Lifestagetalent development & coaching
Best Practices in talent development & coaching
Strategic talent development enhances student outcomes and boosts staff retention [1].
Organizations that cultivate a culture of continuous growth support a thriving environment that enables staff to meet – and surpass – expectations. Aligning individual goals with school-wide objectives not only bridges performance gaps but also empowers staff to unlock their full potential for future success within your organization.
[1]: engage2learn.org/talent-development
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Step
1
Track Process
Talent leaders should collaboratively monitor progress alongside managers so that everyone is invested in tracking and assessing the effectiveness of the current talent development and coaching strategies. Developing a tracker to input data from feedback surveys, skip-level conversations, and observations of managers is critical to understanding ongoing skill gaps and areas needing improvement. If offering funding for professional development opportunities, track the demographics of staff that apply or request funds to identify if staff member identity impacts likelihood to request funds, and track who receives the funds to ensure equity in their distribution across lines of difference.
DEIA Callout
Proactively providing funds to staff members rather than requiring them to apply for funds, or using clearly defined rubrics for assessing funding applications help to mitigate biases that often negatively impact staff of marginalized identities.
implement & monitor
Step
2
Schedule Equity Pauses
Regularly schedule equity pauses to assess for the existence of bias in talent development and coaching systems. This step is particularly important in manager-driven coaching given the extent to which managers have autonomy over their actions. HR/Talent should regularly assess tracked DEIA data and follow-up with staff focus groups if trends suggest that inequity or dissatisfaction is prevalent within particular groups. In a standardized manner, share a summary of this data with all managers using conversation guides developed by HR/Talent, and ask all managers to reflect on the findings and provide feedback on what needs to be changed to address the current DEIA concerns.
RESOURCES
DEIA Callout
Create talking points and conversation guides for equity pause conversations to ensure that each supervisor of managers is providing a consistent level of accountability and equity.
implement & monitor
Step
3
Assess Success Metrics
Assessing progress toward your defined success metrics and overall vision should occur annually, if not semi-annually. Ideally, HR/Talent should review data in the tracker (e.g. staff feedback skip-level conversation take-aways, equity pause reflections, etc.), and follow-up by scheduling meetings with supervisors of managers to review trends and create action plans. Data reviews should include organization-wide data, as well as granular trends within teams and departments. Importantly, segmenting data by demographic subgroup allows for ongoing monitoring of potential disparities across lines of difference.
DEIA Callout
Increasing transparency about success metrics builds staff member trust that there are practices in place to mitigate against potential bias across managers.
EdFuel can design talent development & coaching systems and processes for you.