Quick adaptability and quick responsiveness

Its all about Quick adaptability and quick responsiveness

The meaning of the phrase "talent management" is anticipating human capital needs and setting about meeting them. "Getting the right people with the right skills into the right jobs at the right time" is a common description of the end result of a good talent management outcome. To that outcome, one needs to anticipate needs and have a plan to meet them. That's the process of talent management. The problem we are hoping to avoid with good talent management is to avoid talent crunches, where business growth suffers because we can't find employees with the right competencies to get the work done, and talent surpluses, where we have to layoff and restructure.


At the moment, talent management practices, especially in the US, the most common is to do nothing, no anticipation of needs, no plans for addressing them. A recent survey reported that roughly two-thirds of US employers do no planning of any kind for their talent needs.

Long-term planning in business is so inaccurate that relying on it is a mistake. The reason is that product markets are no longer predictable. The idea that a company could predict accurately what it would be doing 10 years out or more has largely disappeared. When business forecasts and plans shrunk from 10 years to five years to, in most cases now one year, the ability to predict the demand for talent has to be scaled back as well. Programmes for developing talent that go out many years create a false sense of accuracy and no longer make sense.

Another problem with this approach is that the supply of internal talent is equally uncertain because of retention problems. Simply predicting what percentage of candidates who begin a development programme will remain when it ends is now difficult. A company that has a modest 10% turnover rate among its managerial ranks will lose half of its managers in five years: Does it still make sense to call that arrangement a "pipeline", or is it better thought of as a sieve?

The big challenge for talent management stems from the main challenge facing contemporary business, and that is to manage uncertainty. The demand for talent is uncertain. As we've already seen in the field of business strategy, the answer is going to point us away from planning and toward adaptability and responsiveness as a means for addressing uncertainty on both the supply and demand sides of the talent management equation.