1. Talent Development and Management: Optimizing Human Performance in the Public Sector
Harvey L. White, Ph. D.
Director, The Initiative for Public Service and Diversity
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs
University of Pittsburgh
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ADMINISTRATIVE DEVELOPMENT: TOWARDS EXCELLENCE IN PUBLIC SECTOR PERFORMANCE
King Faisal Hall for Conferences, Riyadh
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia November 1-4, 2009

2. Talent Management-An HR Paradigm Shift?
,. . . talent management requires a paradigm shift in the way HR defines its mission and measures its success, . . .leading organizations are redesigning people structures, rethinking talent processes and using new technologies to transform the way talent is managed.
Heidi Spirgi, President of Knowledge Infusion, a strategic workforce consulting organization

3. Strategic Perspectives of Talent Management
The Process Perspective
The Cultural Perspective
The Competitive Perspective
The Developmental Perspective
The HR Planning Perspective

4. The Process Perspective:
Talented management should include all processes needed to optimize people within 
an organization. 

Organizations should put systems in place that enable talented individuals to carve out a successful career in their chosen organization.
Talented people will thrive and progress if they meet the competency and performance requirements of the talent management process.

5. The Cultural Perspective:
Talent management is more of a mindset than a set of activities. 

This perspective revolves around the belief that individuals will succeed if they are talented enough and that their success equates with business success.
This is perhaps the least structured approach to talent management and therefore the one most likely to suit creative individuals, entrepreneurs and mavericks.
With the absence of rules and processes, especially around promotion, individuals are free to create their own opportunities.
In a sense, this approach to talent management has the most drama and risk-individuals have all the rope they need to hang themselves or prove their worth.

6. The Competitive Perspective:
Talent management is about identifying talented people, finding out what they want and giving it to them-if not, the competition will.
This perspective flourishes in industries where the most valuable assets are people-based and where intellectual property is everything.
Consultancy, public relations, advertising and law firms know full well that if their most talented people leave for a competitor, they will lose not only critical knowledge and experience but also key customer accounts.
In the worst cases, if entire talented teams are lost, the market may question whether the firm still retains a core capability.
Finding ways to recruit the best talent and also keep it away from the competition is a pressing concern.
Traditionally this approach depends on motivating talented people through financial rewards, but the limitations of this tactic become apparent during serious talent shortages.

7. The Developmental Perspective:
Talent management is about accelerated development paths for the highest potential employees. 

Organizations want to “lock in” talent by targeting recruitment at entry level to the organization and then developing and promoting from within to maximize career opportunities for high potentials.
This perspective comes closest to the old psychological contract in which the employer looks after the individual’s career.

8. The HR Planning Perspective:
Talent management is about having the right people matched to the right jobs at the right time and doing the right things. 

This approach is generally supported by a very sophisticated IT system, which maps out various different scenario options and future possibilities.
People are moved around the company like pieces in a game of chess.

9. New Workers and A New Workforce
The Workforce is Shifting

10. How Will The Shifting Workforce Affect The Public Sector?
Image © original artist TG.

11. The Workforce is Shifting:
More Diverse
More Technology Driven
More generational differences
More Independent Workers

12. Employment Tenure Shrinking
Average tenure down from 22.5 years in 1960 to only 4 years today*
For Tech it is under two years
Today’s 30-something worker will have about 20 jobs throughout career 25 20 15 10 5
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
2010
Average Employment Tenure
* BLS. “Employee Tenure in 2006.”

13. Why is the Workforce Transforming?
New economy is predominantly service driven and knowledge based
Workplace independence empowered by technology
Global competition forces new rules
Traditional “Corporate Social Contract” is fading
Dual-income households demand work-life balance
Generation Y predisposed to Freelance
76 million Baby Boomers leaving their traditional jobs

14. Technology: Empowers Workplace Independence
Do you really need to work at the office?
Distributed virtual work arrangements are affordable, often more productive and preferred by worker
According to market researcher Nemertes Research of New York, as many as 9 out of 10 employees now work from locations other than company headquarters. In addition, some 40% to 70% of employees work in locations remote from their supervisor.

