Category: Talent Management

In my recent post I already mentioned that for me the next evolution of HR is outstanding. I am deliberatly speaking of HR and not the HR function or department. From my perspective, just taking the HR department into account when speaking about HR tasks and responsibilities is short-sighted and no longer viable. In addition, I believe that the HR departments as they exist today need to split into separate, specialized departments.

But step by step: Before thinking about New HR, the requirements and challenges today as well as tomorrow need to be explicitly debated – New HR should be applicable at least for a decade to really offer sustainable value for todays businesses. And debating starts with understanding who are the customers of New HR?

Basically, since Ulrich has performed his evaluation of HR’s customers, not much has changed – however, the importance of the different customers has changed. Therefore, examining the different customers, their requirements and challenges builds the starting point for New HR.

Back in Ulrich’s times and the same is true for today, HR’s customers are:
– Management
– Shareholder
– Customer
– Employees
– and in many countries and many industries: works councils and unions.

1. Management

Let’s start with Management, starting with the Board, down to Teamleads. Each employee with leadership responsibility has to be counted into this category. But of course, this makes the diversity in this group big and of course the different levels of leadership positions have different requirements for HR, need different HR services.

Top Management requires strategic as well as operational HR support. It needs a true and capable HR player, not only partner (like Ulrich used to say), who is capable of advising across the complete menu of HR. This advisor role is of course future focussed (strategy) as well as based in today’s business (operations) – but in any case beyond a company’s workforce.

Just below the top management level, the mid-level leadership team also requires HR support. This is less strategic and more operations focussed – but still not to be mixed up with transactional. This is the layer that puts strategy into practice – and this requires people. Typical HR support here is Change Management or Journey Management or Organization/ Workplace Design.

And last but not least there is the Teamlead level. These are managers that often don’t see themselves as Management – however, they do lead teams and have to form those teams as effective as possible. In addition, this is the group that has to mainly deal with employees, their careers and demands on a daily basis.

Current HR models do not entirely answer these requests in theory, and in practice mid-level Management and Teamlead support is often non existent.

New HR has to deal with these requirements and find cost-effective, efficient answers. In my next post I will debate Sharholders as the next customer group of HR.

HR for a long time was based only around administrative, transactional activities. Fact is that HR as we know it today originated from “personnel” which did not do anything else (at their time) than contracts and pay checks. Only over time the working field of “personnel”  has changed. From “personnel” the next evolution was to personnel administration in the 1970ies. This was also the first time that personnel was a separate department. Before, it was mainly a sub-function. From personnel management at the end of the 1070ies the next transition was to Human Resource Management in the mid 1980ies. Only in the 1990ies (although already recognized in research in the 1980ies) Ulrich with his Strategic HR function appeared. Until today though, there was no big evolutionary step afterwards. Strategic HR is still where we are today.

But the question is if the next evolutionary step is outstanding? – research as well as practice should get ready to answer this!

In recent years the term Talent Management appeared and grew big. In the beginning understood as elite coaching of high potentials, it changed to being a new hype applicable to each and every employee and applicant supported with high gloss company image pages and campaigns. But this is just marketing. In many firms Talent Management is not a lived reality. But if a firm wants to be successful or wants to remain successful, Talent Management should become lived reality pretty soon – the war for talents is on if not over, and the talent has won!

Important skills a rare!
In general, in most 1st world countries, especially in Europe, the available workforce gets smaller and smaller. On the other hand, the trend towards more complex products and services requires more and better skilled employees. In addition, today’s talent is way more flexible than ever before – but not for the good of companies: Flexibility for today’s talent means that talent is ready to switch jobs and even employers if they do not find fulfillment in what they are doing – but on the other hand are not flexible to trade work-life-balance today for more money tomorrow.
Talent Management has to step in here and offer a solution. Real Talent Management means more than single non-coordinated programs or high potential coaching. Real Talent Management is an integrated part of the complete employee life-cycle, therefore built into each HR process, but also integrated (and this is as important) into the day-to-day work environment of each and every employee. This means that all direct Talent Management processes (e.g. Performance Management, Learning, Succession Planning, etc.) are implemented – and of course aligned with the goals and strategy of the company as well as the needed employee profile. But in addition, the secondary Talent Management processes (mainly HR admin) need to be aligned with Talent Management as well. This means for example that an HR Serviceline is not only utilized to be efficient in answering employee requests, but treat employees as valuable talents – so have a kind of CRM system to better service each and every employee.

Last but not least, embedding Talent Management in the day-to-day work environment. Especially at the work place the management team/ leadership needs to live Talent Management by example and action – because this is where talents spend most of their time. And if they do not feel Real Talent Management at this place, all other initiatives and processes will not be successful.

In essence, Real Talent Management is a holistic approach to Talent Management which of course sees HR responsible for it, but which needs to be lived through each and everyone with HR responsibility – and this also means management at each level.

From my experience, today’s HR departments are not in a position to support Real Talent Management – hey need to adjust. In addition, there are external pressures for example through Integrated Business  Services that urge HR to change and adjust, too. Answers to these new challenges and requirements as well as the external pressures are so far not to be seen in theory or practice. For me, Real Talent Management is the next evolution of how HR work needs to get organized and done. But more about that in my next post.