EXPERT'S CORNER: Tracking career paths

By Jim Matthewman, worldwide partner, Mercer.

In today’s war for talent, compensation alone is not enough - rising stars want progressive career development.

Organisations are realising that today’s talents have rising expectations of career development, which need to be matched to challenging work assignments and responsibilities.

Likewise, the pressure of globalisation, growing future business capability and identifying future leaders is top of mind for nearly all organisations. Profitable growth demands a committed and capable workforce able to meet current and future business challenges.

Yet the process of future development options is often poorly structured and driven by personal employee demands rather than planned organisational business needs. Line managers tend to focus on departmental rather than wider business needs. And while many organisations have drawn up talent strategies, weak definitions plus even weaker execution can seriously undermine good intentions.

According to Mercer’s global ‘What’s Working’ study, less than 40 per cent of employees surveyed believe their organisation was doing a good job of developing personnel to their full potential. Only 55 per cent felt confident that they would be able to achieve their longer-term career objectives with their current employer, and a similar percentage stated that they did not have sufficient opportunities for growth.

Organisations in turn have sacrificed many of their former career or development programmes for a shift on immediate productivity and cost containment measures. Not surprisingly, careers have suffered.

What’s held organisations back?
With weak processes, organisations are still making ad hoc career advancement decisions rather than proactively managing organisation-wide career development.

To be successful, companies need to understand:
- Which careers are critical to the business and will drive business performance;
- Where the sources of future talent are.

Too often organisations and line managers assume talent management is focused on key individuals. What is equally important is to identify the mission critical roles and their respective career paths. Lateral moves are often significant milestones, so analysis across job families is key.

Building a robust process
There are four steps for a successful process. These are:
- Talent dynamics (i.e. understanding what is really going on);
- Building a career infrastructure;
- Effective talent mapping;
- Ensuring line managers take action.

Talent dynamics
This is not only about identifying sources of talent but also noting how talent moves in, through and out of the organisation. This will show how people have typically progressed through a company. It is important to spot the feeder roles to critical roles.

Building the career infrastructure
This is about creating role maps within and across job families so individuals can see entry points, next steps and how to get there. Competency profiles and competency mapping are the cornerstones of a sound career infrastructure. Such maps illustrate the options; provide managers with criteria to guide decisions about advancement, development and promotions; and give employees information about what is required in current and future roles.

Talent mapping
Many organisations use some form of talent grid to categorise talents by performance and potential (the typical 9-Box Grid). What we tend to find is while organisations may “use” a grid, the various definitions for the boxes are unclear or weak, especially in respect of assessing potential. The end result is that the grids are really maps of current or past performance.

The most effective talent reviews are those where senior managers assess their key talents (ie, high potentials and future leaders) in a workshop with common criteria.

Taking action
One of the weaknesses we see in many organisations is that while managers may have categorised their staff into various boxes or buckets, this is where the effort ends. The process needs to ensure that there is clear development or management action in each case, which is followed up at least quarterly or half-yearly.

Career development ownership
Over recent years it has been fashionable to re-position career ownership as the responsibility of the individual rather than a requirement of the organisation. This, however, only works if individuals have access to both the information and to someone with whom they can discuss the options. Immediate line managers are most often not the right people as they lack the coaching skills and may be narrow in their vision, as they will want to protect departmental bench strength.

Mercer’s research highlights a three-way relationship where the organisation, managers and the employee jointly ensure the business creates sustained competitive advantage through its people.

Jim Matthewman is a worldwide partner at Mercer. He can be contacted on jim.matthewman@mercer.com. Copies of Mercer’s Career Joint Venture Point of View are available from MercerHR.com.
Reprinted from Talent Management Review by kind permission of Osney Media.