What is talent management?

Imagine you are the manager of a Division and you are looking for a new senior manager to fill one of your key roles. How do you do it?

You could recruit from outside the organisation. This can be expensive though and a lengthy process. And if you have high potential people already within the Division, you’ll miss out on their experience and run the risk of them becoming stale in their role and disgruntled at the lack of opportunity.

Another option would be to recruit from within the organisation. But who do you recruit? How do you find out who has the potential to be able to do the role well and who is already performing well? The answer is Talent Management. And this is just one of the areas where a robust process of formally managing the talent within an organisation has tremendous benefits.

Performance and Potential

Talent Management is part of the wider Performance Management process. It aims to identify each person’s talent profile and then manage them according to that.

The key to Talent Management is that it looks at each person’s potential as well as their performance. Traditionally performance management approaches have focused on performance. But by identifying each person’s potential as well as performance you can transform the way people are managed.

  • By understanding a person’s potential as well as performance you can:

    • Properly plan their career path.
    • The organisation can more easily plan for succession in key roles.
    • You can ensure that people aren’t promoted into roles beyond their potential.
    • You can ensure the capabilities of high potential people are utilized.
    • You can identify people who are performing below their potential.
  • This has two key benefits:

    • Retaining your top people
    • Increasing performance

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