3.2.4 Talent

The Enterneers® I 07:22

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07:22

Elements of Enterneering^®/People/Talent

In traditional business management, talent management is defined as the process of procuring, evaluating, retaining and developing employees with diverse qualifications. The primary goal of this approach is to promptly and permanently fill the positions that are relevant to the success of the company with the most suitable candidates. This approach often targets a specific group of people in the company who are to be recruited, retained or developed based on business needs.

Like other sub-disciplines, individual fringe areas within talent management quickly merge with other disciplines. For example, ’sourcing’ in talent management strictly refers to providing the most accurate and assessable requirement profiles for recruitment, which is usually the function that applies to all people in the company, regardless of their talents. Many papers on talent management extensively discuss the individual sub-disciplines and delve into certain methods.

However, a holistic perspective reveals that the focus quickly shifts to the following areas:

➟	Identifying people's talents.
➟	Determining their development potential based on their talents.
➟	Defining the talent requirements.
➟	What expectations do I have of the people in the company, and am I an authentic role model?
➟	Performing gap analysis between the existing talents and the required ones.
➟	Establishing measures for the further development of the existing talents.
➟	Determining talent procurement requirements.
➟	Retaining to a certain degree talents that are valuable, scarce or both within the company.

Comprehensive technical papers, treatises and tools are available for each of these points. It is the responsibility of the HR (People Management) function to derive these tools and implement them effectively. First and foremost, entrepreneurs must be sufficiently aware of the importance of active talent management. They should understand that talent management is not a solitary discipline in the company but is closely linked to other elements. It is important to internalise the fact that talent plays a role in determining the competitive position and performance of the company, and so, talent management cannot be left to chance.

The better a company is positioned in Enterneering^®, the more elements it has that contribute positively to success in talent management. The following elements are particularly relevant and are described in more detail elsewhere in Enterneering^®:

Philosophy ❭ ❭ ❭
Purpose ❭ ❭ ❭
Involvement ❭ ❭ ❭
Empowerment ❭ ❭ ❭
Recruitment ❭ ❭ ❭
Knowledge ❭ ❭ ❭
Incentives ❭ ❭ ❭

Cross-references: At this point in the app, it becomes clear that the individual elements in Enterneering® complement each other and develop their full effect in combination. They will probably become fully apparent to you only after you study this app in its entirety.

In addition to the above-mentioned points, the recognition, assessment and development of individual talents remain special features of talent management, which will be discussed in the following section.

IDENTIFYING TALENTS
When identifying talents, a fundamental distinction must be made between two perspectives. One is focussed on the company and aims to determine which talents (abilities, inclinations, interests) are in demand in the company, for what purposes, and in what quantities. The second perspective is focussed on individuals within the company and aims to identify the talents of each one of them. Well-organised companies maintain records of their employees’ talents and personality profiles throughout their employee lifecycles, from recruitment, through all important developments, to the time they leave the company.

To make both perspectives assessable and comparable, identical benchmarks and definitions should be used on both sides. A common tool for this is the competence matrix.

The competence matrix contains, in the basic dimension, the competencies/skills/capabilities that are most important and valuable for the company. These can be subdivided into categories, if necessary. On a further dimension, these criteria are allocated in a weighted manner to individual areas or activities in the company. This weighting can be emphasised visually, for example with Harvey Balls or traffic light colours. However, a clear scoring is crucial for the analysis, i.e. a measurable allocation of points for the importance of each criterion for each organisational unit. This results in a view of the whole company.

The same criteria are again recorded for each employee in the company and given a measurable scoring. This results in another dimension of the competence matrix, at the employee level.

Regular staff appraisals or performance evaluations of individuals, and further training, can be used to update the personal dimension of talent management. It is important to involve the individuals being evaluated and not have the assessment done solely by the manager. It is not uncommon for the person being evaluated and a third-party assessor to come up with divergent assessments of talent.

ASSESSING TALENTS
Based on all dimensions of the competence matrix, different analyses and comparisons can be presented, which ultimately form the basis for an effective gap analysis. The assessment aims to identify optimal staffing or individual development approaches. In addition, the assessment is used for personnel requirement planning and procurement. The assessment results can also be used as a form of 'strength or weakness' analysis within the company or against other market participants.

The comparative form of this assessment involves projecting the view of the company into the future in a planning or simulative manner to identify the potential need for certain talents in the coming years and to take medium-to-long-term measures.

DEVELOPING TALENTS
The development of talent can take place in groups of comparably talented individuals or be planned and carried out so that it is individually tailored for the respective persons. Sustainable development goes beyond providing individual training or in-depth measures. It also involves linking the development measures to the application-related activity of the employees in the company and providing appropriate feedback and progress assessments.

Finally, a development measure should include a kind of resubmission period, in which the success is once again specifically evaluated and an adjustment of the competence matrix is made after a certain period of time has elapsed following the measure. It is recommended that the follow-up is conducted jointly with the employee in question.

Note on practical application
Talent management should not be confused with incentives or rewards. In other words, it is not the employees with the best performance in the past year or with particularly high earnings or with a long period of service who receive a measure within the framework of talent management. It is the persons with the most valuable talents or with talent-based development potential for the company who do so.

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