Companies repeatedly talk about problems with acquiring and keeping the right "talent". They speak about individuals who can change ingrained orders for the better. In fact, however, they confuse talent with people able to perform perfectly in the existing social system which the company represents. While individuals may make a difference, the system simply overwhelms them. The bigger the company, the more this applies.
Todd Warner from Australia, who has more than twenty years of practice helping companies with transformations toward greater performance via human resources, discusses this issue in an interesting article on the Harvard Business Review website.
"Fundamentally, organizations domesticate people—they condition people to work in certain ways, and they inadvertently perpetuate the status quo. People get tagged as “talented” when they fit in (or pretend to). This ends up exacerbating conformity and fear, and perpetuating the very problems that the CEO is hoping to solve," explains Warner. If you want to achieve real change, in his view, you must first understand the following three fundamental dilemmas of talent management.
1. Tribal organisation
People still behave tribally: they look for and maintain small groups of similar-minded people for working together. While companies say they seek and promote talent, they actually encourage and reward old, well-worn procedures. Their talent management systems can't work properly until they realise this fact.
2. Compliance instead of creativity
Minions, whose task is to avoid problems and help their superiors look good, thrive more in organisations than talented people. They are usually clever, confident and resourceful people but they do not differ from the average in any substantial way. They don't bring any of the challenges talent should bring.
3. Corporate context
Many companies confuse the best people with people who perform the best in the context of their organisations. They have in mind a particular type of people they are looking for, which is quite risky. The purpose of talent management is not to seek and promote the best people but purposely to build the DNA of the company's entire social system. The best people in a given context will probably achieve high performance but that is not the same as talent.
-kk-