Talent Diagnostic Takeaways and a Brand Refresh
Hi there! I’m Sarah Braver, and I’ve been working with Lora Cover at coLeague since the Fall of ‘22. I get to work on operations, strategy, and product; and I’m excited to share some of our learnings from the first rounds of our Talent Diagnostic.
Over the last few months, I've gotten to work with clients to launch coLeague's new Talent Diagnostic. It's been such an incredible experience to get to take something from a spark of an idea to actually making an impact with client teams. Most importantly, it continues to fuel coLeague's mission to support leaders as they support their organization.
As a quick refresher, coLeague’s Talent Diagnostic is a unique approach to assessing an organization’s talent strategy and infrastructure through a radically people-centric lens.
We created the Talent Diagnostic in order to increase the impact coLeaguers can have on an organization from day one. By starting our work with the Talent Diagnostic, coLeaguers and clients can rapidly assess the root of many challenges and create a roadmap to tackle the issues in the order that’s best for the team.
A few of my biggest insights so far:
1. If your employees don't know about your talent systems or how they work, they might as well not exist!
The rubric on our diagnostic doesn't measure the quality or efficacy of your systems; it asks about whether things exists/folks know about them, how often/widely they are used, and whether or not they are integrated with other systems. This gives us the starting place for digging deeper into what's missing or broken.
*Takeaway:* What's missing might actually be transparency or system cohesion!
2. You can have a world-class employee wellness program and employees still might report believing the company doesn't prioritize a healthy work/life balance.
*Two Takeaways:* wellness perks aren't a substitute for the basics like psychological safety or a reasonable workload AND you can't control how folks feel despite doing your best to make them feel good.
3. Our Talent Diagnostic can bring many new things to light, but what it seems to really do for clients is validate their feelings and suspicions about the underlying cause of what they're seeing day-to-day.
*Takeaway:* Validating feelings with data is empowering and can be just the thing a leader needs to get started tackling the biggest people challenges.
Finally, my biggest personal takeaway is that there *is* an answer to the question, "we've got a million things to do - where do we even begin??"
We've already learned so much doing this work for our partner clients and I hope we get to help many, many more organizations get to the bottom of (and solve!) their biggest people problems.
Want to learn more about how the Talent Diagnostic can get to the root of your People Problems? Book time with us!
coLeague’s New Brand: We’re On Your Team!
An opportunity to refresh the brand this fall lets us show off the incredible value of our coLeaguers.
When Lora created coLeague in 2022, the brand was strongly focused on the "co-" aspect: "co-partner, co-design.” She was right - what coLeague would become was about true partnership with our clients, sitting alongside them as experts in inclusive Talent strategy and how to center people in everything an organization does.
When we got the opportunity this summer to work with a design studio to refresh the brand, we wanted to "show the co" in a way that conveys that partnership in a simple image.
We love our new logo - two flags flying together, representing the way we see ourselves as a sort of "second team." coLeague is not just the individual coLeaguer supporting a client, but the coLeague Team and all of our coLeaguers’ collective experience and expertise forming a "deep bench" that can be called upon to address any challenge an organization might face.
"Green flags" (as opposed to those pesky red ones) are also so emblematic of coLeague - signaling to leaders and teams that we want to do things the right way, the inclusive way, the people-centric way. coLeague's green flags are our commitments: equity-centric talent strategy, putting people at the center of everything, and supporting coLeaguers as theysupport leaders and organizations.
Lastly, our new tagline, "Chief People Experts," represents our core mission - giving organizations access to the best veteran people leaders in the biz. Small, mission-driven organizations might not be ready for a full time Chief People Officer, but we think they deserve your experience and expertise as much as any larger organization.
