Bersin’s Top 22 for Talent Management – Coaching is the Key

Bersin & Associates recently published The Top 22 for Talent Management, which is based on two years of research and analysis. They found that these 22 talent management practices “drive the highest business impact.” You can check out the full top 22 list here.

I wanted to discuss the list because it provides a tangible and well-researched analysis that can be used to help guide, and justify your talent management strategy. The top best practice with the most impact is coaching. We talk a lot about coaching on this blog, which Bersin defines as “formal or well established coaching programs for employees.” This alone gives no better reason to take the time and effort to ensure coaching is a priority for everyone in your organization. You may want to share this research with your executives and managers to reinforce how important coaching can be to the bottom line of your organization. From there, you can reinvigorate coaching by making discussions related to performance on a daily basis, not just a once year event around a performance appraisal.

If your organization is focused on coaching, you need clear goals for everyone in the company. Otherwise, coaching is being done by what’s happening in the moment or gut feeling, but it’s real impact should be how it drives goal achievement and in turn, corporate performance. On the Bersin list, goal management comes in at #8, which really isn’t a surprise when you consider that employees are going to perform better when they understand how their work ties to organizational goals!

So, what does this all mean at the end of the day? I think ultimately this list highlights how talent management processes are more powerful when they are tightly integrated. You could be doing three or four of these really well, but if they are operating in isolation with no overarching strategy, it’s difficult to know how much business impact each of them has. If you look at coaching, it’s only going to get you so far without goal management. Same thing can be said for #16 using competencies for assessment, or even #12 assessing performance – they are all tightly linked.

Thanks to Bersin for this research and providing the evidence needed to reinforce why talent management is important – particularly when business results matter more than ever.