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In a world of information overload and filter-failure, I focus on helping HR students and young professionals by curating insights about what matters in the world of work, the new talent agenda and fueling curiosity. Welcome to smarter!

HRHeadStart #81: Linking Talent to Value; 70-20-10 of Work

Sep 5, 2023

The Talent Agenda

Organizations spend considerable time identifying and recruiting high-caliber individuals. Sizeable sums are spent on rewarding talent which bring value to the organization in the forms of skills, knowledge, experiences, relationships etc. However, several organizations pay little attention to allocating and continually reallocating this talent to unleash the value of talent by mobilizing talent to the most critical, high value creation roles. Even when we try to do so, we equate role criticality and value to hierarchies. We incorrectly assume that the most critical roles are found in the top 1-2 layers of the organization. In fact, critical positions and critical people can be found throughout an organization.

Organizations who do this right take a quantitative approach to measure the value of roles, evaluate whether top caliber talent sits in those roles and makes talent reallocation decisions based on role-capability matching. Dive deeper into this topic here.

Working Better

In a recent mentoring discussion with a fresh graduate in her first job, I sensed a fundamental question, “How should I spend my time on the job?”.

We could apply a simple framework here:

~70% of the time should be focused on your core work and excelling at it to build credibility.
~20 of the time should be spent on making sense of the organisation and state of HR to develop ideas for improvement, building new HR processes, identifying other HR sub-functions where one could add value. The key idea is to identify a number of small bets. If something turns into a major opportunity, allocate more time. It it doesn’t go back to the drawing board to identify more bets.
~10% of the time should be spent networking with other members of the HR team and, if possible, folks in the business to truly understand the state of play and the players in the game.

If you have other ideas, feel free to drop me a line.

Tiny Thought

All progress depends on curiosity.