Raising Talent

Every year, Minneapolis-based Fairview Health Services plucks 10 top performers from its manager and director ranks to participate in its High Potential Program. “It’s a year-long program for people the company believes will move into executive roles on day,” explains Laura Beeth, a 2005 High Potential “graduate.”

The executives-to-be have regularly received high performance ratings, have expressed interest in climbing the company hierarchy, and are nominated by organization leaders. They apply for admission to the program; an executive team winnows the field down to 10 people who represent a blend of leaders from all pockets of the 22,000-employee organization. Beeth, for example, a human-resources professional, was grouped with, among others, a surgeon and leaders from nursing, pharmacy, and allied health.

Once assembled, this group is assigned to work on community projects that are important to Fairview. Beeth’s group addressed an organization-wide challenge identified by the CEO: unifying a complex, multi-site medical services provider in a way to best serve patients. To do so, the group met off site for two days a month, bringing their respective expertise to bear on the problem, and were given leadership instruction by various guest speakers, typically Fairview executives. In addition, each participant was matched up with executive coaches and mentors from within Fairview, who imparted wisdom and provided exposure to otherwise inaccessible areas of the operation.

For participants, “It’s a wonderful experience,” says Beeth, who was system director of workforce development and placement in Fairview’s career service area when she was admitted to the program, which has since been renamed the Excel Program. Today, she is system director of talent acquisition for the entire organization.

At Fairview, this ongoing commitment to high-level training is an integral part of a comprehensive talent management framework, which spans the entire employment cycle, “from predicting talent all the way to retaining talent,” Beeth says.

Done systematically, with buy-in from company executives, talent management fortifies a company by strengthening its parts. “The smart talent managers out there understand that the process is not just about developing individuals, as important as that may be,” explains Durwin Long, assistant dean of executive and professional development for the University of St. Thomas’s Opus College of Business in Minneapolis. “It’s about building organizational capacity.”

But talent management is anything but widely adopted, and generally only by large enterprises. A 2009 study conducted by Human Resource Executive magazine and Bersin & Associates, an Oakland-based research firm, revealed that a mere 5 percent of the nearly 1,000 responding firms had a clearly defined talent management system in place. And the recession likely is tempting companies to shift their gaze from the horizon to the growing number of revenue-draining obstacles in the foreground.