It is sometimes easy to forget the "human" in human resources or the fact that there is a soul underlying the "talent" in talent management. It's pretty remarkable, since utlimately the what we do in talent management – who and how we hire, develop, promote, etc. – signficantly and directly impacts the lives of lots and lots of people.
Earlier today I was speaking with a current classmate of mine. He's a former GI in his mid-thirties who works in financial services. He has no experience in HR and his company is not very large. Yet, he made the very astute observation that organizations are moving in the direction of developing two workforces – one that is nurtured, developed, and catered to, and the "other" that simply produces.
It's an oversimplification, but our conversation made it clear that the secret is out – the broad goal of talent management in most organization is hire, develop, and promote superior talent.
Our good intentions clearly raise lots of moral dilemmas, particularly as it concerns those who end up – rightly or wrongly – on the "other" end of the spectrum (i.e., my classmate).
I only want to get into one of those dilemmas right now, and that is the disconnect between our desire to create high-performing people/organizations and the backward processes by which we identify and nominate "talent."
The sad reality in most organizations is:
- Performance management processes don't produce highly reliable data. They simply aren't often helpful in reliably and objectively differentiating employee performance. The process that was once an "ass-covering exercise" has not been sufficiently adapted to the reality that most organizations (and the technology they leverage) are now relying heavily on performance data for making important talent decisions.
- Other talent measures/processes, such as employee "potential" and promotion "readiness" ranking are most often based on gut, at best, and politics, at worst.
The end result is a dysfunctional dynamic that severely jeopardizes that already feeble social contract between employee and employer (see here for more).
Bottom line – if we're going to do talent management, we owe it to people to do it in a way that is as fair and objective as possible. If not, we're not creating better performing companies based on meritocracy; we're simply empowring the kind of gut-based decision-making and politicking that has given our discipline a bad name among everyone from college interns to the CEO.
I was watching the Final Four with my wife last night when she posed the question, “Why don’t you see more star athletes become great coaches?”
