4 Step Guide to Identify & Replicate Your Best Talent in 2019?

Organizations are a mix of varied levels of employees in terms of their engagement, performance, motivation or loyalty towards the organization. While some of them are your best talent, some are better to get rid of and some are lying in the middle. Still the organizations treat their employees as a workforce rather than a set of individuals with varying skills, motivations, and experience. Policies are designed and processes executed in a way that treats everyone in a similar way.

The best talent is different not in terms of their skills or activities but also in terms of how they approach tasks, their motivation and how they work with other teams. While some of them can be coached, for the rest you need to identify the people with the right traits and nurture them.

Who would not want to identify their best talent and replicate more of them in their organization? There is a direct correlation between better talent and business performance and is a great source of value creation for organizations. With the added pressures from the industry, markets, and stakeholders, the need for better talent all across is bigger than any other time.

Based on our experience working with multiple clients, the approach to replication can be taken in the following steps

1. Identifying the best talent profile(BTP)
2. Hiring based best talent profile
3. Coaching to the best talent profile
4. Engaging the best talent profile

1. Identifying the best talent profile (BTP)

1. The first step is to identify the criteria that determine who's the best talent in your business. Look at your business metrics and identify the leading and lagging indicators which define your teams into best talent, average, and laggards.
2. Once you have the factors set, perform a 360-degree analysis to verify the data and build consensus as to whom management sees as best talent and why. Interviews, group meetings, and observations may help to expand the input.
3. Please also keep in mind that best talent is not just about top performance numbers but about behaviors as well. As part of the identification process, it's equally important to determine who not to include. If the sales numbers are great for a territory, but the salesperson achieved them by inheriting a great territory or winning a big deal that accounted for the majority of their quota attainment or was a single deal wonder, but due to the efforts of others, you should exclude them from the study. The key is to find the talent you want to clone.
4. Once you've identified the best talent, the next step is to determine what traits and behaviors are present and how they affect performance. Try to look not only at the behavior or activity data but also some of the traits they exhibit. Look at both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the things they are doing. A great tool used by leading organizations is the Talent assessments done to identify the right skills and behaviors that define the best talent for a role. It is important to identify the behaviors so that they can be isolated, defined and replicated.

2. Hiring based on best talent profile

1. The next step in the journey is to modify your hiring based on the best talent profile. The talent acquisition team and the hiring managers should hire not only on skills but behaviors as well. As a lot of people are not trained to identify or judge the behaviors and traits and there is always a risk of human bias while hiring.
2. A good practice is to use customized talent assessment solutions to bring in agility, standardization and remove the bias.

3. Coaching on the best talent profile

1. For the existing employees use assessments to identify their skills and behaviors gap with the best talent profile. Once the Gap Analysis is done, it should be the base for individual, team or group level interventions. People managers should use these gap analyses to help other team members acquire those skills and bridge the gaps.

4. Engaging the best talent profile

1. While you identify, hire and coach for the best talent, for best results, keep engaging the employees so that they don't fall back to the previous modes and continue to be amongst the best talent. Employee surveys have demonstrated a great correlation between understanding the needs of the employees and keep them engaged. The most common way to measure Engagement is via Online Surveys. Since measuring employee engagement is complex, there are a variety of surveys that can help you get a better handle of your employee's engagement. Some of the most common being Pulse Surveys, New Hire Surveys, Exit Interviews, 360 Degree & Employee NPS.
2. Replicating best talent is not a magic bullet, but a methodical approach to top talent replication is a huge leap from interventions done at a generic level. The foundation is to identify the differences in individuals and creating specific IDP's to include them in the best talent club. Not only this helps, employees, reach their potential, but also help organizations reach business performance and improve employee retention & engagement.