Talent Management. It makes sense. It’s another human capital idea that took way too long to define and rally around. I like to think that I was into Talent Management when Talent Management wasn’t cool. It was around 2002, and I worked with a group of smart consultants and product development people. We were some of the first people to tie all of the talent functions together.
As a former Recruiting Director, I realized the importance of Talent Management quickly. It was hard to deny the need to hold managers accountable for Talent Management . You know the managers: the recruiting teams would diligently fill a seemingly endless supply of their requisitions. Sometimes those reqs were the same ones that were filled a few months prior. They were the managers that didn’t manage their people well. They hired for experience (because it takes too much energy to train), and worked their employees long hours because they didn’t manage the workload or skills well. We didn’t know how to measure it, but the cost of their workforce was higher than the managers that knew how to manage talent well. Sometimes those managers were hard and uncaring. Many times they were just clueless.
All organizations have those managers. But the real question is: do you know who they are? Can you actually measure your managers against each other to determine who is better at Talent Management? Because, really, it’s all puppies and rainbows until you can actually prove that it works, right?
Ok, I’m not picking on puppies and rainbows. I like them well enough. But what I’d rather share is a secret you can use to school your CFO and business leadership. You need a Talent Management Index. The TMI (which seems like an ironic acronym, doesn’t it?) is a handy little measure that you can tailor to your organization’s talent management priorities. It’s an index, and for those of us that didn’t make it to statistics class, that’s basically a statistical measure of changes in a representative group of individual data points. You might know some common indices like Cost of Living Index, Consumer Price Index, or even the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The great part about an index is that it lets you value variations in a way that is easier than looking at individual data points.
Leveraging an index to compare all of your talent management priorities is your first step towards quantifying Talent Manager effectiveness. Are you ready to try?
