James HolincheckI have been meaning to comment on this post on the Systematic HR blog for a while. It was spurred on by this post from Dave Lefkow’s Director of Recruiting blog. I agree with Dubs that it is nice to see someone from the recruiting arena acknowledge that talent management is more than just talent acquisition. Both Dave and Dubs discuss who in the HR organization “own” talent management.
That is where I depart ways a little bit with both of them. I was asked the question “who owns talent management?” on an industry analyst panel at the National Human Capital Institute Summit last week. I answered that the HR organization does not own talent management, it helps enable talent management. Executives and managers own talent management. Data from Gallup and others points out that the relationship between employee and supervisor is the greatest indicator of employee engagement. For talent management to be successful, it has to be embraced, and owned, by the business.
Category: Human Capital Management Talent Management Application Suites Tags: HCM, talentmanagement
5 responses so far ↓
1 Dave Lefkow March 30, 2007 at 11:39 am
At the risk of getting into a semantic argument, I agree that everyone in the company owns talent management and that it needs to be embraced by the business as a whole.
Yet as you mention, someone has to enable it – and that’s where things get fuzzy to me. There are so many silos and disparate processes in HR that the sum of its parts are often greater than the whole.
Which brings us back to at least the spirit of the original question – who will step up and tie this all together?
2 Jim Holincheck March 30, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Thanks, Dave. You are right that it is not clear who is going to take the lead. There are many would-be leaders: Recruitment, OD, Training, etc. It would be nice if there were one owner of enablement like a Director of Talent Management. However, I think it will probably start more as a collaboration across silos initially. I still think it is more critical that the business is on board and driving it than how HR is organized to enable it (multiple models will work).
3 Jim Newman March 30, 2007 at 5:24 pm
I agree whole heartedly that the overall organization needs to own talent management and that executives need not only drive it, but support it through action. I also think that HR is or needs to be the enabler. When working with clients, what’s interesting is that they don’t necessarily know who owns it. We find that often times the ownership decision falls to the wayside once a technology enabler is implemented and the system administrator does their best to bridge HR silos to accomplish objectives. Executives need to assign ownership and accountability to a lead role within their organization. We believe that Talent Steering Committees comprised of HR/OD, Operations, IT and Finance execs (to name a few) properly facilitated, has the opportunity to yield significantly better results. Unfortunately, to date, we have not seen this occur to the extent we believe it should.
4 DonaldHTaylor May 11, 2007 at 5:01 am
I agree, Jim H, that HR is the enabler of Talent Management, and the business the owner.
But there is another component – who is the leader? I’m not trying to complicate matters, but rather echoing Jim N. An executive has to sponsor the whole idea of TM. Without that, it fails to become a priority at ground level.
With an executive lead, however, practitioners will feel empowered to collaborate across silos (as Jim says). In our experience that’s where TM begins and – crucially – shows its value, even when practitioners are calling it something else.
5 Hamed Elbarki April 23, 2008 at 6:19 pm
“Executives and managers own talent management.”
This is the answer I would have give.