Talent Management – What is it? Why is it Important?

What is Talent Management?

An integrated set of processes designed to achieve organizational goals – these processes include:

What Do We Mean by ‘Integrated’ Processes?

Progressive organizations realize the value in making a number of changes:

These processes are integrated to work together for one reason: to achieve Organizational Goals.
Each of these processes work together to support the organization’s Strategic Plan, designed to achieve Organizational Goals – the principle here is that no plan will work without the right people doing the right things at the right time.
Line Management ‘owns’ these processes – managers are held accountable for how well these processes work within each manager’s area of responsibility.
Human Resources are the experts in Talent Management processes, and are accountable for providing high quality advice and guidance to line management.

Why Talent Management?

Historically, the above processes were administered separately, in silos.
Traditionally, the Human Resource function owned these processes.
This was accompanied by a somewhat naïve belief that having HR hold these processes would leave line management free to concentrate on the real work.
However, the result of this traditional approach has been that these processes did not receive enough organizational priority and were inconsistently applied, with very mixed results.
As a result, the HR function lost credibility and line management lost sight of how important these processes really are to organizational success.

Results Count!!

Properly executed, Talent Management provides a unified approach to getting the right people in the right places at the right time, with the skills, knowledge and ability to execute the organization’s Strategic Plan and achieve Organizational Goals.
The measure of Talent Management’s success is how much these processes contribute to achieving Organizational Goals