Is there a bigger and better sustainable future for talent management?

This article argues that coming out of the recession talent management strategies should value moral virtue, privilege knowledge-sharing, involvement and shared leadership.

Since the entertainment industry metaphor of talent first crossed the Atlantic, the context of the debate has changed radically as a result of the global financial crisis (GFC) and the current sovereign debt crisis. Both shocks to the system have led to questioning recent talent management strategies. Worryingly, it has also raised the possibility that HR may have been the ‘un-indicted co-conspirator’ in the GFC, earlier corporate governance scandals and even disasters such as the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This analysis is based on the ‘too much of a good thing’ effect, where usually beneficial management policies cause harm when taken too far.

HRM is replete with such paradoxes, one of which is an arguably misplaced faith in talented individuals, especially heroic/visionary leaders, as the source of sustainable innovation. Recent events and academic evidence suggest that this discourse of ‘talent’ and ‘leaderism’ has, indeed, been taken too far.

The consequence for some organisations has been the creation of a significant imbalance in the three aims of sustainable corporate governance. For decades, organisations have privileged short-term wealth creation (innovation) at the expense of wealth protection (risk management) and wealth distribution (fairness in rewards). Moreover, there is evidence that the HR function has been complicit (or silent) in implementing talent strategies that have overemphasised the importance of human capital (individual employees’ knowledge, skills) at the expense of social capital (the degree of employee bonding, internal and external networking, and trust in an organisation) to sustainable organisational success.

Three important consequences of this mismanagement have been:

• a poorly articulated notion of ‘engagement’, failing to recognise that employees need to be engaged with each other as well as with their jobs and their organisations

• talent management strategies and ‘leaderism’ that are part of the problem of declining levels of trust and employee identification rather than a solution

• failure to recognise that an organisation’s intellectual capital, a key driver of corporate reputations, owes as much to social as to human capital.

Building sustainable organisational reputations is not only a result of organisations becoming different by pursuing individualist strategies, but also being legitimate in the eyes of stakeholders and society at large, which, paradoxically, implies similarity and fairness. The logic of difference leads organisations to pursue exclusive talent strategies, focusing on a core of high-value-adding employees. The logic of legitimacy leads organisations to be more inclusive in who they define as talent and to focus on stakeholder business ethics rather than self-interest. This socially constructed notion of talent in an organisation determines the levels of engagement, whose voices are listened to and who is involved in making decisions.
Sustainable talent management strategies coming out of recession should value moral virtue, privilege knowledge-sharing, involvement and shared leadership, require all staff to be other-referential rather than self-referential, and value craftsmanship and experience as well as potential. The recession has been partly a consequence of a model of corporate governance that promoted values and theories in direct opposition to these ideas and an HR function caught up in it. 
 
Graeme Martin, University of Glasgow Business School

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