last 10 years, and is applying for a similar role for the next 10 years, is this person a talent, or just someone who's good at what they do? When hiring for a talent, it is important to see demonstration of the person doing well across different roles, interacting with different stakeholders. This represents a certain level of adaptability, agility and perspectives that is needed for eventual senior leadership positions. Many organizations faced an issue of high performing individuals being groomed for key leadership positions, only to choke at the last minute, because these individuals have been high performing only in the roles that they are comfortable in, most commonly faced when moving from an execution role into a strategic role.

Developing

As mentioned earlier in the article, developing a high potential talent is very similar to developing any other leaders in the organization. These talents will eventually be senior leaders in the organization, and need to demonstrate the values and behaviors to lead and inspire the organization. However, talent development do need additional emphasis on stretch and exposure.

As the main purpose of talent management is to uncover potential, talents need to be put into development that pushes them outside of their comfort zones. Taking on a project outside of their job function, doing a secondment, moving them to different teams, roles or location are all ways to get them away from what they are familiar with, so that their responses and behaviors can be observed and resources provided for the support of their development.

Internal mobility is the most common impediment to the development, and it happens from a variety of reasons - the individual themselves may not want to move from where they are; their manager may restrain them from moving because they do not want to lose a great asset; or the future manager may not accept these individuals from a perceived lack of experience in the future role. This is a problem that can be overcome with senior leadership intervention, but the better solution is to develop an active internal mobility culture where employees are constantly encouraged to move roles every few years. Companies like Unilever, Shell, GSK has done this quite successfully.

The purpose of moving talents around is to build capabilities. However, the focus is not about building functional knowledge but the attributes that is important for enterprise leadership. Other than the usual ones like influencing, networking, effective communication and such, the few critical ones are:

1. Strategic or Enterprise Perspectives: Exposing key talents to different functions allow the individuals to gain an understand of how the organization operates. They get to experience how different functions work together to create synergy. This experience allows for these future leaders to break down siloes, and accelerate decision making and delivery of results.

2. Agility: Rotating talents across different functions every few years forces the individuals to learn to appreciate strategic importance. It requires them to be able to pick out critical information faster to make decisions or take actions, without the luxury of time. An enterprise leader is not expected to know everything, but they need to know enough of what is important, to be able to lead and inspire the organization.

3. Resilience: Failure is the best test of a person's character and their resilience. Failure does not indicate a lack of capability, but the ability to bounce back from failure is a strong indication of talent potential. Its easy when we're always successful. It does indicate a level of intelligence to be able to do things well and deliver as plan. But the environment is always changing, challenges will always present themselves. The demonstration of the ability to learn from our failures to become stronger and carry on, is what will differentiate the true potential of a leader.

Retaining

Sometimes, the labelling of talents can be counter-productive. Overdoing the talent emphasis, and you risk ending up with a lot of dissatisfied "talents" thinking they should have been promoted long ago, and there is a high flight risks when these individuals do not get the advancement they want. And when talents do not perform to the higher expectations, sometimes they are punished excessively, even though they may still be performing better than the average employee.

The talent concept needs to be very well understood by leaders and HR practitioners. It is not a cattle brand that once you are marked, you are a talent permanently. The talent process is a very fluid process. As much as we would like to identify the future CEO within the talent pool, it is also an exercise to help this group of talented individuals find meaning for themselves, and a role that really excite them and bring out their best.

The maturity of the talent concept in the organization will lead to better career conversations, be it with talents, or with any employees in the organization. The key is to achieve a balance between what the organization need, and what the individuals want.

Conclusion

Talent management is a stop-gap measure. In an ideal world, we should be doing talent management with all the employees in the organization and that would be possible when the organization reaches a certain level of maturity, and all the managers are able to have healthy and open discussions about career development and plans for their teams; a robust internal mobility scene; and an inclusive environment which is able to recognize true capabilities in individuals.