Why CMOS Need To Manage Their Talent For Long-Term Growth and ROI

When it comes to money, those that end up with the largest portfolios tend to be those that effectively manage how they save, spend, and invest. They often take a long-term approach with the understanding that the more attention they give their portfolio, the more ROI they will get from it. And, that’s an intangible item but a very important asset in our lives.

Now, imagine applying that philosophy as a CMO to the talent in your organization. As a leader, responsibility involves not only determining the direction the company will take in its strategy and marketing efforts to achieve that strategy, but it is also about effectively managing the people within the organization that is essentially responsible for making that success happen. Therefore, you have to look at your team as a talent portfolio and asset that has to be nurtured over the long term to get the right levels of ROI.

Maintain A Favorable Standing With Talent

The leadership in an organization has the power to make this happen, especially if you consider the results of a recent Owler survey on CEO ratings among 350 popular private and public companies from 30 states and 17 countries. The crowdsourced business insights platform gathered more than 100,000 insights from the over one million business professionals that participate in their online community.

Among the research, it was found that employees rate their CEO more favorably than non-employees 95% of the time. Overall, employees awarded their CEO 88% favorability while non-employees offered a rating of 55%. That is a good sign and indicates how much stock employees put in the leadership of their own organization. It’s something that a leader should focus on keeping by enacting the tools and processes that maintain this favorable rating. In exchange, this talent will stay and work hard on behalf of the leadership and the company.

New Leadership And Organizational Design

A recent research report from Deloitte entitled, “Global Human Capital Trends 2016” included insights from 7,000 leaders across companies located in 130 countries and concluded that managing people effectively has changed due to the changing organizational design that now includes remote and widely dispersed talent.

This has required a different leadership approach in order to still effectively oversee this portfolio of talent that now consists of various generations each with a perspective on what work means. There is also more of a team dynamic alongside the need to provide individual acknowledgments of contributions.

Leverage Technology To Manage The Talent Portfolio

While the human aspect of the equation in the form of an inspirational and respected leader is important in managing the talent portfolio, some of the processes can be automated. New technology platforms are emerging just for what is being termed “Human Capital Management (HCM)” Gone are the days of HR as more organizations understand the value in looking at their talent as an asset that has to be seen and managed in a different way.

HCM platforms combine numerous aspects of managing the process behind the people like onboarding, payroll, benefits, time and attendance and all other components of the daily work process. By streamlining these previously cumbersome and time-consuming processes, talent has a better experience with these aspects of their daily work environment.

At the same time, those within the organization can spend more time on the softer side of people management where motivation, satisfaction, productivity, and retention are most impacted by the behaviors of leadership and the overall culture. Although all these operational tasks of people manage are important, they do not need to dominate the relationship between an organization and its talent asset pool.

Within an HCM platform, previously separate data about these assets are combined to generate new insights and understanding of how the people management process is performing, which also can help leadership more effectively oversee these assets. Like any type of portfolio, bringing all the necessary data together and providing analytics about that data can help identify under performers and top performers so more informed decisions can take place that addresses the underperformance that might have previously gone unnoticed.

According to the aforementioned Deloitte report, “77% of executives now rate people analytics as a key priority, up slightly from last year. In response, companies are building people analytics teams, rapidly replacing legacy systems, and combining separate analytics groups within HR into one strategic function.” In recognizing the value of people analytics, “44% are now using workforce data to predict business performance, up from 29% last year.”

Leadership + Technology = Talent Asset Portfolio Management

This brings it full circle back to the impact of the CEO so that they know how to make changes that may increase favorability and retention among these assets for even greater ROI. Combining technology with the human approach acknowledges the changing perspective of workers while also providing efficiency and capability to oversee people that are scattered and participate in remote teams. It’s technology like HCM platforms that handle the legwork, but it’s the leader that brings it all together and keeps the portfolio growing over the long term.

The Data Driven CMO

In addition to managing talent, another challenge for today’s Chief Marketing Officer is leveraging personalization to demonstrate and drive clear ROI to the executive team.

Download The Data Driven CMO to see how leading CMOs weigh in on other challenges, including how they can skillfully decipher, understand, and leverage the abundance of available data to engage with customers.

This article originally appeared on Forbes. 

Image source: Flickr

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