Starting with today's background context for Talent Management -
If Personnel was mainly to do with administrative excellence
And
Human Resource Management (HRM) mainly focused on integrated process excellence
Then
Human Capital Management (HCM) provides the added dimension of
business intelligence (BI) excellence, since it takes the integrated process excellence of HRM as read.
As I have mentioned previously this is BI 2.0, not just data collation, i.e. evaluation and measurement leading to the potential of predictive analytics. Incidentally, workforce intelligence, a phrase that we were one of the first to use, is normally referred to as the ‘HR’ component of BI. (But today is not about BI!).
Thus, having defined human capital management we, as a professional services firm and associated School, already look at talent management with a measurement, evaluation and BI focus above and beyond the HRM process..... ok so far?
Before talent management comes talent, so what is talent?
A quick and dirty definition of Talent (at an individual level) is 'the collective knowledge, skills and personal attributes of an individual. This includes any innate ability and also the ability to ‘grow’ or develop.'
Onto Talent Management (TM) and our current working definition:
‘Talent management is a collective term used to describe an organisation’s approach to managing and utilising its human capital capability and performance. As such it can be viewed as much as a philosophy with strategic intent designed to provide the organisation with competitive advantage.’
From an HRM process perspective there is very little new in terms of what talent management brings. However, talent management appears to be interpreted as more focused on the optimised integration of existing HRM processes relating to TM (even though technically this should be covered under strategic HRM).
This has been skewed from a software supplier perspective. Our definition of integrated is much more than just data importing and exporting. I would also point out the observation that TM is viewed as an underlying philosophy much as Human Capital Management is which is important.
This is why our view and definitions under the HCM banner (and Global HR Profiler) accept that all of the Talent Management processes already exist or are embedded in current organisational HRM practice.
Many organisations have the basics in place to a sufficient degree. These can include specific areas such as performance/competency management, succession planning, workforce planning, recruitment, employer brand, reward, development/learning, diversity, elements of OD etc.
Thus, if you like, it is looking at a cross section of HRM practice through a lens. That’s it –though one can argue that there is a more strategic focus associated with TM. The real question should be how effective is the organisation’s overall talent management/strategy and what difference is it making?
This is why efforts around talent management should really be around evaluation, measurement and business intelligence (which is why we are already doing this) rather than the process or data collation. It is the same for both public and private sectors even though background context or individual organisational drivers may be a little different.
To provide context on talent management, from our view you may recall that our evaluation of strategic HCM best practice looks at 16 core HR strategies (and their associated operational effectiveness), of which one is talent management. These are:
- Diversity
- Employee centricity
- Employee engagement
- Employer brand
- Leadership (at all levels)
- Organisation climate
- Organisation communications
- Organisation design
- Performance orientation
- Resourcing
- Retention
- Reward
- Talent Management
- Training & Development
- HR Governance
- HR operational excellence
They are not mutually exclusive and are linked in the integrative fashion already alluded to.
There is nothing stopping anybody looking at Talent Management from a strategic perspective as long as they are clear as to what that entails (though also by definition, anything strategic should really involve measurement/evaluation).
Reading through a plethora of TM stuff, one is struck by the regurgitated and repackaged HRM processes that are trotted out. Thus if somebody is talking ‘Talent Management’ to you and there’s a piece of process/data collation software mentioned or maybe repackaged parts of recruitment process or employer branding etc as the main thrust of the discussion you know you’re being suckered.
This also goes for any business school out there who is jumping on the TM bandwagon in the hope of generating revenue without doing some serious due diligence.
So to all relevant suppliers in the HR industry, given the working definition of Talent Management mentioned and the observation that from a HR process perspective there is nothing really new – do you agree?
Because if you don’t, what were organisations trying to do before the term Talent Management came into vogue with the HRM processes they had in place?
Look forward to the reasoned arguments.............of course HR practitioners are welcome to comment........
[Talent Management Part II was originally published November 21 2007]