What is Talent Planning?
Talent Planning is a 3-step process of crafting a 3-year strategic vision, developing a talent plan, and laying the infrastructure for continual execution (execution cadence) to achieve your vision.
It’s about your strategy, talent, and execution pulling together in the same direction to eliminate people issues to accelerate growth.
Fewer people issues = greater growth.
The quickest way to accelerate your company’s growth
Talent Planning is the most effective way to grow your business. Why? It proactively solves the number one issue limiting your growth: people.
When you go upstream to solve your people issues through a comprehensive 3-Year Talent Plan, you increase the probability that your 3-Year Strategic Vision becomes a reality.
Being proactive with your talent = greater profitability and long-term success.
Why Talent Planning?
When launching Stop The Vanilla in 1999, we believed the strategic plan was the most important document a company could create. That’s why we focused all our energy on creating strategic plans for our clients. Until we realized a powerful truth:
Without the right talent, you can’t effectively execute your strategy.
This led us to the realization that the talent plan is almost more important than the strategic plan. But, you can’t create a talent plan without a strategic vision–you need to know where you’re going before knowing the talent you need to get there.
That’s where Talent Planning comes in.
Talent Planning creates significant growth for your organization because your strategy and talent are working together. It’s a growth flywheel.
As you develop and grow your talent (Talent Plan), you accelerate toward your 3-year future state (Strategic Vision), allowing you to continue growing your organization and increasing profitability
Those Who Plan – PROFIT!™
The 3 Operating Principles of Talent Planning
1. Strategic Vision
Your strategic vision creates a vivid and measurable target of what you and your team want your organization to look like in 3 years (your 3-year future state). This target guides your strategic, talent, and resource decisions leading to accelerated growth.
2. Talent Plan
Your talent plan is the bridge getting you from where you are today to where you need to be to achieve your future 3-year state. It details the talent strategies and action plans over the next three years to make your strategic vision a reality.
3. Execution Cadence
Your execution cadence ensures that your strategic vision is achieved. It creates a rhythm for your meetings that leads to effective communication, collaboration, and accountability across your organization.
Through agile 4-month sprints, all team members complete action plans to work “on” the business to achieve your goals and take another step towards achieving your strategic vision.
Principle 1: Strategic Vision
A strategic vision includes both subjective and objective components. Subjective components include how you will differentiate your organization to Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream, what products/services you will provide, target and geographic markets, how you want your customers to describe you, and how you want your culture described by the end of your vision.
The objective component is your financial vision, which includes 4-6 strategic measurements with 2-3 goals for each. This provides you objective insights into where you are in achieving your 3-Year Strategic Vision and how you can get there quicker.
Principle 2: Talent Plan
A talent plan includes the functional structure your organization needs in place in 3 years to make your strategic vision a reality. It also includes your team's strengths, weaknesses, skill set voids, development priorities, hiring priorities, high potentials you need to retain, and succession planning.
Leaders use behavioral science and the talent toolkit to develop their talent plan and execute the talent processes.
Principle 3: Execution Cadence
Your execution cadence includes four key meetings: Weekly leadership meetings, plan execution meetings, department meetings, and 1-on-1's. Each meeting contains a specific agenda and timetable for peak efficiency and effectiveness.
As we like to say, your execution cadence is where the rubber meets the road. It moves you at an accelerated pace toward your 3-year vision with rapid feedback to adjust your strategy and talent plan as needed.
