Talent management: issues of focus and fit.

Talent management has been high on the agenda of HR professionals in the United Kingdom for the past few years. This high level of interest is reflected in a number of recent case study-based research reports that describe a broad range of organizational practices and highlight some of the tensions and dilemmas that arise as employers try to come to grips with the idea of talent management. Some of the most useful summaries have come from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (ClPD) (1,2) Ashridge (3,4) Roffey Park (5) and Incomes Data Services (IDS). (6) Between them, these studies give a fairly comprehensive overview of how large organizations in the UK are facing the talent management challenge.

This article draws on published research and also on the considerable practical experience of the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) in supporting organizations in implementing their own talent management strategies. Much of the work IES work has done has been with public sector organizations, particularly with national government departments and agencies and local government authorities of varying size and sophistication.

Talent Management: Upsides and Downsides

The idea of talent management is attractive for several reasons. Managers and HR professionals feel they should be doing more about developing their organization's workforce for the future, and talent management is assumed to be just about this. The term can also encompass career development, which has been difficult to position in organizations for a while, since individuals have been left to sort out their own careers. (7) Talent management is about positive things--doing things for your best people, investing in developing them, building on potential and, therefore, helping people make the best use of their strengths and improve on their weaknesses. The term talent management can also has the potential to apply both to meeting the needs of the organization and of the individual, which is in tune with the current sense of what HR professional should be trying to do.

The phrase talent management also sounds a bit important, rather strategic, and even exciting. As one HR director commented at an IES conference on this subject, "It plays well as a term in the boardroom."

However, there is no clear, shared definition of talent management. CIPD defines talent management as "the systematic attraction, identification, development, engagement/retention, and deployment of those individuals with high potential who are of particular value to an organization." (8) This definition explicitly includes the term potential, but it also includes the much more general term particular value, which can mean just about anything.

Attempts to define talent management tend to get confused on two fronts. First, the parts of the workforce to which the term talent might apply can range from a small number of potential senior leaders to the whole workforce. Second, the HR profession has extended the core ideas of attracting and developing talent into every -ing imaginable--retaining, motivating, rewarding, and so on. So at one extreme, talent management can be taken to encompass the whole of human resources management for the whole of the workforce, which is not very helpful when trying to narrow down what one means when one talks about talent management. Why call it "talent management" when what is being done is simply normal, proper workforce management and development of all the organization's people?

This confusion means that the term talent management does not always play so well outside the boardroom. We have found that mentioning talent management in many organizations makes people rather nervous. They start to wonder, "What do we mean by 'talent?' Talent for what? If I am talent, what will 'managing' me mean? What if I am not talent? And if I am a manager, will I need to tell some people that they are not as talented as they thought they were?"

Especially in the public sector, people often fear that talent management will cut across equality of opportunity and the transparent processes that allow people to apply for higher-level jobs in order to further their careers.

Partly because of these tensions, we have noticed a lot of hot air being spouted about talent management strategies but seen much less useful action.

Reframing the Debate: Focus and Fit

So how do we help organizations move forward with using the positive ideas of talent management, clarifying what talent management will entail, and making talent management something that is of benefit to both the organization and the organization's workers?

The authors of several research reports have advocated defining what a particular organization means when it uses the term talent. (9) However, this makes it sound as though talent is an abstract commodity and will only have one definition in a given organization. IES has found it helpful to slightly reframe this question as, "Where do you need to focus your talent management effort?" The focus an organization originally chooses need not be not fixed for all time, and several areas of focus can be defined, as will be illustrated below.

The second idea which IES finds useful in practice is that of fit, which is finding a way to meet the objectives of talent management by doing things that mirror or complement the other things the organization does in terms of human resources management.

Focus: For What, Where, and When and Development Goals

Having a clear talent management strategy provides focus by addressing three types of questions. The first type involves questions about what part of the organization--what kinds of job roles, such as senior manager--would be better served by taking a more purposeful approach to developing potential job holders.

The second type includes considerations of where in the organization--or outside of it--can the right kinds of people be found for the target roles and how far ahead--that is when--the organization needs to start developing those people so that they will be good candidates by the time they compete for the target roles. So, for example, an organization with a strong pool of middle managers might be looking at a number of current employees who have the potential to become skilled senior managers. If, however, an organization has a weak group of junior managers, it may do well to start talent management interventions earlier in career and to improve its recruitment.

The third type of question concerns what development outcomes the organization is looking to achieve. If an organization doesn't know what its goals are in terms of employee development, there will be no point in launching any HR initiatives or identifying potential participants in such initiatives. Goal-setting is essential to talent management programs because the goals will guide the identification of talent pools and recruiting to avoid resourcing difficulties. If an organization want to develop senior managers from within its ranks, then, it might seek to give some of its good middle managers broader career experiences outside their own functions or business divisions. This will make the middle managers stronger candidates for a range of future senior management vacancies and also equip them to perform better if they attain such a position.

Common Types of Talent Focus

Different organizations have different resourcing challenges, draw on different labor markets, and operate on different time frames. So they may well need different types of focus for their talent management efforts.

There are many situations in which organizations attract recruits of quite good quality who can grow fairly naturally into more senior roles when they are provided appropriate learning and development experiences. In such cases, it is reasonable to describe the whole of those organizations' workforce development efforts as "talent management." Organizations that take this approach include parts of the UK National Health Service (NHS), where positive learning strategies are well-structured for many of the professional groups. Professional development is less available for those in more junior support and administrative roles, however (see for example North Wales NHS Trust). (10)

1. Step-by-Step Focus

In organizations where career paths work fairly well to supply more-senior or more-skilled jobs, a light touch to talent management can involve all managers looking for employees with the potential to take another career step and what could be called step-by-step development to prepare people for their next career move. In many organizations, for example, administrative supervisors are prepared this way by giving personal development support to the most promising individuals within groups of administrative staff if those people are interested in becoming supervisors.

Talent management as a more proactive approach to both skill and career development has the most to offer when there are more specific types of role that are hard to fill, either because recruitment is difficult or because career paths require very different skills and experience at different levels in the organization. In such cases, we see several kinds of focus within the organization.

2. Leadership Focus

The most common focused talent strategy addresses the future supply of leaders, often called the leadership pipeline. (11) An organization needs to consider carefully where in that pipeline it needs to act and with what outcomes. If an organization leaves it until too late to develop future leaders, it will find it difficult to give people the range of career experiences that might equip them well.

The examples of Panasonic (12) and of Lloyds TSB (13) show the common focus large companies have on the future supply of leaders. In the public sector, for example, the UK Civil Service is currently engaged in the positive development of midcareer people who may have potential for to serve in its senior levels either in the short-term (one or two years) or the longer term (say five years). The outcomes the Civil Service wants to achieve are improving leadership skills and, when there is time, exposing talented midcareer people a broader range of business experiences inside the Civil Service and, sometimes, outside of it.

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