Do you know if your organisation is talent long or short?
Are we long - or short - on talent? Great question posed by McKinsey’s Megan McConnell and Bill Schaninger. It’s a question all organisations should be asking themselves - regularly! Developing an approach to ensure your talent skills are aligned with your needs, need not resemble the process of the past…
The McKinsey article, which I encourage you to read, shares some truly creatives ways of managing your talent pools, alongside tried and tested methods. The most important aspect however is to first understand the skills that your organisation needs, the skills your organisation has, and evaluate if you are long or short? Are you under or oversupplied on the skills needed in your organisation to best position you to meet your strategic goals today and into the future? From this understanding you have created a great foundation to move forward.
One of the exciting notions they present is to move away from looking at position titles when considering skills, and to look more deeply at the actual skills. What skills might your employees have that aren’t currently being deployed because they don’t align with their job description? What skills might your employees be able to develop to meet your needs? What skills do you need to bring in or exit? How should you go about this?
The article is a great read, easy to digest and only takes a few minutes. - if you’re interested I’d highly encourage you to click through. Although the article predominantly refers to examples of larger sized organisations, there are many size and scale appropriate ways that smaller businesses can take similar approaches - in fact, the smaller, the more nimble, and usually the quicker it is to implement and gain advantages of taking a more proactive approach to your talent strategies.
