Developing Employee Talent to Perform: People Power (AGENCY/DISTRIBUTED) - Softcover

Kim Warren (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1606490397 ISBN 13: 9781606490396

Publisher: Business Expert Press, 2009

Synopsis

People are an expensive, critical resource in any organization, and can be a powerful source of sustained advantage. They profoundly affect other resources such as customers, brand reputation, intellectual property, and cash. They drive the growth or decline of these resources and possess attributes of their own - such as skills and knowledge - that must be carefully developed and nurtured. Despite this, leaders tend to focus on the softer aspects of people management, that are the least easy to identify and influence, such as motivating, mentoring, and team-work- whilst ignoring the simpler fundamentals of how many they need, and where and how to deploy them over time. This book redresses the balance, providing a practical, fact-based approach to managing this most sensitive of resources. The book gives clear explanations and illustrations of the key concepts, with action checklists, key questions, and case examples. It shows leaders how to understand and manage the changes in their staff-base over time, in the light of often complex interactions between hiring, promotion, development and attrition. It explains where people connect to the tangible resources of the business, to help ensure they are deployed more effectively, getting the right number of the best people in the right places and adapting these deployments as the business changes through time. It describes the mechanisms by which people and teams develop skills and shared capabilities, so that they can bring about substantially improved performance for the organization as a whole. It provides a common language, in diagrams, words and numbers, for leaders, HR professionals and others in the management team to understand and communicate about how their staff resources are developing through time, ensuring that expensive and effort-intensive initiatives to develop the organization can be undertaken with confidence and support.

About this title

About the Author

Kim Warren has been teaching Strategic Management in MBA and Executive programs at London Business School since 1990. There he has developed powerful frameworks for strategy analysis and strategic management that go beyond the simple, static tools that are more commonly used. Known as 'Strategy Dynamics', this method focuses on improvements to the time-path of business performance that is so crucial to the concerns of investors and other stakeholders. The method also provides a sound basis for strategy development in public-service and non-commercial organizations.

From the Back Cover

This book outlines a critical approach to developing employee talent within your company; strategy dynamics. It removes the shroud of mystery from effectively attaining desired performance outcomes by clearly defining the links between people issues and performance. It is well illustrated and provides real-world examples along with action checklists to drive and monitor results. It is easy to say "our people make the difference." It is much more difficult to understand and actually make this true over the lifetime of a company. In fact, the links between people issues and attaining your desired performance outcomes remains a mystery to the vast majority of companies. This book pulls the shroud of mystery away and clearly defines the essential elements of strategy dynamics, a system that will help ensure that you are developing employee talent to perform at their best advantage for your organization. Building on the foundation of strategy dynamics, this book shows you how people-oriented initiatives in your organization will develop through time, how to track and adjust those initiatives to keep them on course, and how to trace their impact on your goals. Although it presents a rigorous outline of how to capture the solid resource factors at the heart of your organization, it also shows you how to specify "soft factors" such as morale, capabilities, and even reputation among customers and investors, so you can see their impact on the tangible parts of the business, and hence on performance. Case examples lead you toward "action checklists" that help you plot out the things you need to properly take advantage of the resources you have, as well as those you need to acquire. The result will be better decisions about this important and costly issue and much greater confidence in your ability to deliver the outcomes your organization desires.

Edition details

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1606490397
• ISBN 13: 9781606490396
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 123