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When it comes to talent, the readiness is all

Young, talented individuals require careful nurturing, argues SAP's global HR advisor - ©Franziska and Tom Werner/Getty

You’ve identified the future talent needs of your organisation – so now you need to both identify the future top players and find ways to grow their skills.

In our last piece we asked the vital question: can you identify the future talent which is there within your organisation? This is important because the skills gap is still there, so it makes perfect sense to invest in the potential talent which is already there within your company. Who has the fire within them to become the future leaders, shapers and shakers?

But it’s one thing to start to identify those individuals, it’s quite another to create the career paths and learning curves they need to pass through to achieve that end result. How will you know when they are ready? How do you go about creating the environment in which they can learn and grow? How willing are you to accept that there will be mistakes made along the way?

At the same time, we know that change is also an absolute, so there is an element of improvisation in all this, too. We’re preparing individuals for a future which is, at best, difficult to predict. However, as we also noted in the last piece, the challenges posed by Covid proved that organisations had the capacity to improvise when they needed to, in order to simply survive. Those skills have not been lost.

Top talent needs nurture

In any team, be that business or sport, young talented individuals require careful nurturing. Yes, they have all the signs that they can succeed and be a huge asset to the team; but judging the point at which they are ready to take the all-important next step up to the top team is a judgement call in itself. You not only have to build that readiness but also to know just how much exposure you need to give them as they develop.

This might include asking the individual to lead a new project, or to make a presentation to a senor group, or even attend an important meeting and report back. It’s vitally important that there are opportunities to process this new learning, and that support is given to enable the new skills taught to be re-enforced. We’ll look in more detail at these kinds of ‘exposure’ in the next article in this series. 

We call them ‘learning curves’ for a reason:  quite simply because they are not linear. Few people have careers which progress in a straight line, and that’s as it should be. We’ll talk about leadership in the last of this series, but for now let’s just note that in preparing our future leaders we need people who have the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. So having a wide background and a rich range of experiences should be all to the good.

We need to not just support our future talent but to have faith in them, whatever direction they travel in to the top. We need to be there to support them and recognise that, even when it looks like they are not ready yet, we chose them because they had a certain something which we felt was worth investing time and effort in developing.

That’s our next port of call: just how do we develop them? The next article in the series will take a look at two vital methods to achieve that – coaching and mentoring.

Michael Esau is global HR advisor for SAP

SAP’s latest survey, 2024 HR Trends: The Year of AI, looks at a range of business issues, including wellbeing. To download your copy, click here. To find out more about our insights, resources and products, click here. 

Our podcasts series, The Human Factor, has been created to discuss just such tricky but highly relevant topics such as culture and talent development. In the podcast episodes we talk to leading experts about the issues and themes that influence people and the world of work, and they share their thoughts about the skills and techniques you need to succeed. The whole catalogue of episodes is available right here.