Talent Management in the current climate Brewing up ... - Ashridge

A crucial HR imperative is to be able to move
with speed to undertake fresh ‘due diligence’ as
the organisation changes, to make sense of the
critical skills needed to meet the new business
strategy. This may involve also identifying the
pivotal leadership positions that must be covered
in the short and medium term. Paradoxically,
when all is under review or being restructured, the
imperative may become holding on to the stable
contributors – something which past processes
may have served to ignore. HR have a key role
to play before any decisions are taken and it may
be a role which serves to turn the ‘norms’ upside
down. Thereafter all that may be needed is to
convey the message; getting to those you really
need to stay and tell them so – offering some
certainty amidst the anxiety – that can only be
done with confidence when you do know who
you need.
Take decisions
What happens with regard to strategic and
operating decisions is often replicated in
decisions regarding talent. When revenue is a
scarce commodity, overt politics and turf wars
are more likely to play out. The talent agenda
may be owned within local business units or at
organisation level. Neither is wrong, but knowing
which and how, being alert to the game-playing
and party to the facilitation of good discussions
is paramount. The case studies showed that
most organisations saw the need for a more
central ownership approach in order to get senior
management buy-in and strategic alignment.
This can raise operational issues in businessunit
driven organisations. HR need both to be
politically astute yet act with the utmost integrity,
work across the organisation landscape, yet stay
close to the local managers.
Definition and entry point
How broad is the group of people who decides who is talent?
6
Accept that you do manage talent
Every organisation has a talent management
system, whether it recognises it or not. Something
happens to talented people in an organisation,
whether they are being developed and motivated
or stifled and neglected. Hence, deciding to
‘do nothing’ right now will not be a neutral act,
it will have an impact. Even in the good times
some organisations are afraid of defining talent
for fear that it identifies the rest of the workforce
as talent-less. Talent management is about
doing something additional or different with
those people defined as talent for the purpose
of the organisation – be it top performers, high
potentials, senior managers suitable for director
positions or people suitable for critical roles in the
organisation. Having less scope or resource for
‘doing something additional or different’ for such
people should serve to reinforce the need to do
whatever can be done well, focusing absolutely
on the right people. Often it actually results in
not taking any action at all – there may appear to
be no easy development answers and plenty of
anxiety around without adding to it by ‘selecting’
some for special attention. The research found
that, in reality, being identified as talent in UK
organisations means more pressure, enhanced
development opportunities and better promotion;
only 7% of managers believed that it resulted in
resentment amongst peers.
The research asserts that it is the explicit
segmentation of those who are defined as talent
for current and future needs that helps to target
investment, and this may be especially helpful
when investment per se may be frugal. Being
able to identify the right people for that moment
– and the next – matched to the right jobs at the
right time, can be crucial in times of restructuring,
merger and acquisition and can only be achieved
through being nimble in the application of the
process, coupled with some willingness to
DISTRIBUTED DECISION CONCENTRATED DECISION
How permanent is the classification of ‘talent’?
TRANSIENT PERMANENT
How many people are included in the talent pool?
1% OF EMPLOYEES 100% OF EMPLOYEES
How challenging is the criteria for entry into the talent pool?
EASY DIFFICULT
experiment in the handling of development
opportunities. From an organisational point of
view there are times and situations that require
us to deploy the most talented people into areas
that need innovation, entrepreneurial flair and
the capability to take risks: at other times the
opposite is required.
The studies showed that advantages and
disadvantages arise from having a transparent
talent system and suggest that transparency
can increase as talent management becomes
embedded and culturally accepted within an
organisation. Clearly it is important not to raise
expectations if an organisation is unable to
deliver for individuals. Yet delivery does not have
to mean expensive programmes; time and again
people say that it is the stretching, even truly
difficult time in a new role, that really helped them
to learn and develop. 2009 would appear to have
stretching opportunities a-plenty! HR have a role
to play in surfacing these questions and achieving
the optimum fit.
Certainly care does need to be taken with
disseminating talent management practices, as
they inevitably lead to segmentation and this can
conflict with diversity and inclusion initiatives.
Talent management systems can complement
diversity initiatives by ensuring equality of
opportunity in applying and transparency in the
criteria for selection. This can be particularly
evident during mergers or restructurings, by
ensuring that time is taken to really review the
total pool of high potentials, rather than calling
upon the same safe few from the original structure
and spreading them ever more thinly across each
strategic project. Yet at those crucial moments
in an organisation’s history the one missing
ingredient is always time – the pressure to resolve
the appointment of the Top Team or to implement
a new structure is unrelenting. The issue for HR
is finding the capacity to be simultaneously fleet
of foot and yet determinedly assertive, such
that they enable time to think without being the
inevitable block to progress.
Accept that the system is both formal
and informal
The research showed that the informal system
was invariably stronger than the organisation
declared and that people draw their own
conclusions about what is going on. Common
in organisations are the ‘tournament systems’ or
rites of passage: “You can’t be promoted unless
you’ve moved country/ been on the Business
School programme/ had a secondment to
the executive floor”. If an organisation sends
messages via such rites it is important to
acknowledge that and to question whether the
tournaments are still valid for the organisation’s