Implementing an Agile Talent Management Strategy for Organizational Success

When Craig Weber consults with a company trying to adopt agile talent management, he first works to understand the organization’s existing patterns of communication. Often, those patterns make it difficult for teams to work together at any pace, let alone with agility.

At a Silicon Valley company, Weber — a Vistage speaker for over 26 years, and author of Conversational Capacity — interviewed the team and was told that the company employed no “jerks.”

Everyone got along well, they told him, but there was a downside: no one was willing to raise challenging issues. Executives of the company, during a period of explosive growth and while preparing for an IPO, soon discovered that essential topics were not being addressed because no one wanted to become the team’s first “jerk.”

Another company Weber visited, a social work nonprofit in New York City, had the opposite problem. Everyone always brought up difficult topics, they told Weber, and every conversation became argumentative. When they received a new referral for business, the organization had to send it to another organization, sabotaging itself over its inability to communicate well and work with agility.

“In both of these circumstances, the way people engage with each other is working against why they’re working together,” Weber says. If conversational capacity is low, there is no way to implement an agile management strategy that works.

Agile talent management requires the ability to communicate well, trust employees to do their work well and pivot quickly when needed, according to Beth Trejo, a Vistage speaker and CEO and founder of social media agency Chatterkick in Sioux City, Iowa. When an organization has implemented agile talent management, it experiences more openness, learning and transparency across its ranks. It can also respond better to market changes and challenges.

“You have to have transparency and trust in employees,” Trejo says of agile talent management. “I hire adults and grown-ups and treat them like adults and grown-ups — I trust them. I get to know them on an individual level. That’s how we build trust. They need to trust me just as much as I need to trust them.”

Understanding the Importance of Agile Talent Management

Taking inspiration from agile software development, agile talent management allows teams to work collaboratively and quickly, often on cross-functional teams. Breaking down the silos between teams requires a high level of communication, which usually involves uncovering previously undiscussed or taboo topics across an organization.

With an ongoing talent shortage and a business world that’s always in flux, more organizations are looking to adopt an agile talent management strategy. After all, most employees want to work in a highly collaborative environment with good communication between employees and managers.

However, many organizations struggle to adopt agile talent management.

According to the Elusive Agile Enterprise report by Scrum Alliance and Forbes Insights, 83% said talent mix is essential for the organization’s agility, but 70% said that the lack of engagement of executives and employees keeps their organization from having transformational success.

In Weber’s work, successful teams that can perform when the pressure is high develop their ability to balance candor and curiosity when exploring important issues and making hard decisions.

A team with high conversational capacity, says Weber, “Can perform well, remaining on track even when dealing with their most troublesome issues. The performance of a team with low capacity, by contrast, can be derailed by a trivial disagreement. In this sense, conversational capacity isn’t just another aspect of effective teamwork — it defines it. A team that can’t communicate about its most pressing issues isn’t really a team at all. It’s just a group of people who can’t engage with each other effectively when it counts.”

There are many benefits of moving toward agile talent management, including breaking apart silos and working at a faster pace, Trejo says.

Employees feel more respected, adds Weber. He’s seen engagement scores and talent retention rise within companies he consults with on becoming more agile.

Some executives even report personal benefits to adopting the principles of agile talent management at work. Weber says that he recently spoke to an executive group and, three days later, received a call from one executive telling him that Weber’s advice saved his marriage. “The successes are great, not just organizationally, but personally,” Weber says.

How to Adopt Agile Talent Management

The first step for executives in developing agile talent management is to assess the organization’s current level of agility.

When Weber first consults with a business, he asks several contextual questions. What’s the organization’s strategy? What are its main challenges in meeting its goals? He’ll observe how employees and managers communicate with one another. Often, he’ll see right away where a company is falling short.

Then, Weber teaches a workshop on building conversational capacity by improving curiosity and candor. Both individual employees and the organization must become familiar with the concepts and skills of conversational capacity, specifically identifying areas where they may lack candor or curiosity, and then working on these areas to improve.

When there’s low conversational capacity, Weber says that organizations either avoid talking about tough topics or bicker and argue endlessly.

Both problems make organizations far less agile, often slowing business and ending essential discussions.

“You might have an excellent strategy in place with good intentions, but if you don’t have the conversational capacity to back it up, it isn’t going to go very far,” Weber says. “When you work in a more balanced way, with high candor and high curiosity, suddenly the undiscussable issues become discussable, and the unproductively discussable issues become more productively discussable. You start seeing things change dramatically.”

To see this change, Weber says that everyone across the organization must work to build their conversational capacity, and he shows them how to use their daily work as the practice space.

During meetings, this might mean that people with high candor — the truth tellers, the hard-to-please, the opinionated — should slow down and ask more questions. Or it might mean that people who typically only ask questions — the shy ones, the people-pleasers, the nonconfrontational — should respond honestly with what they’re thinking, as uncomfortable as that may feel.

Weber says that the systematic framework for building this capacity within individuals focuses on awareness, mindset and skill set.

To build your conversational capacity, Weber says there are three domains of practice: awareness (the emotional domain), mindset (the cognitive domain) and skill set (the behavioral domain).

