The Emerging Focus on Talent, Part IV

Now that the importance of talent to a Supply Management organization’s success is well understood, an organization needs to know how to get started on its talent management journey.
Based on the collective insights on talent management brought to you by SI over the years, which includes some great insights from the recent Hackett Group Best Practices conference, some key starting points are:

  1. Admit You Have a Talent Management Problem
    Even if the organization is world-class and has a team filled with extremely talented individuals, it still has a problem. First of all, its top talent is being recruited daily and eventually one of its competitors is going to make an offer that each of its top X talented individuals are not going to be able to refuse. Then it will have to deal with the fact that the only pool of talented resources out there with the education, experience, and expertise needed are already employed by competitors. So even if the organization doesn’t have a problem today, it will tomorrow.
  2. Make Supply Management Attractive
    If you want raw talent to choose Supply Managemnt as a career path, it has to be attractive. If Marketing or Finance or Legal gets all the glory, that’s where the talent will go.
  3. Put a Hire-to-Retire Plan in Place
    Not only does raw talent have to see Supply Management as an exciting career option, raw talent has to see Supply Management as an exciting career option in your company with a well defined, long-term, growth plan that can lead all the way to the C-Suite.
  4. Make Cultural Diversity a Core Value
    Cummins, Disney, and HP understand the critical importance of a diverse team — your organization should too.
  5. Talent Comes First
    Great leadership is important, but team success is more important. Make sure leadership puts the good of the team and the success of their employees above their own. That’s how a world-class Supply Management organization is built.

And while this list of starting points certainly isn’t exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination, it will put the organization in the right mindset to formulate its talent acquisition, retention, management, advancement, and retirement strategy and ensure talent is put first in the H2R (Hire-to-Retire) strategy, which is much more than just another metric of a world-class organization.