Why Managers are Catalysts in Managing and Developing Talent?

Most businesses today are talent driven businesses – skills and competence of people developing products and providing services is at the core of an organization’s differentiation strategy. Talent management and people development should be at the top of an organization’s strategic agenda given the need to improve productivity and effectiveness. Everyone agrees that people development is important, yet clear ownership of doing so is often missing.

Why is this a challenge?

Because managers look at people on their team as tools to get their tasks done. Because managers are only made accountable for generating business results only and not for developing people. Because managers excessively rely on some “training and development” department that is far away from day to day realities of how a business operates. Because leaders think that training and/or certification is the only way to develop skills of people.

The truth is: managers are the ones who communicate with people every single day, assign work in line with capabilities of people, provide the resources that people need to get the job done and guide the performance of people. This proximity with people (and their skills) makes a manager, an ideal owner for development of people within an organization. This is also true because people learn the most by working and experiencing, and less by training alone. But a 2008 research by Hewitt and Human Capital Institute reveals that less than 10% of managers are held accountable for development of people and less than 5% are competent enough to develop others.

What can be done?

I think, the first step towards building a managerial culture around people development is to start at the top. If top leadership takes active interest in developing managers at various levels, that drives one expectation clearly: that we are all responsible for developing people we lead.

The second step is to make managers accountable for people development. Developing people should be an integral part of every manager’s KRA and managers should be given the required space to develop others.

The third step is to help managers in developing people. This is where HR/Training teams can provide interventions. This can include critical areas like assigning right people to right tasks, building a team with complementary skills, improving collaboration, building trust through mentoring, providing feedback and build environment of learning and growth for everyone on the team. In fact, managers should be hired based on demonstrated skills in these areas.

The deliverable of a manager, in my view, is two sided: one is the business results and other is developing people while they deliver these results. The only way to thrive in a competitive environment is to constantly expand people’s capability to deliver and innovate. A manager’s ability to build a culture of continuous learning and develop people equals better bottom line results and higher employee engagement and retention.

Join in the conversation: Do you agree that managers should be responsible for developing people? Have you seen an exceptional manager who focused on growing others? What did you learn from that manager?

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