6-2 What is talent management? Four philosophies

Question 1

What is talent management?

Answer 1

Armstrong (2012: 256), for example, defines talent management as “the process of ensuring that the organisation has the talented people it needs to attain its business goals”.

He argues that while talent management may simply refer to management succession planning, or more broadly HR planning, it is better seen as “a more comprehensive and integrated bundle of activities, the aim of which is to create a pool of talent an organisation attracts, bearing in mind that talent is a major corporate resource” (Armstrong, 2012: 256).

Question 2

The 4 philosophies of talent management are

Answer 2

.1 The Key People Approach

2. The Key Practice Approach
3. The Key Position Approach
4. The Key Strategic Position Approach

Question 3

.1 The Key People Approach

Answer 3

is about people management strategies that attract, retain and develop these high performers and high potential employees is the main focus of such a philosophy.

the focus is on the development and implementation of a talent management strategy that starts with identifying individual star performers who are a source of competitive advantage.

Question 4

2. The Key Practice Approach

Answer 4

the idea is that for talent management to be successful it needs a fully integrated HR process and activities that:

a. Identify and recruit talent
b. Minimising attrition (effective onboarding, aligning rewards structures, improving line management skills and engagement with talent).
c. Identifying key internal talent
d. Managing talent flows (developing effective succession systems, creating flexibility in internal mobility, career management system
e. developing employees by flexible portfolios of development activities and options for employees, team learning processes, strategic and operational leadership development programmes, coaching

Question 5

3. The Key Position Approach

Answer 5

This philosophy talks about talent management based on pivotal positions i.e. positions which have a disproportionate role as well as large variability in the quality of work which impacts a company’s ability in executing part of its strategy

A positions - are highly strategic and create top-heavy value for the organisation, and the consequences of mistakes are high in terms of financial repercussions

B positions - are more support-oriented roles as skills required to perform them are common leading to little variability in performance of employees

C positions are functions that are not strategic to an organisation’s success and therefore could be outsourced.

Question 6

4. The Key Strategic Position Approach

Answer 6

• focus is indeed on pivotal positions but it’s about the investments to be made in order to achieve the greatest leverage.

It’s about efficiency, effectiveness and impact.

a. efficiency (Do you deliver HR programmes and practices through frugal use of resources such as time, money and labour?),
b. effectiveness (When you implement HR programmes and practices, do they have an effect on the people to whom you apply them?
c. impact (Do you apply your HR programmes and practices to the talent pools where they have the greatest effect on your strategic and organisational effectiveness?) (Sparrow et al., 2011: 11)