Talent Unconference, Part 1: Tricky Business
- Author: Amitai Givertz
- Posted: March 4, 2007
- Category: Workforce Planning, Talent Management
- Tags: No Tags
- Comments:
I had an exchange of emails with larger-than-life Jeff Hunter last week. Among other things, I fell on my sword admitting that I had been remiss for not following up on the recent Talent Unconference, giving back in the spirit of the thing. FYI, Jeff conceived and championed TalUncon, a loya jirgah of sorts for what has been described by John Sumser as “the tribe.” Jeff’s sponsor, Electronic Arts graciously hosted the event on their swank Redwood Shores campus, all under the careful watch of a passionate Cindy Nicola who spearheads EA’s innovative HR function.
TalUncon’s deal was simple: learn one thing, teach one thing. On the first count, I learned a lot. On the second count I fear I may have fallen short. As we left the big tent of talent to return to our villages I promised to post something on the TalUncon site, a reflection on how next years event might be improved. Alas, I have not done that either. Oh, dear. I’m sorry, Jeff.
For what it’s worth, at some point I do intend to organize my thoughts to formulate a coherent answer to Dave Lefkow and Susan Burns’ take on the difference between, application of, and relationship between workforce and talent planning, or not as the case may be. Susan and Dave led my pick for afternoon session, Talent Planning and Strategy which was billed like this:
The opportunity we see is:
There is a huge opportunity for talent management functions to raise their profile and importance in their organizations - not just to support business strategies but to help drive them.
The problem we see is:
We know how important talent is in our global, information-driven, innovation economy. Yet talent management departments are often called upon to fix the problems that are created vs. help avoid them in the first place. In the face of an increasingly complex global business and labor environment, how do we strategically use information and talent planning to turn this vicious cycle into a virtuous one?
Joining the track I wasn’t really expecting mo’ talent-speak, talent planning and strategy established practices I thought. And it seemed to me that the term “workforce planning” was being lifted from the human capital lexicon to be repurposed in talent management’s burgeoning nonsensicon, blurring issues and confusing me.
I don’t know if talent pipeline, -development, and -management, and its functional subsets – recruiting and selection, performance management, succession planning and so on – were being mashed-up with strategic workforce planning – the formalized process by which an organization determines its future human capital needs to deliver its strategic objectives, over time, tweaked as needed – mashed-up, I wondered, to serve some hidden agenda or emerging fad or deconstructionist babble.
I’m left wondering now, is the conventional thinking that talent management processes — deployed to implement the workforce plan — being challenged now to evolve a better overall system for delivering shareholder value or are our talent management vanguard playing musical chairs, looking for a seat at the table? Again:
There is a huge opportunity for talent management functions to raise their profile and importance in their organizations - not just to support business strategies but to help drive them.
Of course, if the latter is the case there is nothing wrong with jockeying for position if that’s what it takes; nothing wrong with musical chairs until the music stops as it did when the dot com bubble burst. Remember that?
Ahem. Now all that said it could be that I’ve just got everything muddled up, loosing my marbles maybe. It happens you know. So here is Susan Burns wrapping up the afternoon session for the whole tribe. You make sense of it:
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Comments (4)
Comment by Amitai Givertz, March 7, 2007 at 6:53 am
More questions than answers I think…
Hat-tip to Kyle for sending me a useful definition of workforce planning, What is Workforce Planning? What is Needed to Do It Well? It’s a good 60 second overview, take a look. For more on the source for Alice Snell’s post, buy the report, Strategic Workforce Planning: Forecasting Human Capital Needs to Execute Business Strategy — Price: $1,295.00 ($125.00 Associates) — published by The Conference Board.
1. Thinking this through, I guess at some point we need to ask, “How do we agree what what means?” and “How do we develop a common language that continues to communicate evolving trends, systems, applications, practices and technologies?”
