Crafting a Talent Development Strategy in 2023-2024

Navigating Talent Development within your organization is a journey ripe with opportunities for innovation and transformation. While the path may present hurdles—like fluctuating employee motivation or challenges in translating learning into tangible workplace results—these are not insurmountable.

Infused with over ten years of expertise in soft skills and talent development, my insights aim to illuminate and inspire. Understanding the inner workings of highly educated professionals is key. When we discern what motivates and resonates with them, we can craft talent development programs that not only align with business objectives but elevate them.

The most important factors of a Talent Development strategy

1. The best way of people to be successful is to help them turn their talents, their abilities, into strengths that have a highly added value. In corporate lift often: when developing strategy leadership goes into execution modes often ‘forgetting’ to align talents with strategy.  
2. Talents require motivation to be developed. Therefore, the basis of Talent Development is making sure that people are intrinsically motivated. One of the largest factors, is making sure that they are in a suitable role or function. This increase job performance and their motivation to learn because they understand how it’s related to their work or even better purpose. Remember that job performance = motivation*capabilities*opportunity. 
3. Therefore, Career Development often improves organization with satisfaction, engagement, and performance. 59% of people are quit quitting. Don’t’ assume that people always know or know how to shape their future and job according to their abilities, it requires understanding of the unconscious. People need Career Coaching to make the unconscious conscious.
4. People their talents are developed into results via competences (knowledge, skills and attitudes). People first need to master the competence of their craft to give them confidence and later power soft skills (according to McKinsey) that push success in work. Mastery of Power soft skills is rare because people dont know how to break their habits. And, breaking habits, makes sure, to act differently and practice and apply these soft skills.
5. This is also were corporate business value is lost. When people operate from their habits, they might know the link between value and their talents but they do different things. Most often, only the very trained eye can see this. Harvard Business Review estimates that approximately 95% of our behaviour is based on habits.
6. One of these power skills, is more a meta competency, guiding all competencies: self-directing: aligning what we want, feel and take right action, this is a high-level skill. People suffer from burn-out, low levels of engagement because they don’t manage this skill. There is not enough alignment between what they want/need, do and is a smart thing to do. This is making the unconscious concious. 
7. Decrease exposure to weaknesses. It’s best to decrease people their exposure to tasks that aren’t in line with their strengths, although its important that people learn leverage skills. Leverage skills kill team and organization performance when not present. Leverage skills are our weakness in relation to our strengths. For example: we can be very assertive and authoritive and this requires to be balanced by vulnerability and connection as a leader
8. Increasing the pace of development can be done based on a variety of interventions (a) helping with onboarding through leadership and mentoring (b) 10/20/70 framework for learning and (c) teach people a learning-how-to-transform method. Learning how to learn, is a skill that together with breaking patterns unlocks the value of learning.
9. Make people understand that any skill requires training, practice and application. We are used to learning according our school system: acquiring knowledge. Skills like communication, our grit, involves our being. What do we do? What don’t we do? We can discipline and traing our being like a boxer. Training what needs to be trained, applying it and changing our habits. This is often not understood by the majority. The effectiveness is showed by the learning pyramid.
10. This last part is, people don’t understand how to train any skill like a boxing match or ice skating. This can be paired with micro habits. Every day 30 minutes of training and that compounds.
11. To keep learning grounded it’s a good thing to work with reflection loops and a learning structure (how to learn or how to strengthen a skill in daily reality, as mentioned above). With reflection we understand deeper insights.
12. It’s’ rare to see people working with complete reflection loops: to strengthen growth, it’s wise to have experiential learning as the basis – going from experience, hypothesis, to action and reflection. This is experiential learning.   

Let me know how it has worked for your to develop your Talent Development strategy in 2023-2024.

Our Learning and Development Consultancy Services

For further insights, visit our Learning and Development Consultancy Services page. We specialize in creating more value and enhancing the ROI from your Learning and Development initiatives. Our unique expertise blends profound insights into personal and leadership transformation with a comprehensive understanding of international business dynamics.