Hands-on Talent Management – why having your hands on social media helps develop talent. by Perry Timms

This is my third blog in support of the CIPD’s HRD 2011 conference and in particular the focus day I will be running called “Hands-On Talent” which featured as the headline in the CIPD’s recent email bulletin.  There’s been a little gap in between the 2nd blog and this one – work, bit of leave and some social media time.

And that’s where I want to hone in – social media as an increasingly vital part of talent development and particularly talent management programmes

Why?  Well it’s definitely more than just the fashionable elements of using Twitter and Facebook.  In my mind it’s about two fantastic things that we sometimes take for granted when we think about developing our talent – connectivity and networking.

My experience of building, running and evaluating talent management programmes does not stretch to global as I lead in a UK-only organisation but I know people who do run global programmes with pan-continent cohorts.  They will probably read this and go “well, sure social media is essential in talent programmes, we use a lot of it like Webinars, Skype/Video conferencing etc”.  So there’s no revelation to be had by this blog I’m sure.  Revelation maybe not but I know from discussions with other talent practitioners that we’re a bit behind the curve in critical deployment of social media so I hope this blog ignites some fresh thinking and approaches.

How I’m using social media in talent development is largely around:

• An internal Wiki – a garden-walled environment (talent board and pool members only) to share ideas, post blogs, create threads, store talent board papers, create online discussions and form interest groups.  Created to share research and organisational learning our talent pool have taken to the wiki and the forums and reported that they prefer blogs for a more filtered content approach (pulled down by them) rather than ANOTHER email (pushed) which gets lost in the day to day grind.  Our Wiki is internally developed, hosted and maintained and acts as a portal/Sharepoint model as well as a repository for indexed data like Wikipedia itself.

• Podcasting and Video streaming – particularly in support of development events and activities; as pre-course work to mean for a reduction in class time from an entire day to 2 hours (as all the knowledge bits are online) leaving the course to focus on skills / practical exercises and discussion elements.

• Blogging – hosted on the internal wiki, and largely a reflective format of blog after a course/event, project or coaching session is proving to be a very powerful way of embedding the learning in yourself and then quickly sharing it with others.  It’s a journal I guess, but calling it a blog, creates excitement in people and means they are more inclined to want to do one..!

• Twitter – more following rather than tweeting themselves.  I tweet a little, but more so it’s following HBR; TED; Dan Pink etc that provides really useful pointers to web articles and so on that become learning activities.  I’ve been told by some of my talent pool participants that they know more about some management areas from picking up links within tweets.

• YouTube – for example Dan Heath’s “Sticky Presentations” 2.5 minutes is as good a way to get your slide-decks right over a whole day course!  And of course the fabulous TED stuff.

There’s a lot more that could be done though and I think it’s about letting it grow naturally.  So with that in mind, I’m already working on a “Smart use of Social Media” skills-based session for my talent pool using experts in social media to share their wisdom and create super-users across the business.  I’d then like people to grow social media deployment for development rather HR push it themselves.

In my last blog, I may have disturbed trainers with my prediction of the demise of training courses in talent programmes and I may run the risk of causing e-learning programmers to cry into their beta-versions but I’ve not mentioned online learning and e-learning here at all - whereas use of social media in development is surely electronic learning?  I’d wager though, that if this blog were to be title e-learning it would lose more than it would gain interest.  Because, let’s face it, not many of us would say we like, prefer or widely use e-learning in the way of online lessons.  No matter how hard we’ve tried to boost its appeal, e-learning has never taken off like its predictors said it would. Why?  Well maybe because we humans are social beings and most e-learning packages I’ve used are very anti-social – just you plugged into a machine clicking a lot.

And that’s why I think social media has taken off – it’s social..!  And that’s why I think it will work for talent management programmes – the connectivity and the networking break out of the instructional e-learning format and the freestyle, free-spirited world of social media will give us more options to identify, connect and enable talented people.

Hope you enjoyed the blog – I’d be interested in any views and look forward to seeing as many people as we can fit into the Hands-On Talent Focus day on 7 April.  For my next blog I’m looking at 3Es – experiential-learning, entrepreneurs and excitement..! 

For now, social and online, Perry

Perry Timms is the Head of Talent & OD for the Big Lottery Fund and a regular speaker for, collaborator with and supporter of, the CIPD.  You can follow Perry on twitter at www.twitter.com/PerryTimms and connect with him on LinkedIn of course.