When a person has strong natural abilities, the right attitude for the job purpose, and is aligned with your company mission and vision, they are positioned for success: everything becomes easier. There is less resistance, management is more open to coaching, and there is a fundamental agreement on what they are there to do. Everyone involved must have a talent mindset – where people and culture are the competitive advantage for the organization to thrive. Engaged employees are excited employees, aligned with the companies purpose and mission.

Take Responsibility for Employee Development

Managers are directly responsible for the coaching, developing, and mentoring of their people and, that being said, HR or Talent Optimization must provide people managers the support, coaching, and training they need to identify competency gaps and use mistakes and failures as learning opportunities. Fundamental training for managers in how to unleash the human potential in people is required.

Before someone has the opportunity to fail, a conscious hiring process needs to be in place to ensure the right person is placed in the right role for the right reasons. This includes competency, compatibility, and capability, as well as passion alignment.

Once the employee is hired, and has bought into the purpose of their role, there must be a plan in place to optimize their talent and close their developmental gaps. After that, it’s up to the manager to inspire, lead, guide, coach, recalibrate, redirect, and keep the employee accountable to the purpose of their role, and the agreed upon measures of success. The manager’s job is to true the employee up to who they need to be to fulfill the intention of their role.

Remove Training Roadblocks

The best way to remove training roadblocks is to create a Talent Capacity Index (TCI) for each employee, each department, and the organization overall. Once the “training department” understands the GAPs in the TCI, they can customize training for what each individual or group needs.

Most people resist training that they do not think they need; when sound and correct data is collected from the employees responsible for doing the work, and the managers who lead them, and that data as well as the overall business strategy is taken into consideration, better, more targeted training can begin.

The top approaches to training and grooming are:

1. Creating a Talent Capacity Index and using it to validate direction and initiatives,

2. Align training initiatives and programs to fulfil the gaps in the implementation for the business strategy,

3. Create targeted competency development modules that nurture, foster, and grow core values,

4. Targeted knowledge transfer and mentoring opportunities between the older and younger generations,

5. Build capacity in the organization by targeting Subject Matter Experts and those that want to become SMEs,

6. Utilize Adult learning principles when creating e-learning, instructor led or collaborative training programs,

7. Build a combination of eLearning, instructor led, flip training, reflection guidelines, targeted stretch assignments,

8. Create an in-house coaching and mentoring program,

9. Gather regular feedback about how employees feel about and rate their contributions to the business success.

Setting the standard from the beginning

An ideal path to creating a positive, supportive environment that generates commitment and enthusiasm is by creating Alignment from the get-go. Hire for alignment, promote the right people to management (people who have the natural ability to inspire, lead, develop and true people up to who they are and can be). Before you cut people who do not fit in, don’t deliver results, and aren’t aligned with the core values, sit them down and clearly communicate what’s missing and what needs to be put in front of them to be at integrity within the organization.

Always create training with the end result in mind; not only what you want the training to look like by articulating specific outcomes the training must deliver, but what you expect from the people who receive the training. The key to structuring a framework for mutually effective learning and development is by understanding how your people learn, and by targeting training to fit the learning styles. Hire the right people for the right jobs. Invest in leadership development that specifically teaches managers how to unlock the wealth of talent in their people.