A common misconception I often find myself debunking is that risks related to “the people part” of business are somehow less quantifiable and less manageable than other types of business risk. 

They’re not. 

Explore a list of Talent Risks that you can measurably mitigate.

To be a more successful change manager, have your team answer the Big Picture questions about yoru organization and its strategy. Wehn answered throughout your team top level to bottom in cascading fashion, these questions will clarify employee roles in supporting the strategy, help define boundaries, and get everyone focusing on the right priorities.

Succession planning tools help your organization prepare for upcoming expert or executive departures. The harsh reality is that since no two cases of succession planning are alike, there is no such thing as a succession planning template. If someone promises you an easy template for succession planning, they are trying to fleece you, not help you.

While we cannot supply you with a one-size-fits-all template solution for succession planning, we can provide you with a number of effective tools that will enable you to fine-tune your succession plan for success.

When everyone involved in a transformation can define what “done” means to them, you know you’ve won. Your team, employees, and contractors should be able to say things like, “My priorities have changed from ‘A’ to ‘B,’” or “I’ve completed my work on ‘C’ and started working on ‘D.’” They should know they are on the right track because they hit their standards for one aspect and their metrics for another. These targets may change over the course of the transformation, but if the targets aren’t clear to everyone involved, you’ll never be able to celebrate crossing the finish line.

When it comes to managing talent risk, your company likely has one or more of the following types of information: an org chart, head count, retirement risks, attrition rates, and employee satisfaction or engagement scores. But if you rely heavily on technical staff with unique skills and knowledge, you will want additional information to assess and mitigate your risk.

Talent risk management is about assessing your company’s capacity to execute your strategy 3 to 36 months from now. Most companies struggle to create actionable plans to truly mitigate talent risk simply because they don’t know how to quantify and measure the cost and benefits associated with talent risk management. Take a read through this list and ask yourself: “How many of these risks are keeping me up at night?” 

Business succession planning is crucial to the financial stability of your organization. When done right, a succession plan ensures that no important knowledge is lost with the departure of an expert. It also makes sure the successor can successfully assume the responsibilities required by their new role.

Our experience has shown that companies that follow these 13 succession planning tips are able to stay profitable and effective during a transition.

A Skill Development Plan (SDP) is a custom, date-driven inventory and schedule of skills and knowledge that must be learned in a given role—and the resources available and test questions needed to confirm that the right knowledge has been transferred.

When I discuss the issue of pacers, every executive can make a list and then tell me what is at stake because of over reliance on these folks; top line revenue, market share, competitive threats, team morale, client satisfaction, are all at risk.

The good news is that pacers are just experts waiting to be managed with a process and a plan. While they may be unique and confounding to you, we see them as our next challenge and look forward to helping them.

The "Pacers" in Your Organization & Talent Risk

Quick exercise: Make a list of all the people in your org. who are needed on so many projects that their very lack of availability is literally keeping you from hitting deadlines and executing critical initiatives – even doing the unique and critical work required to add new top line revenue. Don’t just groan and say you have people like that. Of course you do. Write down their names and lets do something about them.

Do you have a structure that holds space for learning and experimenting in the busy day-to-day? Do your teams read and discuss relevant articles in staff meetings? Do you block time on your calendars for reflection? What are your practical tips for skill development? 

If you cannot see through the technical fog, you cannot inventory and manage your unique technical capacity—and that means you can’t identify and manage your talent risks either. The first step to lifting the technical fog is to stop settling for HR-style data on your technical workforce that doesn’t get down to the task level of what each person actually knows how to do. The work of getting this relevant, detailed talent data and then lifting the technical fog to make better decisions is called talent risk management.

Highly technical professionals, perhaps even more so than their business management counterparts, truly appreciate the structure that 3-Step Knowledge Transferprovides. They are able to learn the required skills of new job role quickly, clearly and measurably, with ultimately less stress during the process.

Using the tools like the Knowledge Silo Matrix, the Skill Development Plan, the Big Picture Questions shines the light on the true issue at hand. It establishes the standards and gives you the ability to hold your team to those standards with undeniable clarity.

Don’t make the mistake of focusing solely on talent risks at the upper management level. Your company’s long-term success may very well hinge on the bench strength and flexibility of your front-line skilled professionals just as critically as with that of your executives. Knowing who has the business-critical knowledge in your company, regardless of their age or position, will ensure that you are on target for long-term growth and stability.

At the Steve Trautman Co., we’re often brought in when the stakes are high: a major reorg, an AI implementation, a looming retirement, a critical gap that’s slowing down a strategic initiative—or a team that simply isn’t aligned with the strategy. 

That’s where our tools come in. 

Turning Talent Risk Into Data You Can Act On