Everyone seems to be talking about talent management at the moment. It came up as a priority for at least 50 per cent of Ashridge’s Management Index of important trends, driving the business school to launch a course to help managers frame the business case and avoid common pitfalls.
At Ribbon Farm, Venkatesh Rao takes a stroll through nine flawed talent management theories to explain why they don’t work. And Tammy Erickson identifies the top 10 talent management challenges. To her list, I’d add a couple more.
First, the definition. What exactly do people mean by talent management? Is it about identifying and nurturing high-flyers, or helping all of your people to develop their particular skills?
The general assumption is that talent management is an enabler, while performance management is more about setting goals and monitoring their delivery.
But beyond that, there’s a muddle as to what is meant by talent and where it talent resides in the business. Is it the anointed few, or, in the right managerial hands, the many, the any?
Done badly, there’s potential for a massive rift to emerge between the ‘talented’ — the ‘hi-pos’ (high potentials) — and the ordinary, tellingly defined recently as as ‘the po-pos –passed over and p***ed off’.
It’s very dangerous to single out the stars in an organisation to the exclusion of all others. There are far more ‘utility players’ on most teams than standouts, for one thing.
It goes against the ‘enabling’ aims of talent management, for another. If you make a big deal of a select few, there’s every chance you’ll have a clutch of demanding and difficult divas in one corner and the disenfranchised masses in another.
It’s also bad for business, says Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze, chairman of Behavioural Science Systems. He points to the automobile industry as proof. “General Motors, Ford, Chrysler — they struggle while Toyota continues to grow revenue and profits, because Toyota listens to everyone’s views. It gets literally hundreds of thousands of ideas from employees at all levels — and it accepts and implements something like 90 per cent of them.”
The assumption that some people are born talented and some aren’t overlooks the fact that behaviour, rather than personality, drives performance, he adds.
The word ‘talent’ is part of the problem. Says Stuart-Kotze: “It has a sprinkling of star dust about it and implies that so-called ‘talented people’ are very special, but talent is a relative concept.”
Talent’s also apt to wax and wane. Talent management theories often presuppose a mystical group of Alpha employees whose work is consistently stellar. Individual and team behaviour is cyclical — like stock tips, ‘talent’ tips should be taken with the same caveat — that performance can go up or down.
Yet, it’s a fact that some employees will rise to the challenge more often and more ably. It’s an issue managers are going to have to learn to deal with in a businesslike manner.
“Culturally, relationships are more important than tasks to UK managers, so we shie away from having respectful, frank, potentially difficult conversations,” says Penny de Valk at the Institute of Leadership and Management.
Turns out it’s not the word ‘talent’ we need to be worrying about after all. It’s our old friend ‘management’.
