1. Strategic Talent Management starts with top management understanding that having the right people with the right skills in the right jobs is vital to the accomplishment of organizational objectives. Now this is nothing new.  Just about every HR, talent, or learning and development person will start by talking about how important top management support is.  Without top management support, it is hard to create a culture that values development of people.  But in the case of talent management, the importance of top management engagement is particularly vital.  This is because it is the only way to get a meaningful linkage between the strategic goals of the enterprise and the talent management effort.  It is usually not enough to “link” to a strategy after the discussion of the strategy is over and decisions have been made.  Unless the talent management agenda is explicitly considered during the strategy discussions, the talent discussion will start out behind the eight ball.  The focus will need to be on trying to fill in essential gaps in understanding about the implications of strategy for specific jobs, skills, people, and timing.

Unfortunately, in many companies, the political realities of the strategic planning process are such that HR (and the owners of the talent management process) have to struggle for a seat at that table with a meaningful voice.  Forward-thinking companies give HR that seat, but many do not. (for an interesting side-bar on this discussion, you may be interested in this article by Bob Bogart, my former boss from Thomson Reuters who published a piece on getting HR a seat at the board room table).

2. There are 2 aspects of “Strategic” when thinking about talent management: 1) the linkage to strategy, which was referred to above; and, 2) adopting a strategic approach in the management of talent once that linkage has been made.  Both meanings of word “strategic” are important.  The second meaning, taking a strategic approach, is all about investing in the development of the right talent.  Which jobs in the organization are the most critical for success?  If you were to invest a dollar in getting the right talent into those jobs, either by hiring the right person or developing an incumbent’s skills, would you get a big return?  I have blogged about this notion of “pivotal jobs” before.  A great concept developed by Pete Ramsted and John Boudreau.  Identifying these jobs requires a segmentation approach.  Then, investment can be funneled into those most important segments.

That is all for now…

Once you have a process to identify top talent, you face a key question:  “should we tell high potentials that we see them as high potentials?”  This question is raised all the time by line executives (both those asking for their ratings and by those doing the ratings), and by talent management practitioners.  The question is frequently accompanied by one of several basic rationales (usually revealing the questioner’s intent): 

1) Transparency.  We need to be transparent with our development efforts, so that people understand the process is fair and don’t feel that we are keeping secrets about them.   This rationale carries with it the most intuitive, gut-level appeal.  Who wants to advocate for secretive HR practices…smoke-filled rooms, etc…?

2) Tell them or lose them.  If we keep it a secret and don’t tell high potentials that we think they are great, don’t we risk losing great people? 

3) If we don’t tell them, what’s the point of doing the assessment in the first place?  If we are aren’t telling high potentials that they are high potential, then we also can’t tell all those other people that they are not high potential.  So, how can we help them to develop?

There is validity in each of these views, and many other arguments are usually brought up in the course of  exploring this topic.

My view? 

I am all for transparency, but about the right things.  If the organization is caught up in the debate about the ratings, I see it as a potential danger sign.  The ratings are made in order to help the organization to have a robust dialogue about talent, reach common understanding about each person’s strengths and weaknesses, and, most importantly, to guide the organization’s development effort–espcially for certain top talent individuals. 

Given that actions speak louder than words, the question that we should be debating instead is, “what happens when someone in this organization is named high potential?”  Are certain development experiences cued up? Does the designation trigger a developmental assignment reserved for high potenials?  Is participation in certain learning programs reserved for high potentials? 

If the high potential designation does not trigger clear development actions for individuals, then who cares what the rating is anyway? If it does trigger such actions, then people will figure it out and the rating won’t be important.

The problem is that it’s hard for the organization to walk the talk in this way. Channeling significant development resources toward high potentials also  means channeling  them away from other non-high-potentials.  The unanointed in this scenario don’t particularly care for this sort of approach.   To follow this path, you need to have a pretty high level of confidence in your talent identification processes.   Otherwise, you will lose in two ways–investing in those who don’t have what the organization needs for the future, while disenfranchising those who do, but have been incorrectly passed over by your talent identification process.

Here are a few of my favorite tests for the quality of a talent identification process:

1) Do ratings depend upon the whims and perspectives of individual managers, or is the process sufficiently institutionalized so that it is not dependent upon individual managers? 

2) Do your talent assessments emerge from rich dialogue with senior management about each individual?  If talent assessments don’t get changed as they move up the chain, then the dialogue is probably not as robust or diverse as it should be.

3) Do leaders in your organization own the potential ratings, or are they something that they know HR wants them to do?

If your talent review and identifcation process does not pass these tests, then you might be best off keeping your potential ratings a secret.

If you are interested in this and other talent management questions, you may want to check out the upcoming Talent Management Strategies course (May 19-21 at the Carlson School).  It is a great program that can help you to better frame your talent management approach.