Talent development is:
1) Making sure you’ve prepared the people you need to execute your business strategy.
You can have the best strategy in the world based on the most incisive and insightful market analysis and be the most visionary leader around, but if you don’t have the people to execute your business strategy, you will fail. Importantly, this means having the people who know the strategy, own the strategy, and can interpret the strategy in the face of real-world, everyday decisions and priorities.
2) Cultivating your management layer to reinforce the company as you grow.
In the lower middle market, most companies have not built a management “layer”. They haven’t needed to. Often, the managers they do have are “accidental managers” who have evolved over time into the role without much development or training around what it means to manage people and teams. The best leaders recognize the value of these managers for their reputations and relationships and invest in preparing them for a more professionalized management role. They also recognize when they bring in new managers that meaningful and effective onboarding that includes talent development is a critical part of setting them up for success.
3) Preparing your talent for successful promotion.
Perhaps you do have a natural manager that – even if she is accidental – has the natural skills to excel in the role. In a growing company, you can’t just replicate her, but you need to leverage her skills and expertise now to lead multiple sites or teams. So, how do you prepare someone who has succeeded with her own team, in her own location, in a culture she helped build to go manage teams who don’t know her, in markets she doesn’t know, and cultures she doesn’t understand? It’s even more complicated when you ask this star performer to go turn around another location that isn’t performing.
4) Securing and engaging your top talent.
Growing a business is hard. Growing businesses don’t always have the luxury of having an A-player in every position. As things speed up and the work gets more intense, we lean on our top performers more and more. At the very time our company’s success is growing increasingly dependent on these top performers, they risk burning out. They can be left wondering how the company is growing but they aren’t. Investing in them with professional development opportunities when there may not be a raise or a promotion that’s an option due to the size of the company can be a critical investment.
5) Strengthening your feedback loops and driving continuous improvement.
Growth is change. Change is hard. Growth requires more feedback and more communication to sustain it. Growth requires harder conversations than – well, whatever the opposite of growth is. One of the most common challenges our Talent Development Teams gets presented with has to do with having difficult conversations. After a few questions, we find it’s typically some combination of difficult conversations, managers understanding their roles, performance management, managing conflict, communication, and trust – just for starters. Regardless, it comes down to preparing people to manage other people, support them, and hold them accountable for their work – which includes adapting as the business changes and continuously improving as the business evolves.
6. Rewarding and recognizing your people.
People feel really honored when their company invests in their growth and development. Across our portfolio, from the factory floor to the doctor’s office to the aspiring executive in any setting, I have seen the impact that talent development can have not only on immediate performance but on team members’ investment and engagement in the company. When people feel seen and invested in, they give you discretionary effort in return. If you aren’t investing in them, they will respond in-kind.
7) Delighting your customers.
I had three conversations last week with three different companies in three different verticals about professional development for their frontline team members. These are the people typically overlooked in talent development conversations. They don’t make a lot of money. They don’t always have a ton of education. They aren’t always looking for a promotion, but maybe just love their job. And yet, in each of these companies, these same people have direct, daily interaction with customers. Investing in them, their ability to manage conflict, their communication skills, and their understanding of how value gets created through the customer journey all directly impact your customers and your bottom line.
8) Optimizing your executive leadership.
In the lower middle market, we work with a lot of first-time CEOs and CFOs. They earned their roles by being top talent, and Shore loves to put them in top positions early in their careers. We must support that strategy with ongoing development, coaching and mentoring, and developing a solid team around them. Developing young executives and the key people around them, like their investment team, their Board, and peer executives, is foundational to being able to scale as an investment firm.
9) Defining your culture.
Michael Burcham told me once that culture is the combination of behaviors you reward and recognize and the behaviors you tolerate. Who are your culture carriers? Do they understand this? Can they see how their day-to-day management or mismanagement of people and processes develops the culture? Do they realize, as managers and leaders, that they are the model of the behaviors you reward and tolerate? Do they realize that most of this is deeply rooted in developing strong professional relationships? Do they understand this is deeply rooted in knowing themselves?