Talent management (in professional services firms) 2

The Management Consultancies Association (MCA) has produced a report on talent management (Tomorrow's people) with a foreword by Emmanuel Gobillot at Hay.

Echoing my comments on HR’s role in strategic people management, the report finds that less that a quarter of organisations believe their current talent management processes will deliver the leaders they need. In fact, 70% of them feel they need to change their approach.

Not too surprisingly, the MCA finds that professional services firms “provide a good illustration of how much organisations have to change” although they do look at a range of other organisations as well.

One major recommendation is that organisations need to carefully and strategically segment their workforce. Chris Watkin at Hay comments:

“It’s not just a question of replacing the word ‘talent’ with ‘people’. You
still need to be able to make some very difficult choices about the group of
people you need to invest in. Especially if you’re trying to throw the net
wider, you can’t afford to develop everyone equally.”

Diedre Hardy at Fujitsu adds:

“What we need here is the equivalent of one-to-one marketing: knowing exactly what skills you need and precisely targeting potential sources.”

The report also recommends that when considering what skills they need, organisations should look beyond today’s skills and capabilities to consider those the organisation will need to survive and compete in the future and which may look very different from the ones needed today (supporting a growing focus on diversity).

And another finding, which I think may well become an ongoing theme within this blog, is that there can be no single, standard approach to talent management. Instead, this needs to be linked to the particular capabilities an organisation needs in the future. The report found that the most popular of these capabilities are the following:

Do these make sense for your organisation, or does this have a different organisational capability to these?