Catalyst | Dexterity
D
Liberating our talent
to prepare for all
possible futures
Maggi Evans
To create nimble, responsive and resilient organisations,
we must reframe talent management as talent liberation,
writes Maggi Evans.
We’re all familiar with the emerging changes in the workplace – the socalled
Fourth Industrial Revolution, the digital age. This is bringing
fundamental shifts in the nature of work and working life, with many
organisations transforming their operating models, building agility into
their structures, localising decision making and simplifying processes.
It certainly brings a challenge for HR: having spent decades driving
efficiency through consistency and planning, we are having to rethink
and reimagine how we can add value to a different kind of organisation.
Central to this is finding ways to balance the need for responsive, shortterm
tactics with the need for long-term strategy and planning.
It’s a classic wicked problem; there is no one right answer, no clear starting
point and many separate issues are intertwined or contradictory, making
it difficult to know where to start. Talent management is perhaps at the
epicentre of this wicked problem – trying to resource rapidly changing
current needs while also developing the capability for a shifting future
(all within a limited budget).
We need
to develop
adaptive
talent
strategies
Stuck in a time warp
Many of our current talent tools have their roots in the 1950s, a period
with greater predictability; a time when five-year succession plans made
as much sense as 10-year strategic plans. The way most organisations ‘do’
talent management is stuck in this time warp and is not fit for purpose in
the current age. We therefore need to overhaul our short- and long-term
talent processes, and the way we perceive talent management. We need
to think about ‘talent liberation’ instead of talent management. So, what
can we do?
In the short term, we need to develop adaptive talent strategies. These are
approaches with sufficient flexibility to enable us to respond to immediate
needs, to scale up or down, to redeploy and refocus. This is something we’ve
become more skilled at with the onset of furlough and other government
schemes to support employment during the coronavirus pandemic.
There are four elements to this:
• visibility of short-term available talent (within the
organisation and outside it)
• rapid reporting to track business needs and identify gaps
• simple processes to fill gaps, reskill, upskill, redeploy
• a cultural element that embraces flexible resourcing and
encourages the transparency and collaboration required
for success
This ‘real-time’ responsive approach is a challenge to many of our
traditional methods of workforce planning, particularly in large and
complex organisations. However, the model used in professional services
is one from which many organisations can learn. These firms are used to
operating in an uncertain world, unsure which contracts will be secured
and exactly which skill sets will be in demand.
They have flexible team structures, set up for each project, with the
people-management role separated from the task-management role.
People are a shared, business-wide resource rather than ‘belonging’ within
specific structures, so are free to move between geographies, customers
or business areas.
Leaders and managers have the skills to inspire, motivate and develop
people in frequently changing teams. If they don’t have enough people on
the ‘bench’ for a project, they will resource externally, or rapidly develop
internal people to fill the gaps. Similarly, retail has, for many years, had
flexible resourcing, with weekly sales and seasonal trend data driving
decisions about rotas and shifts. For professional services firms and
retailers, this flexibility is an essential element of their business model
– and it’s a feature from which many other organisations can learn as they
explore how to develop greater agility.
As soon as we plan for
just one future, we
limit our preparation
for the unexpected
and with it, our
ability to flex
Considering all the possible scenarios
Looking through the long-term lens, we must start by considering the
strategic aims of the organisation and possible scenarios for how the
organisation might evolve and grow. For each scenario, it is possible
to identify potential organisational priorities and risks that the talent
strategy needs to address; for example, how to ensure access to critical
technology skills, how to resource expansion into new geographies, how
to acquire and integrate new businesses successfully.
A strategy can then be built to show how to respond to each scenario –
factoring in possible changes in technology which may mean that some
roles are more/less important. Inevitably, this is based on a series of ‘best
guesses’. But as energy company Shell found through its groundbreaking
work on scenario planning in the 1960s, the value comes less from
predicting an actual future and more from recognising that the future
is not set, from being prepared to succeed in a range of possible futures.
As soon as we plan for just one future, we limit our preparation for the
unexpected and with it, our ability to flex. As with the short-term talent
approach, organisations will only succeed in this if they look at culture
as well as process. There are four particularly important cultural themes.
Organisations need to recognise the value of diverse skills and
experience. This might even mean bringing in ‘disruptive talent’. Firms
require access to fresh perspectives. An organisation of clones is unlikely
to be able to respond or adapt well to change.
Greater transparency is essential. This means having open
conversations about possible scenarios and about the skills and experiences
that will be most valued, involving feedback and support to enable people
to develop these skills.
Businesses must work in partnership with talented people, whether
staff are employed, ‘borrowed’, temporary or permanent. We need to
engage with our people to find the ‘sweet spot’ between their wants and
needs and those of the organisation. This requires thinking about them
as stakeholders within the talent agenda. Instead of leaving their voice
out of talent plans and decisions, we should be educating and empower
our people to be proactive in managing their own careers, encouraging
job crafting, motivating and supporting them to be their personal best.
Through this, we can help everyone to perform well and thrive, attracting
and accessing the broad range of talented people we need to safeguard
success.
The approach must be owned by the HR function. These are businesscritical
issues and all leaders need to lean in, building new skills, challenging
current approaches and embracing agility in how work happens.
A fundamental overhaul
These ways of thinking represent a fundamental overhaul of talent
management. As HR professionals, we need to let go of our historical
approaches and reshape the conversation, finding new ways to drive
competitive advantage and manage risk, and so creating organisations
that are nimble, responsive and resilient – where talent is liberated rather
than managed.
In my experience, leaders are open to this change; they can see that
current approaches are not bringing the benefits they need. Now is an
ideal time to introduce new language into our talent conversations, to ask
about future scenarios, to challenge established practices around secrecy
and to invest time in developing a positive talent culture fit for the future.
Maggi Evans is an experienced consultant with international
experience across a wide range of sectors, and co-author of From
Talent Management to Talent Liberation, which will be published
in December 2020.