Talent

To be successful, effective talent management begins with a plan…

To be successful, effective talent management begins with a plan — a plan that should be firmly rooted in the strategic objectives of the business. Start first with the business strategy and talent needs, then clearly define your talent management objectives and develop an integrated plan to achieve those goals.

Effective talent management requires a multi-pronged, integrated approach encompassing every aspect of the talent life cycle, and should be firmly rooted in the broader business strategy. Starting first with an understanding of the key business drivers, Crosby Consulting can help you define your talent management vision and develop an integrated strategy to deliver results. Michelle has worked with numerous organizations to translate the needs of their business — whether it is unprecedented growth, upcoming CEO retirement, a reduction in force, or significant change in the business model — into effective talent management strategies and programs. Michelle also brings with her the experience of having built world-class talent management functions in other organizations from the ground-up. Michelle can help you think through how best integrate the components of your talent management strategy to achieve desired business results.

Effective talent management begins with a clear picture of what success looks like in your company…

Effective talent management begins with a clear picture of what success looks like in your company — brought to life by language that uniquely reflect your organization’s brand and DNA. Competency models provide the foundation for success and provide the integrating mechanism between elements of your talent management framework.

Effective talent management begins with a clear definition of effectiveness in your organization — the knowledges, skills, abilities and personal characteristics needed for effective job performance, defined in behavioral terms. Your competency model may include core components that apply to all employees as well as job, role or level specific competencies that apply only to certain segments. This model should speak in your company’s voice and communicate your brand, crafted in the right language to resonate with your team. Your competency model should be the underpinning for your integrated management strategy to ensure that all elements work together.

Through two decades of experience with job analysis and competency modeling in dozens of organizations, and a core belief that to be effective competency models must be both practical and speak in the voice of the brand, Michelle brings together the art and science of competency modeling to define what effective performance looks like in your organization.

Once you have a clear picture of what is required for effective performance in your organization, you need tools to help you find candidates who fit the profile…

Once you have a clear picture of what is required for effective performance in your organization, you need tools to help you find candidates who fit the profile. Selecting the right people is difficult; state-of-the-art assessment tools provide additional insights and go beyond the capabilities of traditional interviewing.

Selection assessments, including tools like cognitive tests, personality and style assessments, biodata, job skills tests, assessment center day-in-the-life exercises and behaviorally-based and life interviews, provide additional insights into a candidate’s strengths, weaknesses, and fit for the job beyond those gleaned from a traditional interview. These assessments are useful both for the selection and promotion of employees into key roles and for profiling current employees to create robust, tailored, developmental and career plans.

As an industrial-organizational psychologist, Michelle Crosby is uniquely qualified to help you design and validate a selection process to meet your business needs. Her two decades of experience with assessment combined with her pragmatic, humanistic approach as a practitioner working inside organizations ensure that the assessment process used will meet your organization’s needs and not be another academic exercise. Michelle has strategic alliances with some of the best assessment providers, enabling her to draw on a full range of instruments to best meet the needs of your organization.

An effective performance management program is the cornerstone to effective talent management…

An effective performance management program is the cornerstone to effective talent management. Providing your employees with honest accurate feedback on their job performance, and linking it to their compensation and rewards, is the first step to effectively managing talent in your organization.

Performance Management is fundamental to effective talent management. Done well, it gives you a picture of where your current employees stand relative to the job requirements and provides feedback, individual development, alignment of goals, and links to rewards that ensure the organization is focused and on track. Done poorly, it is a painful administrative exercise; unfortunately this is the picture in most organizations. The best performance management programs include a cascading goal process, linkage to competency models, and leadership calibration exercises to ensure alignment around what excellence looks like. Effective performance management is not about a form or a rating scale, it is about process. The right senior leadership support, training for managers, and supporting communication are critical to ensuring success.

Based on Michelle’s extensive experience with numerous organizations, she can help you take your performance management process to the next level. She has also used a variety of technology tools to help automate the process and aid in reporting and can help you think through the right technology solution for your organization.

360 Degree Feedback provides greater depth and accuracy on an individual’s job performance in key competency areas…

360 Degree Feedback provides greater depth and accuracy on an individual’s job performance in key competency areas by providing insights from multiple perspectives, beyond traditional manager performance feedback. This information can be used as an assessment tool to help inform the performance management and talent review processes, or as a developmental tool only to enhance self-awareness and learning.

360 degree feedback provides insights from a variety of perspectives — self, manager, peer, subordinate, customer, and others — on an individual’s strengths and weaknesses. These different perspectives provide richer and more accurate insights than traditional top-down feedback, whether as input to performance measurement or as a developmental tool. Building the 360 tool around the competency model ensures consistency in message and measurement.

Michelle has extensive experience developing 360 degree instruments that speak in the language of the organization and provide useful, insightful, and actionable feedback. In addition, she can assist with the supporting communication, training, and process needed to make 360 an effective tool based on the unique culture and needs of your organization. She has also used a variety of technology tools to help automate the process and aid in reporting and can help you think through the right technology solution for your organization.

Talent review and succession planning are perhaps the two most important and strategic people-related processes…

Talent review and succession planning are perhaps the two most important and strategic people-related processes and are poorly executed or non-existent in many organizations. Talent review gives leaders the opportunity to review their current bench strength in depth and ensure the organization has the talent needed to accomplish key business objectives. Succession planning ensures that specific plans are in place to backfill key leaders. Both are mission critical for business success.

Talent review provides leaders with the opportunity to assess all the talent in their organization, understand their current bench strength and any gaps, thoughtfully move people to their next opportunity, identify high potentials, create development plans, address underperformers, and assess the overall talent health of their business. Starting with the right background data — educational and career history, performance, 360 and other assessment data, financial, customer and employee metrics, career aspirations and geographic mobility — provides for a robust discussion on each individual. However, the overall process itself, commitment of senior leaders, and actionable, visible outcomes are critical success factors and more important than the form itself.

In addition, “names in boxes” succession planning for key leaders forces the organization to take stock of its depth and bench strength to fill key roles and the action plans needed to close those gaps. Increasingly, Boards are requiring this information for their executive teams and holding senior leaders accountable for effective execution of this mission critical business process. Again, the right communication and training support is needed to ensure effectiveness of the program and the process.

Michelle has extensive experience designing and facilitating effective talent review and succession planning processes, including giving summary presentations to senior executives and Boards of Directors. She also has experience leveraging technology to support the talent review and success planning process and can help you think through the right solution for your organization.

Effective Talent Management includes training programs to help your people grow and develop…

Effective Talent Management includes training programs to help your people grow and develop. Whether the programs are on-the-job action learning, e-learning, or instructor-led programs, the best will include hands-on, experiential learning components with clear tie-backs to the job.

Training programs are an important tool in the people development tool kit, whether to teach job specific knowledge or more fundamental skills like supervision or customer service. Quality programs take the same elements that make for effective leadership development programs — hands-on experiential learning, assessments to increase self-awareness, role plays, feedback, and clear connections to real job related challenges — to engage the participants’ hearts and minds.

Crosby Consulting can work with you to create memorable, game changing development programs. Past successes include leading the development and implementation of a global service culture training program, cited by many participants as not only changing how they thought about their work, but also how they thought about their personal relationships. Michelle excels as both a program designer and facilitator, where she draws on her wealth of real-life organizational experience to illustrate her points and engage with her participants. She can work with you to create an effective, memorable developmental program to meet your particular business need.