Why You Should Develop and Not Recruit
Business owners and managers – please be honest, how many of you are committed to developing your people to the best of their abilities? How much time have you spent thinking about them as individuals and determining exactly what it is that they seek from their career?
As an employer if you are to make real progress around areas such as inclusion, diversity and equity you must focus less on hiring new people, an exercise that is fraught with danger and disappointment in many instances, to concentrate more on creating systems to develop, promote, and retain a range of diverse junior talent. Some of these will be the senior managers of your business in the future if only you take the time and put the resource in place to train and develop them. This will turn out to be a far more productive and effective way of improving your organisation than the ‘crap shoot’ that is recruitment.
Here are some ideas that can help you develop good people in your business:
Have a clear view on who are the performers in your business: You need to have performance standards and goals in place enabling you and your managers to track people’s performance objectively and from this know who has both the potential and desire to progress. In an inclusive workplace, it’s important to understand who is moving up within the business and who is capable of moving up, not just who is working there.
Where do you stack up competitively? How does your business compare to other firms in your industry in terms of its development of people? What sort of mobility through their business do the competition offer? What sort of training do they offer? Today many data sources store and analyse the online profiles of tens of millions of workers. These data sources can offer your beneficial business benchmarks for specific peers, roles, and locations. Why is this important? Simple – if your competition is doing this much better than you there is no doubt that you will lose the best people – in a competitive market this is not desirable.
Know what’s in your talent store: Know the skills your employees possess, not just the roles they are in. This will help you identify the capabilities that these employees can utilise as they progress in their careers.
Assess the health of your people ‘feed’ pipe: Audit and analyse the diversity, or lack of diversity, across your organisation at all levels.
Create the pathways for your talented people: Invest in training resources and offer learning opportunities. Proactively map the career paths of your junior employees.
By developing talent from within you create a business where people are imbibed in your culture, respect your business values and fully understand its purpose. These are exactly the type of people you need ‘on the bus’ with you for the journey and your chances of developing them internally are far greater and less expensive than trying to find them externally.
For help and support in getting the best from your team, contact us at ignite@tinderboxbusinessdevelopment.co.uk, or call on 0116 232 5231
David Turner
Managing Director
