Talent Management Critique Essay

This new age economy, with its attendant paradigm shifts in relation to the human capital, in terms of its acquisition, utilisation, development and retention, has placed a heavy demand on today’s HR professionals. Today HR is expected to identify potential talent and also comprehend, conceptualise and implement relevant strategies to contribute effectively to achieve organisational objectives.

Hence a serious concern of every HR manager in order to survive this ‘War for Talent’, is to fight against a limited and diminishing pool of qualified available candidates to replace valuable employees when they leave, dramatically underscoring the difficulty to attract, motivate and retain the best employees in an organisation. To analyse the reasons, we first need to understand what “TALENT” means. People have different views and definitions.

According to Leigh Branham, vice resident, consulting service at Right Management Consultants and author of the book, “Keeping People Who Keep You in Business”, a talent is not rare and precious. Everyone has talent – too many to possibly name all. Talent is behavior; things we do more easily than the next person. We speak of “natural born talent” but those with a gift, knack, ability or flair for something can refine and develop that talent through experience. Talent, however, cannot be taught. As someone once said, “you can teach a turkey to climb a tree, but it is easier to hire a squirrel”.

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Vice President, HR of Seagram, Mr. Gopi Nambiar, says talent can be best described as a combination of abilities and attitudes. The real trick is to match the right motivated talents to the right role, individually and collectively, harnessing and harmonizing this crucial attribute to achieve the objectives of your company. Today, companies have become fiercely competitive when it comes to attracting and retaining talent. According to Branham, 75 per cent of the senior executives admit that employee retention is a major concern today, the obvious reason being the ‘increasing rate of turnover’.

This dynamically changing and volatile demand-supply equation with such erratic attrition trends and cut throat competition has led organisations to focus on mechanisms pertaining to attracting and retaining talent. It is an accepted truth that turnover will happen and companies need to device a strategy to curb unprecedented turnover from affecting organisational success. As the Director, HR (Asia) of Bausch & Lomb, Mr. P. G. George declares, achieving zero percent turnover is neither realistic nor desirable.

People tend to seek change for a variety of reasons—more money, better benefits, the appearance of a greener pasture- and this has been a practice from the very beginning. Then, what is it that has really changed? Despite intense competition being the key to market development and success, organisations have failed to identify some of the major reasons which highlight why ‘good performers’ leave.

In his study, Branham clearly states that one major reason why people leave their organisation is because of the organisation’s failure to bring about a correlation between pay and erformance. Human Resource experts in the industry believe matching the right blend of talent with the right job profile can lead to superior performance. The present scenario with abundant opportunities has triggered a wave of employees, perpetually “on the move”, forever seeking better opportunities whenever, wherever and however they can.

What is behind the restlessness of these hard to keep employees? By focusing on productivity, organisations are realising that it is imperative to hire employees who can do the job and be successful at it.

The organisation no longer wants to just hire to hire, in fact they are striving to find the right people, bring them into the organisation and retain their services. One of the critical functions of HR is a sound Human Resource Planning through which they are able to project the demand for human resource and thereafter formulate strategies for acquiring them. As the leading HR heads of the country point out, the solution is not just about finding the correct retention mechanisms , but it starts from the very beginning by devising ways to acquire the right people for the right jobs.

Traditional HR systems approach people development from the perspective of developing competencies in the organization. This can actually be a risk-prone approach, especially for companies operating in fast evolving industries, since competencies become redundant with time and new competencies need to be developed. Thus, over time, the entire approach to development of people might be rendered obsolete calling for rethinking the entire development initiative. Talent management on the other hand focuses on enhancing the potential of people by developing capacities.

Capacities are the basic DNAof an organization and also of individual potential. Translating organizational vision into goals and mapping the required level of capacities and competencies to achieve goals Aligning individual values and vision with organizational values and vision Assessment of talent to profile the level of capacities and set of competencies possessed within the organization. Enhancing capacities to learn, think relate and act through development initiatives Helping individuals realize their full potential through learning and development

Gap analysis and identification of development path The focus of talent management At the heart of talent management is developing the following intrinsic human capacities: 1. Capacity to learn (measured as learning quotient LQ) Enhancing an individual’s capacity to learn improves the person’s awareness. It adds to the person’s quest to know more and delve into newer areas. This capacity is developed by holistic education that teaches how to learn, an enabling environment and good mentoring.

Capacity to learn comprises of the following:

• Introspection is the individual’s willingness to look back and learn ability to o c learn from mistakes and identifying areas of improvement.
• Reflection and contemplation is the individual’s ability to observe his own thoughts, actions and emotions/feelings and using the awareness to improve i further and perform better.
• Getting into the flow is the individual’s ability to get into a new experience and flow with the experience.

Capacity to think comprises of the following:

• Analysis is about asking the right questions and breaking complex things into t simpler elements.
• Creativity is about generating new thoughts and breaking the existing patterns of thought.
• Judgment requires both.

