It's a common misconception that talent development is a solo race for selected stars. The latest research in talent development shows that the organizations that succeed in creating effective talent programs are the ones that manage to build strong talent environments. Therefore, when working with talent development, it's no longer enough to identify and cultivate individual stars. It is crucial to understand talent development as a shared organizational task.
Talent development is at the top of the strategic agenda in the majority of organizations in the country, but few are able to create talent programs that deliver real value in practice. The vast majority of organizations are aware that the way they develop talent can have a significant impact on organizational performance. They realize that attracting, developing and retaining talent is a key task if they want to avoid making an expensive talent investment only to lose them quickly, or even worse, not developing or retaining the talent the organization already has. That's why talent and talent development are often at the top of the strategic agenda in many organizations.
Build strong talent environments based on the organization's strategy
Creating a talent environment is about developing 'Smart Contexts' rather than 'Smart People' (Tanggaard & Juelsbo, 2015). This means focusing on creating an organizational framework for talent development where talented leaders and employees are developed based on the organization's strategy.
Talent environments represent a highly emergent understanding of talent, where talent is understood as something that unfolds and is influenced by the interplay between individual characteristics and factors at the team and organizational level (Tanggaard & Juelsbo, 2015). When an organization designs a talent program, for example, it is therefore not sufficient to initiate learning activities that only address the individual participants. Instead, there is a need to work systematically with the talent's environment, the talent's relationships, etc.
Esbjerg Municipality is one of the municipalities that has taken up the challenge and is working systematically to build talent environments.
In Esbjerg Municipality, the work with talent environments became a catalyst for managers and employees alike to get a learning curve in the talent program. During the program, managers and employees developed by, among other things, being given opportunities in everyday life to work on tasks that they had to succeed with in their role anyway.
Here, Esbjerg Municipality divided the activities into three tracks, which included activities for different target groups:
- Individual track: activities for the manager who participated in the talent program (e.g. training activities, coaching conversations and expectation conversations with the line manager)
- Team track: activities for the management team that the talent is leading (i.e. the manager's employees/managers)
- Organizational tracks: activities that addressed multiple parts of the organization (e.g., activities where the talent solved real and current tasks of strategic importance to the organization to build competencies to take on a higher-level leadership role).
The three tracks ran simultaneously to ensure that talent development was worked on in a broader perspective - in one environment. By striving to create an environment that allows talent to develop themselves, each other and the organization, you can create ripple effects and develop even more talented leaders and employees across the organization - precisely through building talent environments
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