Why Businesses Need a Strong Talent Strategy

Matty Gregg, Vice President of Talent Management

What are the challenges or the core trends you have seen over the years in talent management?

While the concept of talent management has been around for many years, it can be difficult to get adoption when a company has been successful without it. When you reach a certain size in a company to where you need it, and with a talent market place that is demanding it, how do you convince your company leaders to start talent or succession planning in their organizations? It requires a focus and reinforced messaging from your Board and your executives. And it doesn’t happen overnight. You need to keep pointing out that the scale of your company no longer allows leaders to work in silos; that sharing talent across organizations is a good thing.

Another important challenge that is mostly forgotten is that when you have had success within an organization that is siloed, many of the silos do the same work, but define it differently. It’s up to your entire organization to come together to have common definitions around the work that your company does. This does NOT necessarily mean consistent job titles. You can have as many job titles that you want, but each job needs to be homed in common definitions of what the work is. Otherwise, you can’t offer clear career paths for people in a talent-driven market place.

What is your approach when it comes to designing skillful and centralized leadership programs?

For me, it's important to have a common and shared language to identify high potentials and offer talent and mobility opportunities within the organization. Getting back to why it’s important to define the work your company does: you may have a lot of talented individuals at your company, but they may not be doing the right work right now for their careers. Michael Jordan, a legendary athlete, is one of the best examples of this. When he shifted to baseball, he struggled (I suppose “struggle” is a relative term), but his passion was team sports, and his results in basketball were phenomenal. It’s really about defining the work your company does, then finding the individuals who have abilities, passions, work histories, and other traits to drive that important work.

How has talent management changed with the adoption of remote work?

Remote work has always been around, first romanticized by the mini/personal computer revolution in the 70s & 80s in Silicon Valley. However, remote work didn't really become popular until the pandemic hit. For those businesses requiring face-to-face interactions with customers, you need to strike a balance with your employees of not being too prescriptive with coming into the office, yet ensuring that your employees are able to have meaningful interactions with your customers and other employees. As a leader, you want them to understand that working remotely is flexible, but you do lose that person-to-person connection, even over zoom. You should always stress QUALITY of interactions with customers and other employees over a predetermined set of time(9-to-5, 5 days a week job). This notion of “teamwork” should always be part of a performance evaluation.

Have you seenmany difficulties withmanaging operations remotely?

There will always be challenges with managing operations remotely, but one extremely important benefit is that when you deal with teams who have operated face-to-face, and they can no longer do that, it exposes some of the larger issues you had, such as a lack of tools that handle broader communication, or having to fix disciplines for using operational systems as they were intended. Innovation is needed when there’s such a huge shift from face-to-face and hybrid, and it’s up to your IS teams to innovate through that.

What would be your advice for the upcoming professionals to be successful in this field?

Know your employees. I believe that the better you know your employees, the better you understand the talent strategy you want to build in an organization. The employer must have solid job architecture and a deployment strategy around the skill sets and interests they have and are looking for. That includes always thinking about your bench strength. Also, DEI should not be an “add-on” to your talent strategy. It should be a core definer. More diverse teams lead to better results. There are no shortage of studies that show this.

Invest in your people and their careers. Give them tools to model what they want to do and where they could go. As leaders, don’t be scared of losing top talent: be bold in exposing them to different opportunities within the company. Don’t hoard talent. Celebrate the time you are with them and always think of how your bench can step in to do the work they do in their absence.

And as I said earlier, define your work broadly inside your company. Failing to define your work broadly when your business is growing might result in several silos and market segmentation. It’s not easy to undo.

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