This is what helps an individual take quality decisions.

Capacity to relate (measured as relationship quotient RQ) It is important for an individual to be able to relate to his learning and thoughts. This leads the person to be able to relate to other individuals and the environment around him. The outcome is indeed a sense of belongingness and an environment of trust at the organizational level and team spirit at the individual level.

• Capacity to relate comprises of the following:
• Listening is the individual’s ability to listen with warmth and respect. Active i listening is free of biases, evaluation and pre-conceived notions.
• Empathizing is the ability to put self in someone else’s shoes and getting out of g i one’s own shoes.
• Trust requires a combination of both empathizing and listening.
• It is about g authenticity, openness and genuineness.

Capacity to act (measured as action quotient AQ) Action is how the above three capacities of an individual are manifested.

It is the individual’s ability to enact his intentions. Following are components of capacity to act:

Organizing refers to the individual’s ability to organize his time and resources e t n so as to enable him to convert intentions into reality.

Implementing means delegating, attention to detail, and focus on the right n process.

Perform under pressure means the ability to work under pressure and time r constraints and handle multiple tasks without negative stress. The individual’s values help in discriminating amongst alternatives and act as the s bedrock for decisions. They act as multipliers in enhancing the individual’s capacities, s a u sigma of which reflects the individual’s true talent.

Grow Talent offers services in all the above areas. Grow Talent’s offerings are based on the models discussed above and follow a unique methodology. Talent appreciation (TAPTM) TAPTMservices from Grow Talent are focused on assessing the way individuals learn, think, relate to others, and act. Tap is used to evaluate the capacities, competencies and values of individuals for assessment of potential for career development and succession planning. This is intricately linked to helping organizations map their capacity and competency requirements and then assessing talent to draw up individual development plans.

The talent profiling thus done for organizations helps them identify critical competencies to be developed and capacities to be enhanced in order to meet future business requirements and achieve plans. Potential enhancement (PEPTM) The focus of PEPTMis to create learning experiences and solutions for individuals that will help convert their talent into competence. It also involves designing learning events and processes that enhance the potential of individuals. Two intrinsic components of Grow Talent PEPTM are:

• Capacity building modules - which focus on enhancing the four capacities of individuals
• Competence building modules – which focus on specific areas like consulting skills, problem solving, service quality, strategic selling, process designing, interviewing skills, etc.

Acquisition of talent (ACTTM) Grow Talent’s approach to helping organizations acquire talent is based on the following:

1. Helping organizations define roles for specific leadership positions based on 'preferred futures' and strategy Identifying the competencies required for each of these jobs.
2. Determining the levels of fundamental capacities of learning, thinking, relating and acting needed to acquire these competencies.
3. Defining the values which are needed to display the desired behaviors Identifying individuals who would fit into these positions Enable organizations and individuals to establish mutually acceptable contracts for employment and lay the foundation of win-win relationships Knowledge Management As said earlier, the domain of talent management includes culture-building and change management.

Knowledge management services from Grow Talent are aimed at leveraging knowledge for performance by creating an environment for sharing by building trust. The focus of knowledge management is to connect people and technology to capture and harness the tacit knowledge of the organization. By making trust the bandwidth of communication, knowledge management enhances sharing and thereby creates an appropriate environment for talent to translate into performance.

With its comprehensive spectrum of services for talent management and unique methodology, Grow Talent is strongly positioned to help organizations gain a competitive and sustained talent advantage.

A tone deaf will never be able to appreciate the music of maestros. Only a seasoned jeweler would know that all that glitters is not real! And, only those who can recognize the worth of a diamond can value it, for others it's just a stone! Talent is doing easily what others find difficult. In an organization, there is nothing more crucial than fitting the right employee in the right position. Or else you would be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

When people do jobs that just don't suit their liking, inclination or temperament, the results, r rather the lack of them will be disastrously obvious. Low productivity, dissatisfaction, low morale, absenteeism and other negative behavior will become typical till the employee is shown the door.

India has become the outsourcing capital of the world and this has created its own set of HR challenges. India’s biggest problem is that qualified graduates are becoming scarce. Despite the large population, the supply of engineers cannot keep up with the sharply increased demand. So, do we have the right talent within to attract and retain the best available talent?

To identify various upcoming challenges of talent management To establish upcoming trends in talent management. To identify the ways to retain the best talent. The supply side discussed puts pressure on companies to attract the best talent and ensure that employees join the company and choose to stay in the organization rather than look for opportunities elsewhere. Present study is supposed to find out the existing Indian talent scenario so as to analyze its emerging challenges and trends.

They should know which talent management elements can have the greatest impact on the business and therefore provide a better basis for prioritization and implementation. To create a sophisticated talent management environment, organizations must:

• Define a clear vision for talent management
• Develop a roadmap for technology and process integration
• Integrate and optimize processes
• Apply robust technology to enable processes
• Prepare the workforce for changes associated with the new environment

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