Week 2: 8th -14th May (Activities: 2.1, 2.2 & 2.3)
Talent management is an important area within HRD because it involves not only identifying employees with high potential, or talent, but also devising strategies around how best to support the development of individual and collective talent within the organisation. For this reason this section includes some material also covered in another module of the MSc in Human Resource Management (B864 HR in context).
Talent management is about matching business needs with current and future employee competencies, a process which is complicated by the constantly changing environment within which businesses operate. In its broadest sense, this is not just about developing future leaders or managers but also about thinking through the definitions of ‘talent’ at all levels against changing business needs and changes within the organisation.
Talent management initiatives within organisations can be classified according to the scope of the activities they involve (narrow vs. broad) and the way they define talent (inclusive vs. exclusive):
- A broad view considers several aspects of HRM strategy such as workforce and succession planning, recruitment and selection, learning and development, and diversity, which includes flexible working and work–life balance (Taylor, 2014).
- A narrow view focuses specifically on workplace planning; in other words, it ensures that organisations can meet their future skill needs.
- An inclusive view of talent management is based on the assumption that anyone has talent and therefore it is in the interest of organisations to develop the whole workforce.
- An exclusive view (which is surprisingly common) is that talent is only present in a minority of individuals who can make a significant impact on the success of the organisation, usually future managers.
In the exclusive approach to talent management, activities aim to release the potential of a selected few who can fulfil key positions for their organisation either now or in the future (Brittain, 2007). These are often referred to as talent pools, talent reservoirs or talent pipelines (Taylor, 2014), and training and development initiatives and resources are allocated for this selected group. This focus on developing high calibre candidates has been criticised for the risk it involves of not embracing the diversity existing in the workforce (Stewart and Rigg, 2011). In fact, a report by the CIPD (2010) revealed that, in many organisations, diversity management and talent management are not aligned. Another criticism that is often made, particularly in relation to exclusive talent management initiatives, is that they focus too much on developing certain individuals as opposed to investing in the development of the collective workforce (Iles and Preece, 2010). For instance, they may focus on developing leaders who are capable of managing conflict effectively, as opposed to encouraging open communication and assertive communication styles across the whole workforce. The immediate risk in investing in particular individuals is that of their leaving the organisation, although the counter argument to this is that exclusive talent management initiatives do increase employees’ engagement and commitment to their organisation (Taylor, 2014; CIPD, 2010).
In recent practice a ‘blended’ approach is often adopted with regard to the methods, scope and beneficiaries of talent management initiatives. This means that while organisations support all members of the workforce in achieving their full potential, they also have more structured talent management initiatives such as graduate schemes and leadership programmes that are directed specifically at a group of high calibre employees (Taylor, 2014).
Within the wider context of talent management, talent development has the following aims:
- to complement workforce planning by identifying knowledge, skills and abilities required to meet current and future business needs
- to engage and retain staff (based on the assumption that investment in employee development shows that employees are valued)
- to develop learning interventions that are:
- linked to business objectives (to support flexibility in a fast-changing environment)
- smart and efficient (making good use of internal expertise and resources)
- dynamic and constantly reviewed.
An inclusive view of talent management reflects a HRD approach and clearly requires HRD practitioners to be flexible and have the skills to be able to offer many different types of training and development across the organisation. These HRD interventions need to be regularly reviewed and evaluated.
The example in Case study 2.1 outlines the different steps taken at the start of a blended talent development approach programme adopted in Tesco as part of a wider organisational change process.
Case study 2.1: Blended approach to talent development at Tesco plc
In 2013 Tesco started to question whether its successful replication business strategy was sustainable in years to come, given the fast pace of change and uncertainty in the retail environment. It became clear that the organisation needed to respond to these changes.
Tesco hired a prestigious consultancy company to help identify the type of skills needed to succeed in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment. It was recognised that Tesco had to create a seamless multi-channel experience for customers, which implied changes in the organisational structure and the skills needed to implement the new strategy.
As a result, the HRD team at Tesco designed a comprehensive talent development programme that was intended to complement wider organisational change towards a more flexible and flatter organisation. The actions they took included the following:
- Using their knowledge of the business and existing capabilities, the team identified five key skills; these were resilience, responsiveness, empathy, cooperation and innovation.
- They evaluated their existing learning and development initiatives against the key skills identified and concluded that they were both insufficient and scattered.
- They developed a comprehensive talent development programme based on the five skills to be rolled out in three different stages: first to top executives, second to managers and, finally, to everyone else. They also decided on two levels of participation; that is, compulsory for executives and some managers, and voluntary for the rest. The programme had the following features:
- The programme for executives and selected managers accounted for about two-thirds of the overall programme, with the remaining third spread across the rest of the organisation.
- The programme was open to everyone and was focused on a diagnostic tool for the self-evaluation of existing skills with encouragement to discuss any skills development needs with their managers; a two-hour experiential programme was offered.
- The programme for Tesco executives at the very top of the organisation (top 1% across the globe) was the most intensive and expensive. It focused on the five key skills. For the resilience development programme they worked with Nuffield (a private healthcare provider) using their expertise on diet, hormones, etc. Resilience was defined in both a psychological and a physical sense, with physiologists on site to measure heart rate and other variables that could help individuals to improve their levels of physical fitness.
Tesco is still working on the programme and currently measuring its impact through engagement scores.
The Tesco example in Case study 2.1 could be seen as a blended approach to talent development because:
- the team identified key skills to be developed across the whole workforce, broadly implying an inclusive approach
- most of their resources were focused on developing the identified skills in the top executive team and selected managers.
In the next activity, you will explore how talent development is being, or has been, implemented in practice within your own organisation or one with which you are familiar. You will work with a group of students from your tutor group to share these examples, and then contribute to a discussion across your whole tutor group. The activity offers the opportunity to work collaboratively with your fellow students, to hear about their examples and to compare and contrast different approaches in different organisations.
Activity 2.3: Exploring talent development in practice
So far you have explored the different definitions and purposes of HRD and the concept of talent development. You may find that the concepts can be used interchangeably, although this will only be the case when talent development is approached from what has been defined as an inclusive perspective. Importantly, all the ideas discussed so far revolve around the same concept: learning. In the next section you move on to investigate more closely some of the ideas and theories about how people learn.
