Beginning a new three-part series on how to make talent management processes inclusive and equitable, Professor Binna Kandola examines how our systems of work and management were never designed to include everyone, and why it’s wrong to assume there’s a level playing field for today’s talent.
We like to believe that talent management is fair and inclusive – that it’s about finding the best person for the job, wherever they may be. But in reality, many talent frameworks are built on a narrower premise: that only a select few have potential worth investing in. In fact, some of the most widely used talent models are explicitly exclusive – designed to identify and elevate high performers from within an already limited field.
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This raises a fundamental question: who was ever considered to be talent in the first place?
From the very beginning, our systems of work and management were not designed to include everyone. They were designed to value a very particular kind of person, with a very particular background.
The story of talent in the workplace is as much a story of exclusion as it is of development – and if we want to create more inclusive, high-performing organisations today, we need to understand where these patterns began.
This article – the first in a three-part series – looks back at how the workplace evolved. The systems we inherited weren’t neutral; they were shaped by the social attitudes and inequalities of their time. And their legacy still defines who gets recognised, invested in, and seen as leadership material today.
How work was shared and then divided
Before the Industrial Revolution, work was mostly done at home. Men and women contributed side by side, whether in agriculture, weaving, or other forms of domestic industry. With the rise of the guilds in medieval towns, however, cracks began to appear. Men began taking on more of the skilled trades, and although girls could become apprentices, they were limited to a fraction of the trades available to boys – and those they could enter were often less prestigious and less well paid.
Guild-regulated work done in towns was deemed honourable. Home-based work, often undertaken by women, was not. That distinction – between “serious” work and everything else – still lingers today in subtle attitudes toward working from home and part-time roles.
The Industrial Revolution fundamentally reshaped the world of work. It separated paid labour from the home and formally excluded middle-class women from participation. Around the same time, a host of new professions emerged – from engineering to accountancy – along with professional bodies to regulate them. These careers required formal education, which was unavailable to most women, effectively locking them out of these growing sectors.
Another profession quietly took shape during this time: management. As businesses expanded, so did the need to organise them. Drawing inspiration from engineering, early management was focused on systems, efficiency, and control. Standardisation became the goal, and anything outside the standard was seen as inefficient or disruptive.
Henry Ford’s famous line captured this perfectly: “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” Simplicity, not individuality, was the priority – and this same mindset shaped how people were managed, too.
The rise of management – and its narrow view of talent
From the late 19th century onwards, interest in management as a discipline grew rapidly. Books and courses proliferated. By 1930, the number of engineers in the United States had grown from 3,000 to 300,000, two-thirds of whom would go on to hold management positions. The values of engineering – predictability, uniformity, structure – became embedded in the way people were hired, assessed, and promoted.
Over time, personnel departments evolved to cover training and welfare, and by the mid-20th century, a growing body of psychological research began exploring employee motivation and satisfaction. The field matured into what we now call Human Resource Management, and in the 1990s, the term “talent management” entered the conversation.
But who was ever allowed to be seen as talent?
The roots of exclusion run deep
The ‘science’ of the 18th and 19th centuries gave rise to classifications of people. Pseudo-scientific racial hierarchies justified colonialism and slavery. Homosexuality was criminalised and medicalised. Disabled people were forcibly separated from the public sphere under “Ugly Laws”. Entire categories of people were labelled unfit – not only for leadership, but for inclusion in society itself.
These ideas weren’t fringe. They influenced legal systems, education and, yes, the world of work. The early structures of management were built in an era where exclusion was not just accepted but formalised. Those seen as the “right kind” of people – white, able-bodied, heterosexual men – were presumed to possess the qualities needed to lead. Everyone else was either absent or overlooked.
This wasn’t a bug in the system. It was the system.
Why this history still matters
Too often, today’s conversations about talent assume a level playing field – as if everyone has always had the same opportunity to be recognised. But the ways we assess potential, evaluate performance, and select leaders still carry echoes of those earlier attitudes and exclusions. If we don’t challenge those assumptions, we risk continuing to see talent in only one kind of image.
The next article in this series will explore how organisational culture and subtle, often invisible forms of exclusion can lead to underperformance – and how that underperformance is then used to justify why certain people are still not seen as talent. The cycle is self-perpetuating, but it’s not inevitable.
To build more inclusive workplaces, we must first understand whose talent was never even allowed to surface.
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