Talent management is mysterious. It's easy to assume, for instance, that just paying talented people a lot of money is the best form of talent management. Now, we all know money talks. But we've also heard about people who have worked their way out of an entry-level desk job to eventually lead the company, and it wasn't only money that made them do it. As this 488-page door-stopper makes clear, it's also wise for you as a manager to put together a fair, transparent, and motivating system across the company to identify, retain, and develop the most high-potential employees.
The editors, who are management consultants, have chosen contributors who lay out ideas and best practices in a forthright and readable way, interspersing directions with simple charts and graphs. The thirty-six chapters are divided into seven major sections: Introducing a Talent Management System; Developing the Building Blocks of Talent Management; Talent Planning (mostly about investments in training and succession); Building Diversity into Your Succession Plan; Coaching, Training, and Development; Using Compensation; and Using Information Technology to Support a Talent Management System.
We like the first person, "how-I-solved-this" chapters from some of the contributors. A senior VP at QVC, the shopping network, for instance, details their trial-and-error process of finding and developing high-potential people during a period of rapid hiring at the call center, the network's main source of revenue generation. He concludes with eleven important takeaways for managers who may find themselves with the similar challenge of building a talent management program in a time of fast growth. Among these are: "The program needs to be driven with line instead of human resource accountability" and "Peer input is the most time-consuming aspect of the [performance] review but also the most constructive."
We think this book is a fine resource for all managers who are fine-tuning their "soft skills" in a smart and systematic way.