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Thought Leaders
Industry Gurus Live
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Thought Leader: John Chaisson on Talent Management Organizations
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John Chaisson was originally a lawyer before he got interested in the human capital side of things. John has always been someone who is at the cutting edge of thinking and his real focus has been on this general issue of talent management. Lately he has been working on the issue of Global Talent Management. There are a lot of global companies, but not too many who have already got their heads around how to manage a global workforce. He recently spoke with David Creelman about his work.
DC: What is a talent management organization?
JC: I think the best way to describe it is probably with a quote, "Labor is prior to and independent of capital, capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital and deserves much higher consideration." And I think it's interesting because that quote could have been made by any number of folks, it could have been Peter Drucker, it could have been the chief talent officer at a technology firm here in the United States, but it actually turns out that quote is from our 16th President in the United States, Abraham Lincoln, discussing the priority of people in any enterprise, any venture, in any undertaking.
I think that quote really captures the spirit of talent management and the spirit and passion that has to be resident inside in what we are calling a talent management organization. Even though there is a lot of conversation going on around talent management, we are still struggling in the marketplace to try to get an actual definition for it. I actually pulled a definition from The Institute of Management, which is broader than an HR organization or an HR association. This is an institute of all management professionals and folks that are tasked with managing all of the operations of the enterprise and they defined talent management as a means of identifying, releasing and guiding untapped potential in people.
Now I think that's an exciting definition. It's certainly one that can be inspiring, but it begs the question of whether or not it actually helps us on a day-to-day basis as talent management professionals get our job done. It also begs the question of whether or not if we say that we are talent management enthusiasts we are actually provided with the data, the information and a blueprint that's actually going to help us transform an organization from an HR organization to what we are defining as a talent management organization.
DC: As soon as we are talking about a talent management organization we are not talking about the HR department and what the HR department does, or how the HR department thinks. We are talking about an organization that believes in talent.
JC: That's exactly right. Here what we are talking about is an entire enterprise that's embracing what many have called the talent mindset and I suppose that if you want to put it even simpler you would just say that we are managing people for the benefit and survival of our organization. And the question that's begged is, what's the blueprint or the road map for doing that? I would say first off that we didn't discover the talent management organization. The concept of valuing talent strategically has been around forever.
What we were engaged in, and I have been engaged in for the past five years, is trying to identify if in fact there is a model for talent management and we kind of stumbled across it accidentally. I had been involved in this area for some time, I actually got into this market because I was very interested in talent management, I was a lawyer in Silicon Valley and moved into the position as General Counsel at an applicant tracking company called Resumix, which has just been acquired by a big human capital company, Ceridian. I moved into this field because I was so fascinated with the concept of the importance of people within the enterprise and how managing people and talent management could actually impact those enterprises.
So, our work began in that area, really looking for what an evolved talent model might look like for an enterprise and we were particularly interested in finding out what the traits might be for companies with the best talent track records. In other words, which companies were doing the best job of managing talent and what were the traits of those companies? Our research was actually initiated by a much simpler project. We were working with PeopleSoft, they asked us to pick a research project and we decided we would try to find out what the top 10 challenges were for corporate recruiting. So, we really weren't aiming for something sort of highbrow or lofty, we actually weren't really focused on talent management per se, that term was something that was really just emerging in the industry.
It was more lingo and a buzz word than anything else and it really didn't mean a whole lot except that you thought that talent might be a strategic asset and you were going to set about creating a set of practices and principles around that. We identified 75, mostly large companies, and I think 50% of the companies that we surveyed and interviewed were actually global organizations and we didn't just provide an online survey to these companies, we actually started with an online survey, a very detailed survey, and then from the responses we picked about 40 companies that we interviewed in depth about their talent management practices, their recruiting practices and we were actually able to gain a perspective on what the top 10 challenges were.
Some of these top 10 challenges were to be expected. We found conflict between hiring managers and the hiring process. We found a challenge of people trying to get recruiting to be more strategic, but what was surprising was the number one challenge identified was evolving the entire enterprise to focus its mind and its resources and its attention on elevating talent within the organization, and this really became what we started to call the talent management organization. We had to pick a label for it, we had to define this pattern, this operational pattern that we were observing and we decided that the talent management organization would be a good label for it.
Since that time, obviously talent management has gained in traction. People have a broader understanding of it. We have specific tools that we now wrap around or integrate into the talent management concept. We see things like the talent mindset becoming standard discourse within our industry. But what we found at that time was that there were about 17% of companies that had advanced talent management traits that we thought were beginning to form a pattern around how you elevate an entire enterprise to be able to focus its resources around strategically using talent. I want to caution that I am not proposing that there is a specific formula for becoming a talent management organization. In fact two of the first things that we realized as we studied the responses from the survey and the research were that there was no specific one trait or tool or piece of software or even business process that would make you a TMO. There was no specific secret formula that was going to get you there.
It's true you had to have a certain mindset, a philosophy around talent, but if you don't have a talent relationship management piece of software that doesn't mean that you are not a talent management organization. If you do have a TRM module operating in your online recruiting engine, it's evidence that you may be moving in the direction of a TMO, but not necessarily. So we are going to get into some of the specific traits and patterns, but we are also going to look at some of the limitations. What we are hoping to do within my practice and working with other groups is to be able to further flesh out a blueprint for what we are calling the talent management organization.
DC: What does 'strategically using talent' mean in an organization?
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David Creelman is CEO of Creelman Research and a well-known writer, research and speaker on critical issues in human capital management. David´s previous work includes Chief of Content and Research for HR.com, in addition to working as a management consultant in Canada and Malaysia, most notably with the Hay Group.
David holds an MBA from the University of Western Ontario and has also taught Rewards and Performance Measures at the University of Malaya executive MBA program. David´s clients include think tanks, consultants, academics and organizations from around the globe. His current focus, in collaboration with Dave Ulrich, is on what organizations should report about human capital intangibles to the financial markets (see www.rbl.net "What the Fortune 50 Tells Wall Street").
David Creelman can be reached by email at creelmanresearch[at]gmail.com |
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Join us for our next live Thought Leader interview with
Dr. Kumar Nair on Seven Leadership Challenges of 21st Century
October 2, 2006
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- Understanding the Knowing-Learning Gap.
- Overcoming the experience trap.
- The failings of "scientistic" decision making.
- Implementing evidence based management.
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