Talent development in the workplace - See the most important management tools

Talent development

There are good reasons to promote talent development in your workplace. Talent development contributes both to a good task solution, employee wellbeing and employee retention. In this article you can learn more about how to spot the talents in the workplace and how you can best manage them.

Organisational view of talent development

By having strategic and continuous competence development in your company, you can achieve development of your employees at a high level, which can contribute to growth in your company.

With talent development and competence development, you can focus on the current as well as future needs of the company and thereby develop the areas where there is room for improvement.

What role does management play when it comes to talent development? Read along in the next section, where this particular subject will be elaborated on.

Talent management

It is already part of most managers' jobs to motivate and develop their employees. Via talent acquisition (TA) you must as a manager keep an eye on the talents via and spot where their development potential lies. As a manager, you must support their development so that your employees feel seen, heard and recognised.

Not only do you have to discover their talent and help your employees achieve their full potential, you also have a shared responsibility in creating a good learning environment in the workplace. Now we take a closer look at the upsides of a useful learning environment.

Create a healthy learning environment

Honesty and feedback are important components when it comes to a healthy learning environment. There must be room to make mistakes and it is your task as a manager that your employees feel safe, so that they can freely express their mistakes and learn from them through feedback.

Shall the evaluations be saved away?

Evaluation is an important tool for keeping track of whether initiatives and projects in the company actually have the desired effect. You can ask your employees to evaluate their projects and keep track of what went well, what didn't work and what learnings you can build your experience on for the next project.

This is a unique opportunity for you as a manager to find out what your employees' strengths and weaknesses are and what development potentials you can focus on to become even better.

When in the evaluation you have identified opportunities for development and mistakes, these can possibly be discussed at whiteboard meetings or team meetings. Here, colleagues can seize the opportunity to share solutions and experiences that they have gained since the last time.

Leaders make mistakes too

As a manager, you are a role model for your employees, so it can be advantageous to show that you, like everyone else, can also make mistakes and learn from them.

By sharing your own mistakes and experiences, you can motivate your employees to do the same. You are a team and must improve together and develop your talents. This is best done together.

By being open to sharing your weaknesses, you also open up your own development potential.

What have you learned?

You can continuously ask about what your employees have learned in connection with a project or a task. This contributes to your employees becoming more aware of their own learning.

The vast majority of employees need recognition and challenges. To learn more about how you can continue to develop your employees, you can read along in the next section.

Development of employees

It can quickly become a habit that development only comes up at the Annual Performance Review. However, it is important to stick to the development all year round. It is advantageous to take the performance review as a starting point and prepare a strategic and dynamic development plan for the individual employee.

You can think of development in many different ways. It may be that the individual employee has a desire for which work areas they would like to focus on. It may also be that the company has a concrete direction on how the employee can best develop. As a company, you can offer your employees, among other things

1. Courses
2. Educations
3. New tasks/work areas
4. New collaboration areas, teams, opportunities

To make sure that your employees' development does not come to a standstill, you can take inspiration from the next section, which is about this very thing.

This is how you can create continuous development for your employees

There are a number of good focal points when we talk about continuous talent development:

1. Keep conversations ongoing

If you hold conversations with your employees continuously throughout the year, you can keep an eye on what motivates your employees. You can ask about what the employee sees as their strengths and weaknesses and opportunities for development. With the help of the interviews, you can also keep an eye on what is demotivating for your employees and why.

2. Give your employees challenges

If there is an area of development that you and your employee would like to focus on, you can advantageously make a plan for how the employee will have a successful experience with something that they find challenging.

It could be, for example, that the employee must practice taking more control in the workplace, where the given employee will be responsible for leading team meetings in the future. After a month, you can evaluate and thereby find out what learning it has given the employee.

3. Old dogs can learn new tricks too

Even the most seasoned employees can benefit from new tasks and challenges. In this way, you prevent the risk of them locking themselves in their work areas and comfort zone and at the same time you contribute to their long term development process.

If you would like to learn more about talent development, you can get more inspiration about: How to create