Don’t guess about greatness; use a high-tech approach to find leaders among employees, candidates.
Identifying both job candidates and existing employees who are most likely to thrive in a management or leadership role can be a guessing game. However, talent analytics, a platform that produces insights into the workforce, can help you better understand the strengths of both current and potential employees and identify those who will be good leaders. Talent analytics start by focusing on successful leaders across the organization, identifying patterns and dominant characteristics; and this helps establish correlations between current behavior and future potential. Powered with artificial intelligence, the results help predict potential leaders in your ranks. In particular, five types of talent analytics can identify those with the “right stuff.”
As you consider these various techniques, realize that talent analytics isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Consider your organization’s needs, as well as your resource limitations, in identifying the best answers for you.
1. Behavioral profiling. This enables you to analyze effective leaders across the world and identify the characteristics that make them successful. Then you can use this information to create a yardstick against which you can measure current and potential employees.
2. Internal baselining. Larger organizations or those with a sizeable internal database can use this technique to analyze “exceptional performers” across roles and departments and focus on preparing these individuals for leadership roles.
3. Team analytics. This technique looks specifically for those employees who are leading successful teams. This is helpful because it helps you identify those individuals who are contributing significantly to team success but don’t have a formal leadership role or title.
4. Job-to-trait interlinking. This type of analytics helps you identify which traits to avoid and use this information to create leadership profiles for specific jobs.
5. Training analytics. Using this technique, you can identify how employees function in learning and development activities and what this shows about their leadership potential.
Many large companies, such as Google, have long used talent analytics to identify promising employees. In 2008, the organization launched “Project Oxygen,” which has developed into a talent analytics initiative resulting in a robust list of behaviors that define a good manager. Google updates this list annually with new traits.
