Discovering Your Employees’ Hidden Talents

I came across a couple of interesting blog posts recently. The first one, Unearthing Talents Your Employees Keep Hidden by Sean Silverthorne over at Bnet talks about how you have employees with hidden talents that, if you only knew they existed, could help your business. He references Steven DeMaio’s blog on Harvard Business Publishing on the same topic. Steven says:

“Good managers know what their individual employees like to do (what tasks they enjoy, which projects motivate them). Great managers find out why someone has those preferences.”

Imagine if you knew who in your organization could make Excel spreadsheets and forms do amazing tricks, or who had particular language skills or had visited or lived in a particular country where you were thinking of doing business? Or who your star athletes are for that corporate charity race or volleyball tournament? I know I’ve been surprised by some of the knowledge, skills and interests my staff have that I never knew about.

The trick is keeping track of all this information, and capturing it in a way that puts it at the disposal of the organization, not just the employee’s manager or close co-workers. How do you make this part of corporate knowledge in a safe, secure way so that it’s accessible and useful?

That’s what I find so exciting about our new Talent Profiles. They let you capture exactly this kind of information. Our profiles are completely customizable, so your profile template gathers whatever information your organization needs, not just what your vendor thinks you need.

But even better, you can make the completion/updating of these profiles a part of your talent management processes, so you can ensure they’re kept up-to-date, or even expand the information you gather. Employee profiles are useless if the info they contain is incomplete or out-dated.

You also get to create custom viewing roles, so you can make sure people only see information that’s appropriate for them. Depending on what data you capture in your profiles, you might want to restrict viewing access on some things.

Ultimately, I think that getting insight on the broader capabilities and interests of our employees opens up new avenues for collaboration and helps to deepen employee engagement and satisfaction – and that’s good for business.

As Steven says: “Treating each employee as an ocean of talent allows you to find troves of precious gems.”

If you want to read more about some of the problems with Talent Profiles, check out this blog post from Leighanne Levensaler at Bersin & Associates.

Are you making the most of your talent pool?