|
Seven Strategies for Nurturing Personnel Talent
by Adele Sommers
When businesses invest in their personnel, they're taking a far-sighted view of success. Continually increasing the expertise of your staff members can help your organization remain flexible, energized, and profitable. Your employees comprise your greatest intellectual assets, and you can nurture their strengths into potent specializations using a variety of instructional resources and support systems.
This article discusses seven ways to help your contributors grow, beginning with aiming their talents in the right direction. In so doing, you can turn employees into "co-visionaries" by enabling them to:
- Transform their strongest aptitudes into their most valuable expertise
- Understand cause-and-effect relationships in your business, and
- Learn to use highly effective performance-building techniques
Don't Depend on Luck!
The current global recession has produced a temporary "employers' market." This means there is so much available talent to choose from that many companies might be tempted to treat the personnel recruiting and selection process as if they were shopping at a rummage sale. They can pick and choose for their momentary needs, but they might not be inclined to plan strategically for how to best use and develop that talent over time.
 Likewise, in plentiful times, it might seem reasonable to "hire and forget" -- either when gaining new employees or utilizing contract help. With this approach, you would hire or contract someone to fill a particular need, apply a dollop of orientation and maybe a dab of training, send them into action, and presto! Problem solved!
Or is it?
Certainly, a short-term advantage of a "hire and forget" philosophy is that it's a fairly fast and convenient way to plug a human being into a socket of temporary need. But with this perspective, you're not considering the negative effects of high turnover.
And, indeed, significant turnover and downsizing has occurred during these wildly fluctuating economic cycles. Whenever that happens, many of an organization's intellectual assets -- people with precious, or even priceless knowledge and expertise -- simply walk out the door, perhaps not ever to return.
Some businesses don't ever recover from such losses, and suffer the painful consequences.
Here's a More Proactive Approach
Rather than depending on assumptions about whether your labor supply will remain plentiful, you can adopt a more insightful position. You can realize that conditions in existence today can evaporate tomorrow. You can also recognize that the invaluable assets you have embodied in personnel can best serve the company's goals when their talents are nurtured. The key is to aim these talents along each individual's greatest strengths, since these will provide the ultimate benefit to the company.
 Indeed, assuming that your organization can survive and thrive without a program to bring out the best in its people can have long-term ripple effects. And your personnel really include both regular employees and contract workers recruited to fill interim needs.
Therefore, obtaining the payoff you desire from your people, products, and services may depend on your considering the needs of the entire staffing picture.
Companies sometimes fret about whether to invest in training their personnel, since those people might later leave with their newly acquired skills.
I heard Rick Barrera, author of "Overpromise & Overdeliver: The Secrets of Unshakable Customer Loyalty," propose the following rebuttal. He said,
"Some companies worry, 'What if we train people, and they leave?' The more important question should be, 'What if we don't train people... and they stay?'"
Below are several options for nurturing the development of expertise in your organization:
1. |
Career assessments to match people's talents and greatest strengths with enterprise needs. These might be administered in-house or through outside consulting services. |
2. |
Formal instruction, such as through degree or certificate programs. These could be offered at local schools or through online learning venues. |
3. |
All types of training, including classroom instruction, online learning, and self-paced tutorials. And although training is not a cure-all for every achievement deficit, when used correctly to impart missing knowledge, it's an extremely powerful tool. |
4. |
On-the-job learning through workplace apprenticeships, supervised practice, various types of work-study arrangements, and one-on-one mentoring. |
5. |
Team learning through problem-solving, researching industry trends and benchmarks, designing experiments, and related skill development. These learning experiences can extend from novice to advanced levels. |
6. |
Personnel cross-training and the rotation of related job functions. Individual departments or work groups may take the lead on designing cross-learning arrangements, which also depend on good procedural documentation. |
7. |
Electronic support systems that help people perform various tasks on the job, and also provide just-in-time, context-specific instruction. These systems can reduce the need for extensive training by supplying task-level support. |
In conclusion, you and your staff will be much more productive, and your customers more satisfied, when you apply far-sighted personnel development instead of shortsighted luck. In this fashion, your staff can become a formidable force capable of catapulting your business far beyond your competition.
Copyright 2009 Adele Sommers
|
As the summer winds down, how fit is your business to leap into fall?
"