2. Do the definitions of things like workforce planning come from academia, industry pundits and commentators — who may have a vested interest in “universal adoption” of new meanings — or do they come from “esteemed” organizations whose political clout or high-priced manifestos confer some authority on their “interpretations” of what is and what ain’t?
3. What role do employers play in the evolving understanding of strategic issues like workforce planning? Most importantly, who distills all these legitimate inputs and synthesizes a common usage, and how does it happen? Is it an organic process or is it something someone somewhere wants to engineer?
Comment by Colin Kingsbury, March 7, 2007 at 10:06 am
Winston Churchill once complained, when served a custard of some sort for dessert, “but it has no theme!” There’s some interesting noodling going on here, but I’m waiting for the dramatic thrust to tie it together.
I don’t think there’s ever been much controversy, not in the past 10 years anyway, that good people are essential. The place where line management and talent people diverge is the primacy of P&L fundamentals as the central metric of a business. A lot of the discussion that I read seems to be saying, “It’s not just about money,” which is something like saying that good surgery is not just about preventing blood loss. True, but if you fail at that part the rest is moot.
Talent management as I am reading it seems preeminently concerned with long-lifecycle investments. It’s not that those are impossible in business–we have 50-year mortgages, after all–but the ones we do have are based on roughly 300 years of civilizational experience in asset valuation.
Right now, the only places where we have any degree of accuracy, let alone precision, in assigning productive value to people, is at the far ends of the bell curve. At the very bottom end, a Target or Wal-Mart has a pretty good idea that adding one cashier will add X dollars of productivity. At the top, a Hollywood studio boss can with some accuracy predict the difference in box office take from casting Jessica Alba in a role versus Scarlett Johannsen. Pro sports are perhaps even more rigorous in this regard.
If a banker were unable to say whether your house is likely to be worth $300,000 or $30,000, and whether its value would increase at 100% a year, or -25% a year, mortgages would not exist. And that is pretty much where we’re at with people in a corporate setting, for a variety of reasons. It may be that scarcity drives us to get better at this at a dramatically increased pace, the way WWII did for aviation. And yet, I think you and I agree that one decent recession could shatter the consensus around talent very quickly. I think that many people are underestimating both the height and grade of the mountain we need to climb here.
Comment by Shally, March 7, 2007 at 7:41 pm
We could do more. Many of the people who commited to share their notes and thoughts, and to discuss on the blog, have failed to do so. It was indeed a very cool “happening” but I’m begining to see it WAS a happening and is NO MORE a happening.
What we started will go nowhere becase there has been no follow through. Look at the date of the most recent post - at the time I write this comment - the most recent post on Taluncon.com is Feb 15, a full three weeks ago.
Comment by Amitai Givertz, March 7, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Colin, you raise a number of points better answered in my follow-up on the morning track: The Value of Talent. That said, thanks for your thoughtful reply.
Shally, you are right but only up to a point:
1. The Taluncon site does not need to be the only place were our follow-up can happen. Not at all. Once I get the trackbacks up and running, linking back to www.taluncon.com, this conversation might evolve beyond a sidebar exchange, rekindle the same level of energy we experienced on that day, if only for the shelf life of a single post. And then again, maybe not.
2. Like others, I may have been slow to follow-up on that day’s happening but that shouldn’t necessarily indicate a lack of interest in advancing the agenda or a willingness to participate in TalUncon’s surviving purpose. I know for a fact that there are many who, like me, need to balance thinking about the future with “getting it done” today. Some like to ruminate on these things a while. We are not all so expert that the answers to these complex issues will necessarily pop out of a YouTube video
You say, “We could do more.” I say, “OK then, let’s.” What do you suggest? One thing is for sure, the issues we are grappling with today were years in the making. It may take many more years before any one of us can say, “We actually made a difference.” Without question, it will take a common language that communicates at every level of the organization the underlying value of talent and a common purpose that transcends self interest. Otherwise, Shally, you are right; what we started will go nowhere.