Is talent management finally being defined in a way that leads to improved organizational success? The term has been tossed about for some time without a definition that is universally accepted. It is often confused with short term workforce planning or succession planning. And, sometimes it is used as a euphemism for performance management. For me, talent management is a process to understand how successful work gets accomplished and how to ensure that results are consistently achieved.
The recession is making CEOs and other executives re-examine their workforces and take stock in a more quantitative and thoughtful manner about which employees are most critical to the organization’s short and long term success. I am doing work with a few clients who are carefully developing criteria for defining critical roles and looking into the future to which emerging roles may become essential to achieving business goals. This is the most encouraging sign I have seen of real change emerging from this economic mess.
There seems to be a better understanding that not every employee is critical and executives seem prepared to make more data-driven decisions than in the past about which skills are core and which are not.
This has led to a focus on both individual and group performance and on analyzing HR data to make decisions about how much a function contributes to sales and profits. This leads to investigating ways to improve output, efficiency, and raise skill levels. And, in turn, this is leading to better assessment of candidates and better internal redeployment and development.
This holistic approach to talent and the understanding that recruiting, development, performance management and all related topics are inter-related and cannot be separated from each other may have arrived.
Overseeing and improving this integrated approach is the role of a chief talent officer and is rapidly becoming the “new” definition for talent management.
