Talent Management Best Practice 3 – Know the Organizational Value of Each Employee

Identify the value contribution of your employeesIt’s become cliché to say employees are an organization’s most valuable assets.

Do you really know the organizational contribution value of each individual working for you?


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Knowing Your Value

Knowing Your Value Women, Money, and Getting What You’re Worth
by Mika Brzezinski

About the Reference

Knowing Your Value by Mika Brzezinski is a self confession and personal growth story about how a now prominent MSNBC morning show host discovered, demanded, and won compensation more inline with that of her peers. The story is complimented by the personal value stories and insights of over a dozen other leaders.

Why You Should Not Buy This Book

StrategyDriven Contributors dislike Knowing Your Value for several reasons. First, the book lacks sufficient method for actually determining your personal worth to an organization. Its premise is that an individual’s value contribution should be based on the compensation of others in similar positions. The shortfall with this argument is that each unique individual contributes differently to the organization and so offers his/her own value proposition. Additionally, there is an underlying assumption that the comparison employees have accurately identified and won their value – a premise that is often not true. Second, the book maintains a foundational assumption that the author was treated differently because she is a woman. While this may or may not be true, the comparison employees identified were noted as contributing significantly greater intellectual and creative works to their organization; suggesting that they were rightfully compensated more. Brzezinski discounts the fact that men, minorities, and other classes of people may also be undervalued, for the reasons she presents, and that everyone should methodically seek to identify and demand their value from employers.

For its shortfalls in revealing how to calculate one’s personal value contribution and its faulted underlying logic and assumptions, StrategyDriven Contributors recommend that our readers not purchase or invest time reading Knowing Your Value.

Alternative Recommendation

StrategyDriven Contributors believe it is highly important for an individual to know his/her value and to aggressively seek it. Identifying one’s worth is not a matter of simple comparison with others or a fight against perceived discrimination but rather a deliberate methodological evaluation of the value contribution of the individual to the organization followed by the positive assertion of that value to those who can correct any imbalance. Such a methodology is presented by Larry Myler, Chief Executive Officer of By Monday, in his book, Indispensable By Monday: Learn the Profit-Producing Behaviors that will Help Your Company and Yourself.

Click here to read a review of Indispensable By Monday and listen to our StrategyDriven Podcast interview with Larry Myler on determining your organizational value.

Recommended Resource – The Executive Guide to High-Impact Talent Management

The Executive Guide to High-Impact Talent Management: Powerful Tools for Leveraging a Changing Workforce
by David DeLong and Steve Trautman

About the Reference

The Executive Guide to High-Impact Talent Management: Powerful Tools for Leveraging a Changing Workforce by David DeLong and Steve Trautman provides a complete talent management program blueprint covering:

  • Diagnosis of talent related organizational risks
  • Evaluation and measurement of talent management initiatives
  • Acceleration of leadership development
  • Transference of individual and organizational knowledge

This blueprint provides the details needed to institute each of these programs and achieve real, measurable results.

Benefits of Using this Reference

StrategyDriven Contributors like The Executive Guide to High-Impact Talent Management because the blueprint provided is implementable, actionable, and based on many of the practices endorsed by StrategyDriven. These practices focus on continuous programmatic assessment and performance measurement to drive superior results. If we had one criticism of the book it would be that the solutions presented appear too academic and unaltered by the realities of the business world.

The Executive Guide to High-Impact Talent Management provides a thorough, implementable talent management program based on sound principles of accountability; making it a StrategyDriven recommended read.

Talent Management Best Practice 2 – Maintain Up-To-Date Job Descriptions

Today’s fast moving marketplace demands that companies be in an almost constant state of change in order to remain competitive. Subsequently, businesses reorganize, new roles are created, and existing positions eliminated on an almost continuous basis. Throughout these changes, it remains important to keep all organization members well aligned and focused on achieving the company’s mission goals. To do this requires ongoing retranslation of these goals to the day-to-day activities of the workforce. Often overlooked but important to maintaining alignment is the updating of job description documents.


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Additional Resource

The link between job descriptions, employee behaviors, and performance reviews is further highlighted by Garry Ridge in his book, Helping People Win at Work: A Business Philosophy Called “Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A”. Listen as Garry shares his insights on improving workforce performance with us during his StrategyDriven Podcast interview.

Recommended Resource – The Talent Masters: Why smart leaders put people before numbers

The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers
by Bill Conaty and Ram Charan

About the Reference

The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers by Bill Conaty and Ram Charan provides unprecedented insight to the people development programs of several legendary organizations including General Electric, Proctor & Gamble, and Novartis. Conaty and Charan illustrate in great detail the specific programs these organizations use to develop talent and plan for and execute on succession plans; including the behind-the-scenes consideration of organizational, cultural, and operational impacts such changes incur. They also share their experience-based insights on the critical personal traits and organizational supports needed for succeeding leaders to excel in their new positions.

Benefits of Using this Reference

StrategyDriven Contributors like The Talent Masters because of its in-depth, behind-the-scenes insights to the talent management practices of globally recognized ‘leadership factories.’ Many case studies highlight the mechanics of these organizations’ programs but Conaty and Charan present the intimate executive discussions and thought processes on personnel development and succession that only insiders possess. This book captures the nuance of thought that makes these processes work so well at creating some of the world’s most sought after leaders.

The in-depth real-world business experience of leading companies presented in The Talent Masters makes this book on personnel development a StrategyDriven recommended read.