Sustainable Talent Management

Support of the CEO and Executive Team

When CEOs model the way for effective talent management you see successful system implementations and results. This includes defining clear expectations, setting individual development goals, conducting performance reviews on time, coaching and mentoring individuals, and holding managers accountable to fulfilling the same performance. We find that managers are most uncomfortable with building employee relations and holding others accountable to meeting expectations. They are uncomfortable with the dialogs and conversations required to be effective. They often let their own insecurities get in the way of helping others be better. The CEO is the best person to help managers overcome the fear and intimidation of the process and coach others to success.

Avoiding Complexity Creep

Complexity is what makes most good intentions a wasted effort. Without clear expectations, it is easy for complexity to creep back into the process. People start adding and building in features for all the contingencies and therefore confuse the true purpose and meaning required for the process. Your talent processes should be audited at least annually to look for opportunities to streamline and eliminate unnecessary complexities. This requires measuring outcomes and monitoring processes to determine what you need to weed out to optimize the time of HR staff and managers.

The Right HR Management and Talent Leadership

Few HR managers and staff have business systems and operations experience. This lack of understanding often makes it difficult for them to effectively integrate talent practices into the organization’s functional aspects. This may impede them from displaying the courage needed to engage and educate managers on the importance and practical steps to implement talent management priorities.

Internal Focus on Continuous Process Improvement and Paperless Processes

HR involves a lot of paperwork and provides great opportunities for savings in the time and money spent on resources – people, paper, email, and training. Talent managers must understand the business and where reduction in resources can be implemented.

Passion and Courage

Talent management is about people coming together to achieve a common purpose. The leader’s passion and commitment to achieve a vision is required to engage a systemic and focused talent program. Leadership must be persistent without compromise to achieve a focused and deeply engaged system. Passion is contagious, and the courage to take action only occurs when leadership sets the right example.

The overall talent management issues:

• As business in Vietnam continue to growth along with the economy, competition for talent will remain fierce
• Salary increases unlikely to come down along with ongoing inflationary impacts
• Movement of talent is expected to continue as employees are willing to move
• People issues particularly on leader development and succession will be the key focus
• Incentives will continue to be used as motivational tools.

To address the above talent management issues, the recommended solutions include:

• Establish Employment Value Proposition (EVP)
• Develop a total reward strategy beyond just compensation
• Make talent management unique to individual organization/culture – embrace talent management process
• Rethink organization structure, staffing strategies and management approaches
• Define your target talent segments
• Differentiate performance and rewards
• Engage high performers and transform them into next generation leader candidates