Dear Lost:
Your talent-management strategy needs to support your hospital’s overall strategy. Consider not only your current recruiting and training methods, but also how your strategy may need to adapt to future market conditions.
Forecasting the future is very difficult. It can be helpful to ask some basic questions regarding how your middle managers will put strategy into practice. Figure out how development efforts tie in tocareer development,performance management, succession planning and the like. Do you have enough people to fill these roles now? What about 5 or 10 years down the road? We recently worked with one hospital that discovered that an alarming 50 percent of its managers were eligible for retirement within five years. That caused them to worry less about training employees and more about recruitment and succession planning.
Additionally, determine the competencies your executives need to drive the company strategy. You say your training program needs to be comprehensive, but sometimes an A-to-Z approach can dilute your overall effort. It is far more beneficial to determine which competencies are needed, perform a gap analysis, and then fill those gaps. Only then can you start thinking about the development program itself. (I am reluctant to call it a training program, although that may be the ultimate format you select.) Classroom training serves a certain purpose. But management development takes a variety of other forms in lieu of, or in addition to, classroom training. These include on-the-job training, special projects, job rotation, mentoring, external seminars and Web-based learning. Your end goal determines the combination of training methods you use, as well as the best learning environment for your managers.
SOURCE: Keith Swenson, managing partner,Capital H Group, Chicago, July 6, 2004.
LEARN MORE: A Sample Leadership Strategy.
The information contained in this article is intended to provide useful information on the topic covered, but should not be construed as legal advice or a legal opinion. Also remember that state laws may differ from the federal law.