"Talent-management processes can’t work if managers don’t think it is important to develop their people”
This, the sub-title of a 2006 McKinsey report titled “The People Problem in Talent Management” that I came across this week, reinforces nicely the point I was making last week and I could not help wishing I had found it just a week earlier. Summarising the results of a survey of business leaders around the world, it stated that “obstacles preventing talent-management programs from delivering business value are all too human.” In other words you cannot manage talent if you cannot manage people!
According to the article more than half the respondents claimed:
1. Senior leadership doesn’t align talent-management strategies with business strategies.
2. Senior managers don’t spend enough time on talent management. They “aren’t managing their time well or don’t see the point of managing people and getting the best out of them.”
3. Line managers were equally culpable with “insufficient commitment to developing talent” and “failure to deal with chronic underperformance.”
4. Silo thinking was a contributory factor as “focusing on the interests of one part of the organisation rather than the whole not only hinders the mobility of talent within a company, but also undermines the sharing of knowledge and the development of interpersonal networks.”
These points not only reinforce the MIT case that “Talent Management is Everyone’s Job” but they go further and underscore the need for a change in the way we manage. Fundamentally all these are people issues, dealing with the way people deal with other people, and while talent-management provides a convenient focus, the problem will never be addressed without looking more closely at the whole people management side.
This is perhaps best encapsulated in the article itself, by the statement, “Habits of mind are the real barriers to talent management.” Now, despite consultants’ partiality for devising new offerings, I very much doubt this is making a case for ‘habit management’! Habits are personal, and the only way to change habits is to focus on the people involved and change the way they think.
Treating people as an expense is one centuries-old habit that needs to be broken. An expense is by definition ‘an item of expenditure’ and there is more than a semantic link between the terms ‘expenditure’ and ‘expendable.’ If you regard people as an expense, they will inevitably feel expendable, and as long as such thinking clouds issues you will never be able to effectively manage talent. So, if you really want to win the war for talent you have to change “habits of mind” and remove the real barriers to talent management!