15 Sep What is Talent Management: A Comprehensive Definition
What is Talent Management?
There is an old decision dilemma adage: If your best efforts don’t fundamentally change the issue for you, you have defined the issue incorrectly. For many organizations, meeting their talent management (TM) needs has been problematical. We at Tekara would suggest you consider how you are framing TM as a root cause.
The industry standard:
For many, TM is described in terms of successfully recruiting and retaining top caliber people. As described by a recent Wikipedia TM description:
“… the process of developing and integrating new workers, developing and retaining current workers, and attracting highly skilled workers to work for your company.”
Is this your organization’s TM description? Why is this a problematic description of TM?
The strategy objective description embodies the implementation strategy for satisfying your talent needs – staffing. Why is this problematic? Because, it makes it more difficult to seek out and consider superior talent securing and utilization strategies.
A Similar Analogy
Let’s look at a parallel circumstance – meeting your organization’s working capital needs. Would your CFO describe meeting these needs as follows?
Meeting our working capital needs through effective use of our retained earnings.
Not likely. Your CFO would consider a variety of means to meet your working capital needs including: debt, equity, partnerships, etc. Many CFOs use a variety of concurrent approaches to meet their organization’s working capital needs. Those of us who do strategy work understand the dangers of imbedding “how” with the “what” in our strategy objective statements.
The Tekara Approach
Tekara’s approach to assisting their clients with their Talent Management needs is to separate the “how” from the “what”. Therefore, we describe TM as:
“Talent Management is the business process that continuously meets our needs regarding timely access and use of talent in highly effective business driven ways.”
There are several practical implications arising from this description:
- We begin with clarity around a business need and the talent implications (what talent [prime and ancillary attributes], when, how we need it, etc.).
- We consider the possible ways we can satisfy these talent requirements. What are the advantages and risks of each approach?
- We determine the best approach to specifically and practically securing this access.
- We determine how to take advantage of the talent when we secure access.
- We determine the “organizational context” to best enable the effective performance of this talent.
These considerations are critical – if we don’t get appropriate clarity around them, we run the greater risk of fully failing to capture the contribution of well-utilized talent in our business.
A simple list of how we can access talent and make effective use of it includes:
- Employment
- Contracting for employee “like” services
- Contracting for “provided services”
- Purchasing the finished outcome of someone else’s talent (e.g., Nike’s use of someone else’s manufacturing investments)
Will employment be an important strategy for meeting our TM needs? Of course, undoubtedly it will be the superior and most common approach. However, how do we know unless we fairly consider practical alternatives?
In future Blog postings we will explore in greater depth the benefits to you in adopting Tekara’s approach to TM. In the next post we will explore how workforce planning and succession planning relate to our TM approach.
How do you define Talent Management in your organization or practice? Please let us know what you think in the comments!
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