Several recent surveys and research papers, including those from Deloitte and Taleo Research, indicate the top strategic talent issues for 2012: leadership development, talent mobility, and building critical talent pipelines. For most organizations these are overlapping challenges, involving simultaneous focus and investment in talent acquisition, development, retention – and importantly – talent intelligence.

Leadership Development
This month Deloitte released the third installment in their “Talent Edge 2020″ series. As a follow-up to their earlier reports from December 2010 and April 2011, they surveyed 376 senior executives, all of whom are employed by enterprise organizations with over $500 million per year in revenue (82% have over one billion in revenue per year).

One of the key conclusions of Deloitte’s latest survey is that while organizations face significant economic uncertainty, many executives foresee “leadership shortages in the year ahead and are looking at programs to accelerate leadership development within their companies.” When asked to name their top three most pressing talent concerns in 2012, the number one response (see figure at right) was developing leaders and succession planning. Further, 29% predicted this will likely remain the top talent concern over the next three years.

Taleo Research agrees with Deloitte and others who have noted the top-issue status that leadership development and succession planning have for organizations. We spent a lot of time in 2011 focused on this area, particularly on the drivers pushing organizations to emphasize the development of emerging leaders. This work resulted in a powerful research paper co-authored with our partner DDI titled “Emerging Leaders: Build Versus Buy.” We then travelled around the US to discuss this latest research and talk with HR leaders about their challenges and needs in this area. We also wrote a series of blog posts on leadership development – see the recap posting for links to all of this material as well as a video of one of the presentation sessions.

To solve their leadership development and succession planning challenges, organizations are increasingly relying on stronger talent intelligence. The combination of pre-hire and post-hire data from robust talent profiles provides the insights required to inform key leadership build vs. buy decisions. Such talent intelligence is critical to answering core leadership questions such as bench strength analysis, high potential identification, development plans, and paths to leadership.

Talent Mobility
Another key result of Deloitte’s latest study was the executives’ responses when asked to give their top three strategic issues that currently capture the most management attention at their companies. The number one response was improving top- and bottom-line performance (38%), but the number two response was expanding into global and new markets (33%).

What makes this so fascinating is not just that this was the number two response, but the trend in this response over the past three years. As you can see from the chart at right, there has been a significant increase in focus on expanding into global and new markets – from 12% indicating this as a top strategic priority in February 2009 to the now 33% in January 2012.

This result is not surprising to us at Taleo Research, as it is in line with a key message in David Wilkins’ recent paper “The Future of Talent Management, Part 1: Underlying Drivers of Change.” As organizations are looking for growth by expanding into global and new markets, so too they are increasingly seeking talent from new regions of the world. Further, this global competition for talent is becoming ever more intense, in part because top companies from emerging markets are now moving aggressively to compete for top talent in developed countries (not just the other way around).

One result of these trends is an increased emphasis on talent mobility. If you are expanding into a new market, you will surely need top talent in that new market – some of which you can source locally, but the ability to rely on internal talent mobility is a key competitive advantage.

Unfortunately, our research indicates that many organizations are not as strong in talent mobility as they need to be. In 2011, Taleo Research surveyed 500 HR decision makers in the UK (see UK Talent Mobility in 2011), and 100 in Australia (see Australia Talent Mobility in 2011), and we learned that organizations are stronger at vertical talent mobility (e.g., promotions) than they are at horizontal or geographical movement. In the UK, 61 percent responded that they are effective at moving people vertically in the organization, but only 52 percent could say the same for horizontal movement, and only 29 percent for geographical movement. In Australia, the results were similar but even lower: 49 percent of respondents indicated they were effective at vertical movement, 36 percent for horizontal movement, and only 27 percent for geographical movement.

This is quite a mismatch: organizations consider global growth as critical to business success and understand that talent will be a key driver of global expansion initiatives, but many are not well-poised to achieve success because of weak horizontal and geographical talent mobility in their organization.

What are the top barriers? Interestingly, both in the UK and Australia the top three reported barriers were the same: lack of visibility into talent gaps and opportunities, lack of systems/technology to support talent mobility initiatives, and the quality and reliability of employee talent data. This is a key reason that having strong talent intelligence is so vital: strong talent data enables the insights that drive better business decisions to enable greater talent mobility — and ultimately the growth into new regions and markets.

Building Critical Talent Pipelines
Deloitte’s latest survey results also emphasized the importance of building critical talent pipelines. In fact, as you can see from the chart above regarding executives’ top three most pressing talent concerns in 2011, coming in a close second is recruiting hard-to-fill skill sets (29%).

Knowing how increasingly important building strong talent pipelines for critical positions has become, Taleo Research recently commissioned a survey of 500 HR decision makers in large companies in the UK regarding their current attitudes and approaches to their critical talent pipelines. The results are summarized in the paper released this month “UK Critical Talent Pipelines in 2012.” Some of the highlights include:

• Almost all respondents believe there are critical roles within their organization, without which their company would suffer.
• Technical/IT professionals are considered the most difficult critical roles to fill.
• The critical roles that are both difficult to fill and have a big impact are technical/IT, finance/legal, and marketing.
• Companies are likely to rate themselves relatively highly on matching high performing individuals with critical roles (68%) and identifying critical roles within the business based on business goals (66%).
• In contrast, companies rate themselves lower on identifying the risk of losing critical employees (54%) and determining the gaps between available and needed talent (56%).
• Better quality data and insight is seen to be beneficial in a number of key areas, most notably – risk of loss for critical employees / positions (60%), individual talent profile reports (58%), and employee development plan progress (58%).

Unfortunately, the survey also found that UK companies often lack the data, processes, and technology to fully deliver on a critical talent pipelines strategy. Deloitte’s research found that “world class” organizations are quick to focus on their priority talent management areas, so forward-thinking organizations will do so here as well by investing in talent intelligence solutions that provide the insights they need to improve their talent acquisition, development, and retention practices – thereby solving their critical talent pipeline challenges.

What do you think? Are these three areas – leadership development and succession planning, talent mobility, and building critical talent pipelines – of top strategic importance in your organization? In what ways would stronger talent intelligence data and insights help you to make better business decisions in these (or other) areas? We look forward to your comments.