Talent optimization

As a business leader, you want to make sure your company puts your talent into the optimal position to produce your desired business results and beat the competition.

The talent optimization discipline has four components:

Talent optimization takes a programmatic and disciplined approach to helping businesses succeed by being purposeful about the alignment of talent and business strategy.
  1. Diagnose: Measure critical people data, analyze that data in the context of your business, and prescribe remedies as needed. 
  2. Design: Purposefully build the right structure, leadership team, and culture.  
  3. Hire: Bring in the right talent across the organization to achieve business goals. 
  4. Inspire: Use people data to drive high performance through better leaders, teams, and culture.  

The essence of leadership is aligning employees with business strategy—and that begins with taking an intentional and data-driven approach to getting the people part right.
Too often, when executives hear the term “people strategy,” they shrug off the responsibility and send it down the hall to human resources. But when it comes to designing and optimizing your most important (and most costly) business asset—your people—passing the buck is also passing up your biggest opportunity to create a truly great organization.
So how do you assemble world-class teams? That’s where having an objective methodology and system for optimizing talent comes in.
Talent optimization utilizes quantitative data and analytics so you can comprehend job requirements, identify the best candidates, understand the team dynamics needed to accomplish business goals, and manage employees in a way that pushes everyone to the top of their game.

Underlying the methodology are four “essential truths”:

Talent optimization doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s informed by business strategy and it produces—or fails to produce if not implemented—desired business results.

Talent optimization is driven by people data. When business leaders measure people data and apply the resulting insights, they’re empowered to make objective decisions rather than subjective ones. There are a variety of tools and techniques talent optimizers can use to collect and measure people data.

Talent optimization won’t work if it’s only implemented in the C-Suite. While talent optimization must begin with buy-in at the top (executives will be the first messengers and champions of talent optimization) it can’t end there.

Disengagement causes employees to withhold “discretionary effort” and to deliver the minimum amount of work to stay employed. Inevitably, when employees don’t give it their all, business results suffer.

The four forces of disengagement are:

  • misalignment with the job
  • misalignment with the manager
  • misalignment with the team
  • misalignment with the culture

The talent optimization discipline has four components:

The Predictive Index® is a registered trademark of Predictive Index, LLC and is used here with permission