Top Tips for Effective Talent Management

Mostafa Sayyadi, Author, Leading Between the Lines

Top Tips for Effective Talent Management

Effective talent management is needed to achieve a high degree of sustainable competitive performance. Executives can improve performance by taking a more strategic approach---suggesting that organization’s collective-interests are strategic tools that need to be managed to create competitiveness. Executives can therefore contribute to organizational performance through developing relationships with subordinates that link talents’ individual interests to the organization’s collective-interests.

Many executives would agree with Haworth, who sees organizational performance as an outcome of various factors such as interactions and communications, and a climate inspiring innovation and creativity within organizations. Every executive is held to the grindstone of maximizing financial and non-financial measures---their careers are tied to company performance measures. The focus on financial performance alone is insufficient as firms need to also consider a range of other factors such as effective talent management that is also reflective of their performance. As executives attempt to manage organizations they find that talent management is in the forefront of success---Bill Gates once mentioned that if he lost his top 50 people he would not have an organization anymore. Yoon argues that in order to generate value from talents, organizations need to manage knowledge flows between employees (the ability of individuals and teams to apply solutions to customers’ need) and customers (the strength of the customer relationship). At this point, you’re probably asking why building organization’s collective-interests is so important. Just as organizations' talent as noted earlier is a huge component of large organizations, building organization’s collective-interests is the resource that keeps the culture together and builds upon the foundations that helps organizations prosper.

Most importantly, Coleman found that organizations need to improve four categories of capital in order to succeed in today’s hypercompetitive global environment: Financial, Biophysical, Human and Social capital. Executives, today, are focusing on customer and employee relationship management. An organization’s collective-interests stress the critical role that executives place on relationships. By influencing behaviour and providing valuable resources, executives can change the culture of an organization. An organization’s collective-interests, however, is different from talents’ individual interests in that talents’ individual interests focus on individual behavior and knowledge while organization’s collective-interests emphasize relationships and the assets created by these relationships. By viewing employees as assets, they are treating talents as an individual quality. An organization’s collective-interests are considered the quality that appear in interactions throughout the organization. Communication is enhanced providing further opportunities and information sharing. Therefore, executives can enhance communications to aggregate talents’ individual interests into organization’s collective-interests so as to provide further information and opportunities for all members, and subsequently create valuable resources for an organization as a whole. In doing this, executives can apply the following managerial implications that can effectively create the organization’s collective-interests within companies:  

  1. Executives can focus on the critical role of social networks in developing relationships with other communication tools in order to enhance the performance of individuals and groups.
  2. Executives can focus on the importance of flexible structures in improving communications in order to achieve organizational goals.

In conclusion, executives need to see how organization’s collective-interests can help in managerial decision making and planning and executing strategy. Flexible structures and social networks can therefore contribute to organization’s collective-interests within companies. Executives willing to succeed in the knowledge-based economy will need to consider such factors (flexible structures and social networks) in order to enhance performance in their organizations. 

References

Coleman, JS 1988 'Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital', The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 94, no. 1, pp. 95-120.

Haworth 2007, Organizational performance. viewed 13 April 2013, < http://www.haworth .com/Brix?pageID=242>.

Yoon, KS 2005, Testing the Firestone and McElroy Knowledge Management Model: An Empirical Study, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, State University of New York, USA.