Talent Management is no longer a buzz word
nor a fad and yet during my recent conversation with few business leaders, I
learnt that their chief concerns continues to remain the same- finding and
retaining skilled talent and developing capabilities to deliver on strategies.
As business environment continues to get more
volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, competition for talent will get
more intensified and fierce. Across every industry, executives worry about
finding the talent and critical skills to deliver on their organizational
strategies. Organizations around the world are experiencing disruptive change
in the demand for critical skills. No wonder then the ability to hire, develop,
engage and retain the right people and at the same time nurture a vibrant,
transparent, high performance culture has become crucial for leaders and
managers across any organisations.
Today, business leaders are not just
monitoring business profitability but constantly reviewing the three key
aspects required for any successful business - 1) Continuously redefining
strategy, 2) Creating a vibrant, transparent, agile, innovative and high
performance culture to execute strategy, and 3) having the right people to
execute strategies. This means HR has to play a critical role especially when
they are being responsible for one-third of the business success.
Today with shrinking margins there is
enormous pressures on business leaders to manage cost, be innovative and
address changing customer demands. This means business Leaders and HR will have
to find solutions to attract, develop, engage and retain right people without
significantly increasing cost, ensuring lesser attrition, with highest
engagement levels and delivering the best possible performance. To address
these challenges many organisations have designed and implemented talent
management strategies and programmes.
While some of the leaders did mention that
they have implemented talent management practices but few of them expressed
their concerns about its success and the way talent management strategy is
executed. While some of the organizations extensively use various tools and
methods to identify and develop talent there are others who only identify
talent and do very less about their engagement and development.
There are companies who instead of developing
talent internally prefer to poach talent aggressively from competition with
more attractive pay and benefit packages which if not done properly could lead
to internal disparity. This is rather a reactionary, short-term and piecemeal
approach which often leaves organisations at the mercy of external forces.
Sourcing external talent is necessary for
critical and niche roles, geographical expansion and for some leadership roles.
Often the pace of change coupled with demand and supply gaps for critical
skills compels organizations to source talent from outside than develop
internally. It is important that Talent Management strategy is able to
articulate a clear long term talent acquisition strategy based on changing
business strategy and workforce planning.
Talent Management should endeavour to be
expansive, promote diversity and inclusion. It is necessary to consider sourcing
talent not just from regular campuses but even from different Tier Institutes and different educational backgrounds. At the same time, organisations must be
open to hire laterally from different industries to gain competitive advantage.
While roles in support function are generally industry agnostics, often
companies are skeptical in hiring candidates from different industries. Candidates
having good learning agility and attitude with proper training can pick up
skills and adapt to different industries.
But Talent Management shouldn’t just be
restricted to sourcing. Talent Management should have greater focus on
development, engagement and retention. To do that, Talent Management has to
become an integral part and even core to business strategy. Leadership team has
to ensure that Talent management does not end up becoming another HR programme
but an essential and strategic component of their business strategy and is
reviewed every quarter. In more progressive organisations, talent and
especially succession management are even reviewed by board. Its time Talent
Management gets aligned with enterprise risk management strategy.
There are various framework available
including the most popular, the nine box model which essentially identifies
talent based on the two parameters - performance and potential. As performance
management systems are undergoing transformation, there is a new school of
thought emerging that suggests discarding the nine box model. Regardless of
this thought, the nine box model does help organisations to lay the preliminary
foundation for talent management.
When it comes to identifying talent several
organisations are widely using various tools and even getting external agencies
to conduct psychometric tests, assessment and development centers, and
introducing talent analytics that provides data pertaining to employee
competencies, performance, potential and other relevant information to identify
talent. Few of the leaders have even started having formal and informal talent
conversation to gauge employee Passion, Attitude, Mindset & Behaviours
which are equally paramount when it comes to identifying talent.
With increasing attrition and given the
competitive challenges of finding talent, business leaders are soon realizing
that Talent development can become a good retention strategy. Succession
management process has to go beyond key leadership and managerial positions and
should be expanded to include other critical & niche roles as well. It is
therefore necessary to identify critical, niche and core roles and then focus
on succession planning.
Successful Talent development can only take
place if organisation understands the current and future organisational
capabilities required to deliver its strategy and understand how to develop and
fill those gaps. Development of talent has to be considered as a strategic
investment. Mere nomination for internal or external Managerial or
Executive Development programmes, conferences, other classroom and online
trainings wouldn’t suffice. The advent of social media, digital and mobile
learning can help organisations to create more integrated development
strategies that include regular formal and informal training, expertise
sharing, mentoring, coaching, on the job training and gamification for
employees to learn as per their convenience.
People identified in talent pool must be
given stretched assignments, exciting action learning projects, job rotation,
cross functional training, lateral career movement, promotion and opportunity
to shadow managerial and leadership roles which will help in their development
and retention. What is more critical is to allow high potential employees a
chance to perform and even fail. In addition leaders have to play a crucial
role in rewarding and recognizing key talent. Their every interaction must
inspire, lead and nurture talent and give people compelling reasons to develop
and stay.
Apparently there are different approaches to
talent management. There is no single ‘blueprint’ for effective talent
management that can be applied to all organisational contexts. It will vary
depending upon each organisation’s mission, competencies, their requirements
for current and future talent pipeline based on changing business strategies
and environment.
While we may debate about it, organisations
should have a clearly defined framework to identify, engage, develop and retain
talent. The ability to get and keep the right talent is all about focus,
execution and follow-through. Successful talent management requires a
sustained, four-pronged effort to recruit, engage, develop and retain the best
talent available. To succeed, a company needs strong, supportive leaders and a
caring, innovative culture. It also needs HR and business to think talent
management as business strategy and holistically develop programs that work
together and support a cohesive talent strategy aligned with organisations
strategic goals.
