This week, I wanted to write an article based on a post I saw on First Round's blog (as I occasionally do), and came across an article on retention. Retention, from a talent management (or TM for short) perspective, is a deliberate, enduring process that lasts from the day someone starts working at a company and ends at their exit interview. While the content of First Round's article was, as usual, above par, the structure of its ideas defied my mental schema for organizational development.
Organizational development - and people development - is something that, over the three years I spent with AIESEC, I came to enjoy and found fascinating. As a VP of TM, I worked with a team to recruit, onboard, and retain committee members and also consulted other VPs on those same topics. In my opinion, TM as a functional team is underestimated. Although it doesn't facilitate sales, client retention, or product validation/marketing, from a financial perspective, it serves to invest a company's capital into talent that can boost that company's bottom line.
Near the end of my tenure in AIESEC, I decided that I wanted to create a manual for my successor: the Talent Management Method Manual (TMMM). However, since I worked and went to school full-time, it wasn't high on my list of priorities to make such a formal document. Instead, I recorded and organized the work I had done during my term as VP, uploaded my files to my professional e-mail's cloud file storage (and kept a copy on my own hard drive), and passed that e-mail address on to my successor. Fast forward to a few days ago: while I was reading and taking notes on that article about retention written by First Round, I realized that writing about retention would result in skipping two key processes that come before it - recruitment and onboarding. I paused, looked through the files I had saved, and decided to create a series of blog posts that would eventually culminate in the project I had never started but wanted to so long ago.
As luck would have it, before I decided to stop working on the TMMM, I created a very detailed outline of talent management, as a functional process, as I saw it from start to end. Roughly, these bullet points were:
- Needs analysis
- Recruitment
- Onboarding
- Training
- Weekly all-hands meetings
- Regular functional team meetings
- Events and projects
- Sustainable talent pipeline management
- Paying it forward
The document itself is about 2 pages long. I want to turn this series of blog posts into a mix of my own thoughts combined with deep research on organizational development. And that will be how this blog will focus on leadership.