Today is the final instalment of Talent Management week. It's also interesting to note that it seems flavour of the month in terms of activity with several reports and comments on this topic appearing.
Fundamentally we know that 'talent management' is really looking at a 'slice' of existing HRM processes in a more integrated fashion and with a strategic perspective, with the provision that this can only happen if structured evaluation and measurement is undertaken (as with most things strategic). Thus talent management (TM) is essentially a sub-set of human capital management (HCM) as it does not look at the total of people management practice (as defined by the VB-HR Profiler). I would reiterate the stance that both HCM and TM are as much organisation philosophies to follow.
I would hate to think that HR professionals are unable to see the similarities between talent management, people management and human capital management............
I have refrained from referring some of our publications until today. I would suggest that if you want to see an overview of strategic human capital management and the link with talent and where evaluation and measurement fit in then I would recommend two articles:
'Competitive Advantage through Strategic Human Capital Management', JoAHCM Volume 1 Number 1 2007, and
'Organisation Engagement: Evaluating your human capital management signature', JoAHCM Volume 1 Number 2 2007
As a general comment, I think the reality is that most organisations are doing some form of talent management to varying degrees of success and to varying degrees of their staffing population. As yet the effectiveness or competitive advantage derived is mainly unclear, simply because focus has been on process and data collation rather than evaluation, measurement and organisation intelligence. My concern is that we spend too long trying to get perfect data or adding layers of process rather than focus on the output/impact/difference it makes......
From an organisational standpoint there are three questions around talent management and its impact that I would pose:
1. When referring to talent is the organisation referring to everybody, or just particular roles/levels of the organisation? For example, The War for Talent mentioned yesterday had a specific focus on certain management levels. More recent interpretations have been broader to incorporate all levels/roles. So does talent have a specialised focus? If its is more broad how does that play out in reality?
2. How are organisations utilising their talent and to what degree? How do we know that people’s ‘talent’ is being collectively put to good use given some of the natural operating constraints, for example? How do we keep track? And what difference does it make?
3. How are organisations optimising the talent they have? How is development aligned with business need? Do we have any idea? What are the implications from a workforce planning perspective? What is our definition of optimise and how different is it from utilise? And are we optimising the 'specialised few' or the general organisation populous? What are the cost implications? What are the cost implications of not doing it?
For some insight into these questions, I'm afraid that you'll have to wait for the next edition of the Journal out in January 2008 with our thought-leader article on talent management.
Until then, two exercises for you to do:
1) How many words of four letters or more can you derive from 'talent management' and can you find any suitable anagrams?
2) Given the 'skilled incompetence' (see yesterday's blog reference and November 8th blog entry) that has been regularly appearing over the past few weeks - can you spot its occurrence in your workplace/in general (the worrying thing is the more you look the more you seem to find).......
Have a good weekend!
