Talent Information IS Business Information

Information generated by an integrated approach to talent managemen is of particularly high value to decision makers at the top level of any organization.  The reason for this is the shape managemetn takes on in more senior positions in an organization.  The higher in an organization someone is positioned, the more his or her work is characterized by leadership and supervision and less about direct “hands-on” work.  The responsibilities involved with leading at a senior level are inherently talent management questions around the business.  That is, teh quesitons that integrated taletn management seeks to answer are the same questions and activities that take up a disproportionate amount of any senior leader’s time:

• Do we have the righ tpeople in palce to meet our goals for growth?
• How well are the people leading our key initiatives doing?
• What risks do we ahve aroudn those key people?  Are tehy motivated and engaged?
• If we lost key people or if we wanted to grow faster and requried more people like them, where would we find them?

One of the reasons that top business people are often compensated so well is the reality that “making good business decisions is hard!” Business is hard because of the level of ambiguity in so many situations that a business person confronts. Business decsions are not math equations–there is often no single “right” answer to a business question.  In many industries the market a business serves never sits still.  Good business management inevitably means getting better and better at making decisions.  Because leading an organization and making key decisions often does not have an obvious forward path, one thing that senior managers invariably covet is…data.

HR’s Missed Opportunity

The driving reason for the integration of talent management processes is to produce data and talent information that help an organization achieve its goals. The success (or failure) of a business is largely made on the skills and efforts of the people that make up the organization.  Unfortunately, most HR organizations have grown in such a way that makes it impossible for them to use their various domain expertise to help their company systematically make better talent decisions. 

In each case where a human resources domain has grown, they have built out processes and methodologies for delivering the specific service they provide.  Naturally, each of these functions has evolved in a way that is optimized for the goals for that function, as well as the metrics that go along with them.  For a Recruiting professional time and cost to hire might be the driving metric by which he is measured.  For the leader of an Organizational Development team it could be metrics on the depth of a succession plan.  While the results of focused effort on any one domain are there for their specific area, the practical reality for many organizations is that many of their HR functions are built out in a “silo-ed” fashion.  The result is various metrics that support either a single process or only a narrowly defined piece of the business.  To support business decisions around talent, HR needs to correlate the data across domains to deliver better information about the business. 

Fact-based Decisions on Talent Drive Business Results

Good data, properly distilled and analyzed to become information is a decision maker’s best friend.  Good managers understand that the best business decisions are supported by timely data.  Business decisions around which markets to target or which projects to fund are always supported by the best information available.  Decisions about talent should be made the same way.

The collective set of functions that make up talent management, Recruiting, Performance Management, Compensation, Succession, etc., can be likened to other systems that are actually made up of various sub-processes.  Think of all of the different systems that go into an automobile.  There is a structural system, a chassis, on which all the other systems are built.  There is an acceleration or power train, a braking system, a steering system, a diagnostic or dashboard system all of which are built together to make a system that gets the driver from point A to point B.   It is the integration of processes, vocabulary, and definitions where Talent Managers from different HR domains can jointly put their overall talent initiatives into overdrive, and better support business decisions around talent. 

Senior management understands that a large portion of the most important decisions they make are about people.  Who do I put in charge?  Who do I need to remove from a certain responsibility?  It is questions like these that most affect the overall performance of the business.  It is for this reason that Talent information is business information.

(Mike Ditson)