A colleague of mine asked me recently, “what does talent management mean”?
Talent management is a pretty common term these days. If you go on to Workopolis or LinkedIn you can find jobs with titles such as Coordinator, Manager, Director or even Global VP of Talent Management.
And what areas do all these roles have responsibility for? If you read the job posting, they coordinate, manage, lead, direct or oversee Talent Management! Seldom do these job descriptions or postings explain what falls under talent management. So it’s easy to believe someone could be unclear on what the term really means.
When you take it apart, Talent Management means managing your “talent” which is your employees. One LinkedIn profile so eloquently says “my talent management role is focused on performance, engagement, leadership development and capability development. I also provide leadership on our people strategy.”
So what are all the components of managing people from an HR perspective?
- Recruitment
- Performance management
- Career development
- Succession planning
In other words, the management of people coming into the organization and management of them while they are with the organization.
These areas of people management are clearly some of the hardest to do well. Often we don’t give managers the training to help them to do it well or effectively. Managers need to have good supervisory skills and be prepared provide honest, open, two-way conversations in order to manage their talent.
One of the most critical parts of talent management is providing feedback in the most constructive manner. I recently saw an article that claimed the most unpopular HR tool is the performance appraisal. My first reaction was shock as I believe performance feedback and management is the key component to developing a relationship with employees and allowing them to develop and thrive.
On reflection, I thought of all the people who either dread receiving a performance appraisal or those who dread writing and leading them. The process to prepare feedback is often time consuming, and the meetings can be difficult and emotional. But often, when the more difficult conversations are done well, they result in the best working relationships.
So why was my colleague so interested in understanding talent management? Because he had met with multiple organizations who were asking to find a solution to outsource their talent management. He figured he has misunderstood the term talent management. Instead of outsourcing Talent Management perhaps what they are looking to find is management skills training.
If we employ human beings as our manpower and all the good that comes with great people, then we need to provide managements staff the skills to manage them directly and embrace the most challenging part of being a Manager.
