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Management Services Spring 2012
Talent management
Talent Management and b organisations
By Colin Coulson-Thomas. T
alent management is a preoccupation of many senior human resources practitioners and certain boardrooms. The importance of people has long been recognised in the speeches of chief executive offi cers and alluded to in corporate annual reports. Is ‘talent management’ another management fad? Will it go the way of other fashions as new priorities emerge or will it have a signifi cant impact upon future performance? A new report suggests that, for many organisations, the challenges which talent management seeks to address are real and pressing, but the approaches they adopt ensure their efforts are doomed to disappoint (Coulson-Thomas, 2012). A practical and much more affordable way of quickly achieving multiple corporate objectives and measurable benefi ts for both people and organisations is often being overlooked.
Disadvantages of prevailing approaches The evidence presented suggests many boards should question the approaches, initiatives and programmes being adopted to create high performance organisations (Coulson-Thomas, 2012). Many talent-related, change and transformation activities are general, expensive, time-consuming and disruptive. By the time they deliver, commissioning organisations may face very different
challenges and opportunities – and requirements may have changed.
Even where fundamental restructuring or reorganisation are thought necessary, there may be implications for relationships with customers, suppliers and business partners to address. Opportunity costs can be high when people are distracted with internal matters. Changing a corporate culture, attitudes, processes and ways of working and learning with some approaches can take years and strain corporate fi nances.
‘Internal communications’, ‘engagement’ and ‘management of change’ programmes suggest the merits of many corporate initiatives may not be immediately apparent to those who are expected to implement them. Similarly, the efforts being devoted in many organisations to motivating people suggest these initiatives are incomplete, while describing a project to put in a new computer system as a ‘transformation programme’ can create unrealistic expectations. The status quo is supported by suppliers of expensive support services who suggest the ‘complexity’ of what needs to be done justifi es the requirement for high cost experts and consultants. However, what if there were a simpler approach and it were possible to get many more and average people to understand and excel?
Problems with contemporary talent management
Many approaches to talent management are unaffordable. Companies engage in bidding wars to recruit people considered especially talented or high fl yers. As the supply of identifi able and deployable talent dries up, organisations move on to compete for those thought to have ‘potential’ in an uncertain future. With training inputs quickly forgotten, building talent internally may not be considered a viable alternative within an acceptable timescale. Yet an examination of
Wall Street analysts by Boris Groysberg (2010) suggests individuals identifi ed as very talented may not necessarily perform at the same high levels when lured elsewhere by increased salaries. His fi ndings suggest consciously buying high performance can be expensive, as a star in one context may not do so well in another. They strengthen the case for focusing on a particular context, for example, by putting the right support in place to create a high performance team.
Talent as a challenge and an opportunity
Having talented individuals on the payroll is one thing, leveraging their capabilities to secure competitive advantage is another (Lawler, 2009). Talented people may not only be costly to recruit, they can be diffi cult to manage and
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