Viewpoint
Talent Development Centres – how can you use them to truly benefit your business?
by Kate Oliver, Head of Consulting Services, Human Qualities
Human Qualities are specialists in designing and running Talent Development Centres (TDCs). In this edition, we want to share with you some of our insights into how to use Talent Development Centres to truly benefit your business.
We’ve been running them for over 25 years, in over 50 leading companies, in over 30 different countries. In the past 2 years we have developed and managed over 90 Talent Development Centre events with our clients, involving over 1500 leaders and managers. So here are some of our key learnings...
Where Talent Development Centres really work:
• Spotting talent – Objective assessment is a foundation for an effective talent management strategy. This enables you to identify where talent already exists and where it needs to be grown in the organization. Talent Development Centres are the single most reliable and valid way to identify people’s competence and potential. A recent Harvard Business School study found that assessment centres had 75% predictive validity (compared with 17% for interviews alone). As a result of using Talent Development Centres, one of our clients was able to much more accurately identify who should be in their talent pool. The outcome was that their talent pool was reduced in size by 50%, enabling greater investment in those targeted as future leaders of the business.
• Developing the talent pool – Research into leadership increasingly shows the importance of emotional intelligence for success as a leader. Talent Development Centres provide a powerful means to increase managers’ self-awareness, through the structured feedback received by participants. One of our clients was able to increase the percentage of internal promotions in their leadership population from 22% to 46% over a two year period, saving around £250,000 in the process, as a result of using Talent Development Centres.
• Creating a full and flowing leadership pipeline – To progress as a leader in today’s organisations requires managers to successfully navigate the turns in the organisation’s leadership pipeline. At each turn different expectations will be placed on the manager in terms of their skills, focus and behaviour. Talent Development Centres can be used to help managers understand these expectations and develop towards these, in advance of making the turn. This dramatically increases their success rate in the new role. For example, one of our clients has successfully used Talent Development Centres in this way for many years to prepare its sales people to take on managerial roles in the future. As a result they have been able to put in place structured development plans for these individuals, to support them in successfully making this key transition.
• Enabling a culture of development – Talent Development Centres can play a powerful role in helping an organisation create a culture of development. Our Centres involve senior leaders within the business, training them to act as skilled observers. As observers they are actively involved in reviewing participants’ behaviour in the simulation activities and providing feedback and coaching on their performance. This not only helps to develop these skills in the senior managers, but also signals to participants a real commitment from these leaders to their development. A quote from a participant on one of our recent Talent Development Centres sums this up, “It is great to know we have a senior management team that is committed to developing its people and are willing to give their valuable time to helping us develop.”
If you would like to find out more about how we can help your organisation with Talent Development Centres, please call me on + 44 (0) 20 8566 1661 or e-mail me at kate.oliver@humanqualities.co.uk.
