Identifying the right course for talent management.

Talent management has always seemed to me to be a tricky subject. It is at risk of becoming mere hyperbole, as in the War for Talent, (1) or of becoming the fad of the conference circuit because the term lacks a clear definition. Proposed definitions are, at worst, a melange of different concepts strung together without a clear statement of what is meant by talent and how we might manage it. Talent management's very success as a rallying call to managers to give attention to the identification of the development needs of employees, though, means that we should not discard the concept.

Like employee engagement, which irritates some academics because it lacks a rigorous theoretical underpinning, talent management seems to play well in the boardrooms of the world. Who could be against engaging employees or managing talent? The active-sounding words and the explicit references to engagement and talent fit with HR mangers' notions of getting the best from people in a meritocratic environment. While the definition of employee engagement has become much clearer over time (even if its measurement is abused by some consultants), talent management has yet to achieve such clarity. Peter Cappelli, a keynote speaker at the 2008 IPMA-HR International Training Conference, has defined talent management as "simply a matter of anticipating the need for human talent and then setting out a plan to meet it." (2) This description has the great benefits of simplicity and being easy to understand. The difficulty remains, though, that the term talent is not defined and the planning method is left open. Martha Crumpacker and Jill Crumpacker quote three definitions of talent management, ranging from "developing, and deploying employees who are critical to the company's success" to the "development of all workers" in their article. So, in the definition of talent, is it a case of "you pays your money and you takes your choice"?

This special issue of Public Personnel Management gives us a chance to examine this question and others relating to talent management, both from an international perspective and from a number of different methodological and content standpoints. We hope that readers will find that the concept of talent management emerges with more practical utility by the end of the journal. Valerie Garrow and Wendy Hirsh's article gets the collection off to a good start by raising the fundamental issues of what talent management is about and the ways in which it can be delivered. Garrow and Hirsh challenge organizations to ask themselves two vital questions: (1) What is talent management's focus? and (2) How does talent management fit into the organization's context? Answering these questions requires talent management advocates to say whether, in their eyes, talent is an inclusive term that covers the whole workforce, one that is restricted to, say, candidates for fast-track development to senior positions, or one that simply describes those who are already in senior positions in the organization. For example, Ruwayne Kock and Mark Burke answer the questions in their contribution to this issue by defining talent management as a set of policies and practices designed to attract, retain and engage "key and leadership talent."

It is obvious that the selection of who is included under any definition of talent profoundly affects the how--the activities--of a talent management program. An organization's definition of talent will also determine the what of management programs. If talent is conceived as being those who are either holding senior management positions or who have the potential to hold such positions, then an organization will need to decide what criteria it wants to use to decide who has the capacity for growth. (The identification of high-potential employees in top positions is generally easier, but an organization will still have to decide which grades of managers are eligible for the talent management program.)

Debate has raged over the years on how organizations should define high potential. As Marilyn Gowing, David M. Morris, Seymour Adler, and Mitchell Gold point out here, researchers started with notions of innate attributes--a set of abilities that stem from their genetic makeup or early-life experiences and which are set by one's early 20s. Which of those attributes are conducive to success as a leader it was thought could be inferred from studying the traits of those who have held senior positions. Knowing what made past leaders successful made it easy, in theory, to find future leaders. All an organization needed to do was search for others with attributes like those of past leaders.

Some organizations, like Shell and its HAIR construct, tried to be more scientific with the process of selecting these attributes. As an acronym representing what Shell was looking for when identifying future company executives, HAIR stood for "helicopter," which meant being able to survey the problem from a distance, yet dive into the detail if necessary; "analytical" ability; "imagination" to be creative in solutions; and a sense of "reality" so that good ideas are well grounded in what will work in practice.

Research commissioned in the 1960s suggested that having HAIR qualities in high measure was indicative of potential for top management.

Some organizations persist in using this sort of approach, but there is less faith in the robustness of its theoretical underpinnings than there was. More organizations have moved toward a competency-based method of looking for employees with the skills and behaviors necessary to succeed. The advantage of this is that there is more chance that competencies can be improved through learning and development interventions. There has been recent criticism (3) of this method, too, not least for its oversimplification and generic approach.

In this issue of Public Personnel Management, Kock and Burke report mixed results for competency-based talent management in South Africa. One risk is that competency selection programs are biased. White middle-aged males tend to perform well on skills assessments because they are like the HR professionals who design the tools and who hold senior positions. Another criticism has been that there is not enough acknowledgement that, as Gowing and her co-authors point out in this issue, leadership is situational. Such an approach rejects the notion of charismatic leadership--the hero who can transform an organization through the power of his or her personality. Acknowledging that people have strengths and weaknesses, and that some strengths play better in some situations than others, is more realistic, but it does pose challenges to the assessment process, which is a subject that I will return to later.

So organizations have to define what they mean by talent management and how the concept applies to their leadership cadre--however they define leadership--using the research evidence and fitting the resulting professional development policies and practices to their organizational needs and circumstances. The questions of fit are discussed by Garrow and Hirsh as they relate to the issues of organizational culture, wider HR practices, the psychological contract that exists between employer and employees, and management capabilities.

Raising questions of the fit of talent management is a timely reminder that talent management should not stand alone from other people management practices in an organization. What an organization values, say, teamwork and collaboration, should be reflected in how employees' performance is managed and rewarded, in how jobs are designed, and in what constitutes successful talent. The alternative to integrating talent management with other HR systems is to engage in a series of disconnected processes that confuse managers and employees.

Talent management should also accord with an organization's psychological contract. Is the deal one of organizational investment in the individual for long-term return to the organization and employee? If so, career management and development processes can operate in that context. Conversely, if employees want immediate rewards and the organizational expectation is for immediate performance, then talent management will have to adjust to that reality.

Finally, what is doable in talent management will depend in large measure on what senior managers are prepared to back in practice, not just in theory, and how skilful line managers are in delivering on their people management responsibilities. It might be a disappointment to talent management advocates who have preconceived notions of the "right" methodology, but HR professionals must design talent management systems that managers in their organizations will support with their time and energy. Account also has to be taken of the degree of organizational siloism and politicking. Will managers act corporately, or will they simply concern themselves with short-term, parochial issues.

All the above has profound implications for talent management processes such as workforce planning, assessment, development, career management, and succession planning. Gowing and colleagues concentrate on leadership assessment. They make the obvious, but still important, point that success is contingent on defining what you need to assess in order to predict who will be the successful leaders.

Like Garrow and Hirsh, Gowing et al. believe in customizing talent management policies and programs to fit particular organizational characteristics. They also emphasise the importance of procedural fairness. If participants do not have faith in the process they will not buy into the results, and this may prove true for the successful as well as the unsuccessful. Assessment systems may also introduce biases--a point also made later by Kock and Burke. Face-to-face or resume-driven approaches to talent identification may prejudice assessors against particular types of candidate. Web-based tools get round this problem but favor the computer literate, which might work against older, non-office based applicant. Both Crumpacker, in relation to gender differences, and Tom Calo, regarding the aging workforce, emphasize the requirement to be sensitive to the audience for talent assessments, which includes both the assessors and the assessees in the particular organizational context. These considerations will determine, for instance, whether assessment tools will be high or low tech and whether the assessment will involve a high or low proportion of knowledge workers.

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