What about Talent Mgmt and Development with Data?
The last two days I have been meeting with heads of talent mgmt and development from over 60 companies. Straight up – TM and TD has its work cut out for itself in data.
There are not systems of record that record daily or weekly activity in relation to leadership, competencies, succession planning, or development. Not that the PMS, engagement survey, LMS, or other systems can’t handle being engaged regularly – they just aren’t:
Engagement survey – 1x per year
Performance reviews – 2x per year
LMS review – sporadic but maybe 4x
Competency review – 1x a year – maybe
So for the last 48 hours its been about how do you track if management is exhibiting training, is leadership getting better, or if people learning.
Well folks…you could start using your systems more than once a year. Break up the engagement survey into groups, do reviews more, track learning weekly rather than monthly – but I know the politics and resource behind that maybe a hot mess.
It’s time to get the data from the business. Mfg quality data, sales, customer service, market share, impromptu feedback, and supplier / vendor feedback from the business. Those areas are being tracked more regularly and you can start analyzing if business outcomes are moving and if HR processes are directly linked to those outcomes. If leaders are able to increase output, start investigating if they are using different engagement and mgmt methods, and where did they get it from.
You could do text based analytics of work product, emails, messaging, CRMs and so on to see if culture or communication is shifting – but that’s a double diamond ski slope – in Colorado. Don’t break your neck. We can ski that slope – but hopefully you can make it down 
It may be better to have an approach that allows for a higher frequency of data enables trending earlier. If you want to see if you are engaging more or if people are learning or executing better – ask more often, assess more often, and check the every day data. That’s the short answer.
The most logical answer is usually the right one – if you want to know if you are engaging people better within a 12 month time frame, not sure you should do the engagement survey only once a year.