The Talent Management Myth

In this episode of The HR Uprising podcast, Lucinda challenges the term ‘Talent’ asking whether it may be counterproductive and suggests 5 reasons why it should be used with caution if not considered to be a myth.  Lucinda challenges our thinking around talent management and introduces a number of examples where we may want to think differently around talent. Finally, having presented the health warning around using the term talent, she shares how we can make it more meaningful and develop a talent management strategy in 5 simple steps.  As ever you can access the full podcast series from www.hruprising.com and other resources are also available from there.  KEY TAKEAWAYS  Most companies don’t know what ‘Talent’ looks like – Do you know what the measure is for it? How do you know who’s got it and who doesn’t?  Talent is situational – A person’s talent can be useful in a certain role, but not on the other. Would it be better if you nurture the strengths of the people that you already have?  It is elitist and may demotivate the majority – Most of the time, you have to identify a talent pool, and most of the time,  it’s 10% of the population.  Talent doesn’t necessarily correlate with performance – From experience, even though you’ve hired the top performing people for your company, there is only a little difference that it makes for the overall performance of the company.  It makes organisations lazy – The company relies much on these people who they labelled their ‘talents’.  BEST MOMENTS  “Think about what’s motivational for the majority of the organisation.”  “If you don’t have these cultures and behaviours in place, literally, recruiting for talent is like filling a leaky bucket.”  “A high-performance culture is everyone’s responsibility.”  VALUABLE RESOURCES   The War For Talent by Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod  ABOUT THE HOST  Lucinda Carney is a Business Psychologist with 15 years in Senior Corporate L&D roles and a further 10 as CEO of Actus Software where she worked closely with HR colleagues helping them to solve the same challenges across a huge range of industries. It was this breadth of experience that inspired Lucinda to set up the HR Uprising community to facilitate greater collaboration across HR professionals in different sectors, helping them to ‘rise up’ together.  “If you look up, you rise up”  CONTACT METHOD  Join the LinkedIn community - https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13714397/   Email: [email protected]   Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucindacarney/   Twitter: @lucindacarney  HR podcast, The HR Uprising, Diversity, Equality & Inclusion, Learning and Development, Culture & Change: https://hruprising.com/hr-podcasts/