Cultivating self-awareness is the first step. Learning to maintain a candid and curious stance requires a clear understanding of how our emotional programming works against it.

We must also adopt a mindset that subordinates our primal emotional reactions to the goal of learning.
But a mindset is only as valuable as our ability to put it into action, so the discipline includes a skill set — specific, well-defined behaviors — for conversing in a balanced way, even when under pressure.

While becoming more agile, Trejo says that organizations should still measure objectives. This may involve maintaining meeting agendas, staying organized to avoid time waste, and setting small, achievable goals. Easy wins in the first days of agility are important, she says.

As the team becomes more open and transparent with one another, Trejo notes that both employees and the team develop trust and intuition.

Those in creative roles are more able to try new things, while those in roles where key performance indicators measure success can watch the trend, tweaking what may need to be tweaked. Everyone is working toward the organization’s larger goal, but they receive more trust in their roles.

Ultimately, becoming more agile is up to each employee, manager and executive. The executives can adopt the concept, a consultant can teach a workshop and the employees can learn the concepts. But each day, every individual within the company must know what they need to practice and bring it into work, Weber says. Practicing takes courage, as people will make mistakes. At an agile organization, mistakes must be welcomed.

“You’re going to trip up and not always be as effective as you like, but treat that as something to get curious about,” Weber says. “If I didn’t behave in a way consistent with what I was trying to do, I should ask: Why did that happen? What can I learn from it? How could I do a better job next time? Even when it doesn’t go how you expected and your behavior doesn’t conform to your expectations, that is a great opportunity to learn the practice.”

Building an Agile Talent Pool

While many of the skills of agile talent management are built from within, both Trejo and Weber say that there are traits organizations can look for to find the best candidates.

Trejo says people who are curious and ask a lot of questions tend to fit nicely into an agile workplace. In the interviewing process, she looks for people who ask her most of the questions, as she believes that this is a sign that they’ll be able to work well on collaborative teams.

While Weber hasn’t found anyone naturally talented at finding the balance between curiosity and candor, he’s noticed that people who have demonstrated their ability to work in various team settings and circumstances tend to do well in agile environments.

“This person seems to be able to jump into Team A and work well with them, and then jump into Team B, which is a different team and a different project dealing with different issues and characters, and they’re able to adjust their behavior and get along there,” Weber says. “It’s that ability to flex your behavior I’d look for.”

Training remains essential for new hires, mainly because it helps them fit into cross-functional teams. Trejo says that the leadership team must ask what cross-functional teams look like and how they can help employees step into these roles without colliding with other roles within the company.

The focus must be on working together rather than working at odds.

“Those are the questions I know we have asked ourselves, as role definition is important,” Trejo says. “People want to have a focus in what they’re trying to do, but how do you help them still learn other parts of the business or learn other parts of the client journey? You have to train and educate employees in those cross-functional roles. I think that’s so critical for everyone these days, because whether it’s turnover or you just need to change skill sets, training on cross-functionality makes a big difference.”

It’s also essential for organizations interested in agile talent management to ensure their tech stacks serve the business, Trejo says. Often, companies use pieces of technology that clash with one another, hindering how quickly teams can collaborate. The company’s tech stack should be well-defined and well-controlled to have cross-functional teams that work well.

Executive Buy-In Essential for Agile Talent Management

Weber loves speaking to Vistage groups about conversational capacity, as he’s speaking directly to the CEOs and top executives. Without buy-in from executives, agile talent management will flounder.

Trejo says once executives buy in, the change must be fully integrated, or else an organization risks running in two separate directions from within.

There will be challenges and stumbles along the way, but Trejo says that organizations adopting agile talent management should also adopt systems for feedback and recognition. Employees should be able to talk openly about what is and isn’t working for them, and leaders should be willing to commend employees on a job well done.

“Every single week, as a part of our weekly stand-up, we do team shout-outs,” Trejo says. “Those have been so positive because the team, not just management, recognizes each other. It’s super simple, but it makes a big difference.”

Getting teams to stay in the sweet spot, both candid and curious, is the hardest part, Weber says, as the practice is the heart of agile talent management. Beyond executives becoming excited at a Vistage meeting, they must ensure consistent effort across the company.

Ensuring consistent effort is not easy, he says, but the usefulness of the skills tends to keep people engaged. However, Weber also helps organizations create their own, unique conversational code of conduct.

“It’s an agreed-upon set of behavioral norms, which helps the team remember and is a great way to onboard new talent,” Weber says. “You can say, ‘When you join our company, we’ve got some behavioral norms you need to be aware of, because you’re going to be pulled right into conversation right out of the gate. I don’t want you to be surprised by that.’ It’s a great way to bake clear behavioral norms into the corporate culture.”

Trejo consulted with a CPA firm on adopting agile talent management, opening conversations, building cross-functional teams and testing new technology. This often isn’t seen in financial services, she says, but it’s worked for them: They’re attracting more talent, their retention rate seems to be higher, and their culture has improved.

“Everybody wants to be something bigger than themselves,” Trejo says.

Related Resources

Understanding Talent Management vs Talent Development: Strategies for Organizational Success

Uncovering Hidden Gems: Use Precision Interviewing to Select Top Talent [Sept. 19 Webinar]

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