Over the past decade, organisations have invested significant sums in developing systems to help them to define, evaluate and develop talent. And yet, the ‘war for talent’ as identified in 1997 appears no closer to ending.
Talent as a concept is under increasing pressure. Indeed, judging by the spate of recent books and articles lambasting “the talent myth”, it feels like we’re in the midst of a period of full-scale revisionism, with established orthodoxies about executive performance and potential increasingly under siege.
Despite the growth of talent management functions, there is an over-reliance on metric-based initiatives that deconstruct individuals into numbers and values. The result is over-simplification of something that is actually rather complex and tricky to quantify: talent. The loss of nuance and subtlety results in a decreased ability to make fine-grained judgements about an individual’s unique set of skills, motivations and spike strengths. However, it is these unique strengths that, when fully utilised, can be genuinely transformative.
At YSC we work with a wide range of organisations, helping them to align their talent management strategy with their business objectives. We take a holistic approach that brings together strategy, process, systems, implementation and embedding, as well as evaluation. We never lose sight of the individual and place a strong emphasis on line management owning talent management decisions.
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