When it comes to promoting individuals from underrepresented groups into leadership roles, there’s one sentence I’ve heard many times from companies across industries: “We want to promote diverse people, but we can’t find anyone!”
My response to this anxious cry is simple: “What are you doing now to develop the future leaders of your organization?”
In other words, there are plenty of individuals across underrepresented groups who would perform excellently in a leadership role—they just need the time, resources, and opportunity to one day thrive. In this blog, I will walk us through a key strategic action any organization can take today to solve the future problem of an absence of diversity: implementing a talent pipeline!
The What
I’ll keep this explanation short! No matter the industry, most if not all organizations possess an ongoing need to have a talent pool that is available to fill positions across management. A talent pipeline is an institution-wide program (or, more accurately, a set of programs) that equips employees with the leadership and performance skills necessary to fill any vacancies within the organization as they arise.
In other words, a talent pipeline requires looking at one’s organization today and selecting the best of the best, whether they’re new hires or people who have been around for 10+ years, to train for future leadership roles! Not too complicated, right?
The How
I understand this talent pipeline concept, you may be thinking, but how the heck do I go about implementing it?
Fear not! I will now guide us through the basic steps of bringing a talent pipeline to our organizations. Step one is to identify our top talent, otherwise known as choosing the employees who will join the talent pipeline to prepare themselves for future promotions. To do so, we first need to ask three key questions:
Who are our highest performers?
Who has great leadership potential?
Who is interested in leadership (e.g. would want to be promoted in the future)?
Identifying top talent requires finding employees at the intersection of these three questions: high performance, high potential for leadership, and high interest in leadership. Not all employees sit at this intersection, so let’s briefly explore the different way types of talent match up under this metric!
The Spectrum of Talent
To establish the “troublesome” end of the spectrum, if an employee is a low performer with low leadership potential, they might be considered a questionable fit for an organization. They might be a new employee who’s struggling to adjust more than initially predicted, or they might be a long-term employee who is failing to meet performance expectations. This category of talent requires intervention—more on that later!—and is in many ways a direct opposite to employees we would consider “top talent.”
Now, let’s say there’s an employee who’s a high performer but who has low leadership potential—is that a negative sign? Do they require extensive leadership training? Not necessarily! Remember, a key element of identifying the future leaders of the organization involves people who are also interested in leadership. Someone who’s a high performer with low leadership potential might be a subject matter expert—occupying a niche position that is crucial to the organization but requires no leadership responsibilities. Either way, a talent pipeline doesn’t involve forcing individuals into future leadership positions; instead, it’s about finding individuals who can and who want to.
In contrast, what if we have an employee who’s a low performer but who has high leadership potential? Odds are this employee may be brand new to the organization or to their role and thus cannot be fully assessed yet for growth. While we might anticipate success for this employee, they aren’t top talent—yet. Keep giving them support and resources, and they might rise to the top!
Last but certainly not least—and to little surprise, I’m sure—we have individuals who are high performers and have high leadership potential, plus a high interest in holding a future leadership position. In other words, these are our top talent and may be the future leaders of the organization! These types of employees are role models in the organizations, are interested and eligible for promotions, and perform outstandingly. This category consists of the employees we want to bring into a talent pipeline—with their consent, of course!
Now, more often than not the majority of our employees fall somewhere in-between these categories, such as a person who has moderate performance and a moderate interest in leadership. This differential is perfectly normal, as top talent tend to be less than 5% of an organization! The small percentage of top talent makes it all the more crucial to get them involved in a talent pipeline to fully ensure they are qualified to occupy future leadership roles when the right time comes.
Development Actions
Once we’ve identified our top talent for our talent pipeline, the next step is to offer opportunities for growth. While the best advice tends to be to go with what’s right for your organization, I’ll present us here with some useful starting points! For one, I recommend implementing formal leadership development programs; rotational and/or developmental assignments; and mentorship and coaching programs. Additionally, as a base framework, a strong talent pipeline attempts to answer the following questions:
Where will this employee be in 1-3 years? 3-5 years? 5+ years?
What are their top six development areas? What skill gaps do they possess? What talent development do they require?
What actions will they take to develop these new skills? What benchmarks should they expect to achieve and at what times (within 3-6 months, 6-12 months, 12+ months, etc.)?
I also recommend reviewing employee progress within a talent pipeline quarterly. Oh, and don’t forget to be transparent with these employees about all things related to their leadership growth! We have their future in our hands, after all, meaning it’s only right that we handle them with care.
The Why
While a talent pipeline may seem a bit daunting, if an organization doesn’t implement one, we may not properly invest in our most talented employees, and as a result we may end up losing them—a blow to productivity and efficiency that no company wants to face.
In other words, the “why” behind a talent pipeline is getting the right employees with the right skills in the right places at the right time, ultimately resolving the problem many organizations face of “We want to promote underrepresented individuals, but none are qualified.” A talent pipeline helps ensure diverse candidates are noticed, trained, and uplifted for future promotions.
Importantly, when we make a list of our top talent, we must be intentional in including diversity—if we end up with a homogenous list, we’re not fixing our problem for the future, and odds are we’re missing out on a lot of talent! Top talent inherently involves people of different backgrounds, because to have a different background is to have different life experience and thus to have different skills.
To return to the opposite end of the spectrum, experience has shown me that many organizations many times tend to not address the worst of the worst of their employees—low performers with low leadership potential, also known as those who are toxic, who don’t care about their work, who don’t have good work ethic, who gossip constantly, who cause issues within the organization, and so forth. Instead, many companies prefer to ignore these employees, and hear me when I say that this tactic is not a long-term solution! To create a healthy work culture, we need to identify these people. Much like creating a list of top talent, we must also put a list together of this struggling talent so the leadership team can meet with them and coach them. The involvement of the leadership team is key, as it is not solely a manager’s responsibility to deal with employees who are detrimentally impacting the entire organization. The leadership team must work with managers to coach these individuals—either into a “middle ground,” or out of the organization entirely.
So, how are we all feeling? Ready to identify our top talent and guide them through the pipeline to success? Just take it day by day—where resources and assistance abound, plenty of talent is waiting to be found!
Dima Ghawi is the founder of a global talent development company with a primary mission for advancing individuals in leadership. Through keynote speeches, training programs and executive coaching, Dima has empowered thousands of professionals across the globe to expand their leadership potential. In addition, she provides guidance to business executives to develop diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies and to implement a multi-year plan for advancing quality leaders from within the organization. Reach her at DimaGhawi.com and BreakingVases.com.
