Who is Accountable for Developing Your People and Why it’s Important

There is a ton of literature on how to develop people to their fullest potential, but who actually does it? Who is accountable for it? And who should be kept accountable for it? Is it the job of HR, Management, or the Employee themselves?
HR
For a long time, HR lacked the visible metrics to form real insight into how employee behaviour, team dynamics and project assignments drive value at the organizational level. As a result, there were limited measures to hold HR accountable for how their hiring and talent development decisions affected other business units and individual employees.
Accountability to employees: HR can spend months courting prospective hires with the lure of “great future career prospects” but fast forward a couple of years and where is HR to be found in alerting the hires about those great development opportunities? One way to keep the function accountable might be to make career interests and skills public and to hold HR responsible for turnover metrics related to a “lack of opportunities”.
HR wouldn’t be able to say they didn’t know what else the employee could be suited for because their capabilities and interests are in the public domain. The idea is to empower HR with public data, encourage them to be more proactive in introducing to opportunities before employees leave, and to hold them accountable when they do. If employees aren’t retained, at least, it shouldn’t be for a lack of trying.
Accountability to business units: For years, HR has accumulated data on inputs — how many hours and dollars did we invest in training for a person? How long before they left? What were their satisfaction levels? But in the results-oriented business world, the focus needs to be on translating those inputs into outputs tracking measures such as revenue per team or revenue generated for each dollar of training investment made in an individual. These cross-functional metrics will help keep HR accountable for their role in shaping the inputs that ultimately drive results.
The Employee
Under forced performance curves, average employees are likely fly under the radar and hide amongst the data because there is no concrete measure or objective telltale sign to distinguish between performing effectively and doing the bare minimum.
Accountability to their own career: By aggregating people metrics into one profile, employees can keep a running tab of their contributions throughout their careers. There, they can assess their strengths, weaknesses, where they are improving and the types of assignments that best leverage their unique interests and capabilities.
Accountability to teams: By having team metrics visibly linked to the individual profiles of its members, it holds people accountable for their parts in team outcomes. When you know your work may impact your colleagues’ portfolio of work or individual profile, it triggers a sense of responsibility to deliver the best possible outcome and empowers teams to play a hand in the development of its members.
Management
With the use of visible metrics, managers can be held accountable to all aspects of their responsibilities including their often overlooked roles as effective feedback and reward givers.
Accountability to feedback: Identifying patterns in feedback can help isolate problems. If on average, an individual solicits positive reviews from their team members but negative reviews from their manager, there is a disconnect between what the team is seeing and what the manager is seeing. If a manager continuously gives negative reviews, HR should be able to see these long term trends and delve into this gap. Maybe the individual and team objectives aren’t clearly laid out, maybe this particular manager has a contrasting work style with the rest of his team or maybe the feedback says more about the performance of the manager than it does the individual.
Accountability to employees: Lack of recognition is among the top 5 issues that drive high potentials to leave. Managers may not always be onsite to see the contributions of their direct reports and can often miss opportunities to recognize and reward good work. By quantifying feedback and introducing robust peer to peer channels, the accumulation of positive feedback makes it difficult for managers to ignore their top talent even if they don’t personally see it. If an individual continuously receives praise from his/her teams without any recognition from his/her manager then it might indicate the manager is ignoring the people aspect of their job. Tracking rewards-to-positive feedback ratios could help identify your organization’s more effective people managers.
Why Accountability Matters
Developing your people to their fullest potential shouldn’t be a matter of coincidence — where a lucky few happen to be at the right place, at the right time, under the right people. It should be the result of a thoughtfully designed system rather than the responsibility of any singular function or person.
Talent management screams of high energy with all of the different ways to empower, engage, and retain your employees but ultimately, accountability is the glue that pulls the system together. And It’s what organizations need to address before any of any of the high energy upside can be realized.
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How can we strengthen our accountability bonds to other functions and stakeholders? What other accountability measures do you think is important?
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A data-driven organizational strategy enthusiast by passion and a CPA, CA by training, Cindy often writes about the changing dynamics of the talent pipeline and has presented an award-winning vision for the future of work. As the Founder of TalentTapt.com, she’s made it her mission to map motivation through data and is currently building the largest grassroots repository of motivational profiles of its kind with The Talent Map Project — empowering people to bring their best to the organizations of tomorrow.
Visit TalentTapt.com to take the 5 min survey to contribute your motivational insight & redefine the #FutureOfWork. Feel free to check out our blogs & research at TalentTapt.com, follow @talentmapproj, and connect via LinkedIn or Email
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on November 30, 2014.