Photo from this site.
An earlier post about talent and human resources seemed to be getting a lot of hits based on Google Analytics and Typepad's internal measurements. As I have turned off comments in my blog (darn those spammers!), I guess there was a bit of a breach in terms of communications there. There might be a number of people who are reading this blog (thank you, thank you, thank you!) who are interested in what I think about talent and human resources.
So I am going to write about talent.
I am no expert when it comes to talent management. I got out of my career discussions with a "needs improvement" in the area of leadership, which has - as a part of its definition - the requirement "motivates people and ensures alignment" (or something similar). I guess I can only write about talent from the point of view of being a talent.
Whenever I hear of "talent management", the first images it evokes in my mind are those of celebrities from the Philippines feuding with their "talent managers" and how the latter tricked the other of the former's money or wealth. Not a pretty picture, if we were to believe the showbiz talk shows that dominate Sunday afternoon TV in Manila and in most parts of the country.
But I have a view that one doesn't manage talent. Talent don't want to be managed; they want to be inspired, impassioned, and unleashed to create and fully maximize their potentials. They cannot be categorized into silos or "developmental phases" because they know that they are in the process of evolving as they go through their codes, their numbers, their analytics, their programs, their creative ideas, and their own, private lives.
One doesn't rein in talent - and make them feel "you're a Ferrari - but you're in a country with a well-established, proven safety record because of our 20kph speed limit". And further told that "just because you can't run that fast, you no longer are a Ferrari - you still are".
I believe that a Ferrari's potential can only be realized when it is allowed to speed on the highways and achieve its maximum speed. Otherwise, it may still be a Ferrari - but what a useless Ferrari would that be.
Anyway...
Physics gives us a pretty good picture of "potentials": The potential energy of an object is the determined by the mass of the object, its acceleration, and the distance to be covered. All three are directly proportional to potential energy - and are multiplicative.
The same is true with a talent's potential.
Her experience outside the company is her mass. Just imagine the massive amount of knowledge that a certain person - latent knowledge and wisdom, even - that she has amassed in the world out there. That's her mass. That's one aspect of her potential.
Her acceleration is how fast she is willing to go - and how fast has she been going to reach her personal vision and goals.
The distance she's willing to travel? It's only bounded by her own imagination.
Disregard her mass and you risk disregarding and not using one of the most important things that she can bring you. Stand in her way and slow her down by not empowering her with the right tools, the right stature, the right respect, the right endorsement - and well, you stand in her way and force her to slow down. Limit her distance - and keep her in a silos and she gets confused and disoriented because she's so used to be bounded only by the horizon and not a wall before her with checklists and gates.
In manipulating any of these three, you lower down her potential.
I have managed teams in the past. I have not always been successful - in fact, I have had disasters when hiring. But I have helped turn around a company with the help of my team of managers. What worked? I played up their strengths and became the filler for their weaknesses as I identified what weaknesses can be (and cannot be) developed.
It was tiring. It was taxing.
But I never thought they could stop growing. I never thought of them as "people who need to meet a checklist of things to do to address their weaknesses". I have always thought of them as individuals - with their own set of potentials, with their own set of goals - personal and professional, with their own set of agenda.
Talent management is not what it's about. Human resource management is not what it's about. It's about "inspiring, empowering, impassioning, and unleashing talent".
