TALENT MANAGEMENT

By Marco Baratta, M.A.

Organizations nowadays are far more complex than 20 years ago, to say a number, complex in a way that things have to be done faster, technology has put a fast pace of working, customers want thing faster therefore but not only that, they want not just a product or service, they want the product or the service, and “The” is what they uniquely want.

So, how an organization in a fast pace technology, fast delivery market and a demanding customers are going to survive? The answer: Talent Management.

Talent responds to the natural ability as well as how an individual organizes the skills, abilities, knowledge possessed to a particular outcome. This process not always happens in an orderly fashion, most of the time is chaotic, this mean that is not planned, it just happens. On the other hand most organizations still standing in the paradigm that everything has to fall in place to be successful. Everything has to have the element of predictability, as everything has to have in the organizational chart a logic pattern of commands.

Let us just examine the three scenarios, first we have a fast growing economy, with a fast demanding market, with a fast technology, second we have that talent happens metaphorically speaking out of chaos, and third we have a centralized very structured organizations. What kind of mingles is that? How is that we are going to align market-technology-employees-and-organitazions?

THE FEAR OF LOSING CONTROL

Managers are so afraid of loosing control; they do not want employees to know more than then, to create more than them, to be smarter than them. This management culture can undermine the talent of any organization that has permeated it and even worst, can make thing so slowly that even profit can be jeopardized. That management culture self centered has its roots in the organization from which it comes. If you have a hierarchy organization that is the management style you are going to have, if you have a clan culture organization that is the management style you are going to have and so on.

NOT ALL CULTURES ARE CREATED EQUAL

Indeed every organization is a different world full of different philosophies of working and therefore different thought patterns which create different policies, rules etc. Now, in today’s world does not matter in what kind of business you are, the process of unleashing your talent is more and less the same. This is not magic is very simple, and is so simple that what is preventing of seeing that is the type of organizational cultures you have. Organizational Culture is a process as talent, but the first one must change in order that talent emerges.

If we say that is a common process such process in what consist? is basically one word:

Opportunity. This word is very important because implies the environment been organized in order that talent can emerge. Let us suppose that not all our employees are talented, then how you create this opportunity? But if the channel is not open, how are you going to know if you have or have not talented employees? So before jumping to conclusions you must find out. Now coming back to opportunity, if we get deep on this concept we discover that to organize an environment in which employees show and develop their talent is very dangerous. That is, if your management style is autocrat or hierarchical. If you have a flat organization it will be easier (may be) and this ideas will sound proper to you. But if your organization has a lot of bottle necks, this is all nonsense.

WHEN TALENT MANAGEMENT BEGINS TO LOOK COMPLEX

When you are aware for whatever reason that you organization needs a shift in leadership and you have to let talent take over, a change process has just started. Just the fact that this ideas is been proposed as a Talent Management Program, or Coaching Program or Career Development Program, or just a change in the way your organization do things, will make the present culture think twice about itself. Is your culture prepared for these changes? Does this mean employees will be in command? Shifting culture is a very hard process because old beliefs must be transformed or substitute by new ones, and not only beliefs but your whole organizational framework will have to change.

Once you create the opportunity for people to express their ideas, or propose new ways of doing things, and decisions are taken not individually but in consensus, also you take care that your talented employees grow in knowledge and become more specialized through training. As soon as all that begin to happens the ladder of employee development begin to escalate also. Job descriptions are aligned to your employees; they obey your employees not the other way around.

Recognition is now present in your activities, talented employees want to become valuable and their efforts recognized the want to feel they are contributing in their work and adding value to the organization. As employees begin to develop they will ask for more opportunities and that will be inevitable, although you can have some individuals that will be in flow (Mihaly csikszentmihalyi, 1996) a state in which opportunity and abilities are perfectly aligned with capacity and produces altered state of consciousness among some are: sense of completely involvedness, time disappears, the activity produces immediate feedback though is highly rewarding (no extrinsic motivators), ego disappears etc. Once the activity is completely a domain of your employee, boredom could emerge, what we say before, then becomes a reality, what new tasks or challenges is your employee going to be assigned to? What career program has the organization prepared for talent individuals, other wise after employee boredom comes employees turn over is a risk if the organization is not creating more opportunities for development.

Talent management is a fascinated journey, you just have to be prepared that once you unleash the conditions for it to happen you must be prepare for what comes next.