Blog: HR Periscope

I’ve noted that there are an increasing number of organisations that offer Talent Management services, include it in job titles or simply speak of the need for it. To an extent this is good or at least the Management of Talent sounds positive. The only thing is I believe there is a lack of clarity as to what it really means. In deed people using the terminology often mean different things.

By Talent Management, I’ve found that typically a number of organisations use Talent Management as another name for Leadership Development, while a number of others use it to describe recruitment and development (of the top tiers) of staff within organisations.

I take a more holistic approach to Talent Management as I believe that although Leadership Development and Recruitment & Development may be important elements of Talent Management, they cannot by themselves be truly effective.

Talent Management needs to start with an understanding of a business’ objectives – both immediate and for future years in line with an organisation’s business plan. (This is the reason why whenever I work with an organisation one of the first things that I do is come to grips with the organisations business plan and objectives.) These objectives need to be translated into resourcing requirements, ideally in the form of a Competency Framework. This may be developed at either an organisation-wide or departmental level.

This Framework forms the baseline for Talent Management as it enables for the Resource Planning or Workforce Planning that provides an understanding of the human resources required by the organisation both immediately and into the future. It further enables an organisation to measure the required resources against those currently in place, to identify where the gaps exist and plan for the future.

It is against this backdrop, that we can talk of the recruitment and development aspects of talent management. The starting point of this is the development of staff to work effectively in their current roles. From here there is a need to move on to consider the identification and development of staff for succession planning. This often focuses on the development of Leadership staff. Good leaders should in turn look to the development of their teams.

As this is going on there is a simultaneous need to creatively work on the recruitment of staff. Although recruitment is nothing new, the challenges of getting the right staff within an organisation is increasing becoming a challenge and the challenge does not stop with recruitment. If an organisation goes through great troubles to obtain staff, then it is only logical that the organisation will want to retain them.

This takes us on to the final aspect of Talent Management that I wish to talk about. This is the management and engagement of staff. The point at which performance management becomes important, not just as a means of measuring performance, but also a means of employee engagement to ensure that an employee’s role within the organisation is something that he or she feels valued in and that it helps to develop/enhance his or her career. Simultaneously it entails offering the flexible working options that provide employees with a work life balance of choice. All of the aspects of staff management and engagement mentioned feed back into Workforce Planning.

While the various aspects of Talent Management have always been important, there is a heightened need for a number of them due to the requirements of employment legislation. Most pertinent, however is that fact that we do have an ageing population and the younger generations of workers that we do have; popularly referred to as Generation X and Generation Y are increasingly demanding these options of their employers.

In effective while the various elements of Talent Management are nothing new what is, if not new, now pertinent is need to pull together the various strategies, processes and systems required for the development of an effective workforce.

Susan Popoola
Conning Towers
HR Transformation & Talent Management

Leveraging the Power of People

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Labels: Ageing Workforce, Competency Framework, Generation X, Generation Y, Performance Management, Talent Management, Workforce Performance

# posted by Susan Popoola @ 13:34