15. Global Competition Forces New Rules
Competition with international labor practices
Many countries have fewer worker rights, which drives down cost in those countries
Workers in many countries are willing to work for lower wage
Competition with foreign social systems
Many foreign competitors don’t bear costs of healthcare or retirement
Off-shoring and outsourcing become preferred practices
Access to local labor resources and social systems
Localization to sell into emerging markets

16. Dual-income Households Demand Work-Life Balance
Traditional office work hours are undesirable
Family values have suffered
Children and aging parents
Technology makes it easier to vary work hours from home

17. The Demographic Crisis
The Numbers
80 million Baby Boomers ( ) leaving economy
50 million Gen Xers ( ) replacing them
75 million Gen Yers ( )
Large “Talent Replacement Gaps”

18. 80 million Boomers: Leaving Traditional Jobs
Over half will not stop working
Living longer, and not ready for the rocking chair
Need the money
It’s “their turn”
Ready to take risks and start businesses
They want to enjoy themselves and demand flexibility
Great skills and a professional network
They are ideally positioned as consultants

19. Gen X Profile Family Orientated Individualists Skeptics
Spend more time with family than any other generation
They phone home daily
Individualists
Skeptics
Critical of everything
“Beasts of Pleasure”
Think boomers are self-satisfying, self-appointed, self-righteous
Income:
Won’t outpace mom and dad
Real income struggle
Unhappy that older people won’t retire

20. Generation Y Predisposed to Freelance
Have grown up with technology, multi-tasking, social networking, video gaming, IM’ing and web surfing
Have seen parents overwork, divorce, and get laid off
First generation to have “Entrepreneurship” as a common business major in college
Everything is digital, personal, and virtual, so why be confined with a traditional job?

21. The Contract Worker
Contract workers represent >28% of U.S workforce and their numbers are expanding worldwide
Temps, consultants, non-employee workers, etc.
Over 12 million Independent Contractors 21

22. An Important Distinction
Traditional Temp Labor
Contract Consulting Talent
Workers who generally want to be permanent and are just drifting from temp job to temp job
Knowledge professionals who choose contract work as a career and manage themselves as a company of one
Clerical, administrative, factory, help desk, call center, etc.
Vacation fill-ins, support peak demand, temp-to-hire, etc.
IT consultants, contract recruiters, project mgrs, etc.
Provide experience / skills, strategy, project deliverables, etc. 22

23. Independent Contractors: A Closer Look
Talented, well-educated, highly compensated professionals
81% age 35 and over
65% male
90% prefer independent contracting to traditional employment
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements,” February, 2005

24. The Corporate Social Contract Fades
Defined Benefit/Pension plans replaced with individual 401K
Rising healthcare costs are being pushed down to worker
Globalization and mergers force downsizing and layoffs
Seniority systems replaced with “pay for performance”
“Lifelong employment” is gone
Even the US Federal government
Even government – long the most conservative sector for the social contract of employment relationship – is moving toward performance based pay.
The Department of Defense is leading the charge, abandoning its GS-15 seniority system for the new NSPS compensation system, which incorporates performance assessments.
The agencies making up the US Intelligence Community, including the FBI, CIA, and Department of Homeland Security, are instituting a doctrine of skills-based careers and portability, requiring officers to cross-train and serve in another agency before being promoted to a higher level in their home agency.
Contractors now make up a significant portion of the federal workforce, up to 1/3 of the workforce in some agencies like the DHS and CIA.

25. Talent management: the next dimension of strategic HR
Often asked questions:
Is talent management more than just the newest fad in a field that aims to give itself a strategic advantage?
And can it really provide value?
Evidence Driven Answer:
Data suggest, it is, in fact, a fresh way of looking at what we do and of finding new, more powerful ways to impact our organizations.

26. Softscape Global HR Survey Top HR challenges for 2009
Reveals;
That 3-out-of-4 organizations Now View Integrated Talent Management As Mission Critical
74% of the organizations surveyed and 83% of large organizations now believe that integrated talent management is mission critical.
Top Five Challenges Identified by Respondents are Talent Management Related Issues:
1. Hiring skilled talent & filling key positions
2. Improving leadership succession pipeline
3. Engaging & motivating the workforce
4. Identifying & retaining high performers
5. Building a performance-oriented culture

27. What is Talent Management?
Talent management is a complex collection of connected systematic HR processes that can delivers fundamental benefits for any organization
There are three fundamental assumptions of successful talent management practices:
The key enabler of any organization is talent.
The quality of people is the organization’s last true competitive differentiator.
Talent drives performance.
Talent management requires strong executive support, along with systems and processes all directed towards having the right talent doing the right work at the right time. That’s when talent truly drives higher business performance.

28. What Talent Management Involves
The integration of different initiatives, or constructs, into a coherent framework of activity. There are certain crucial components and a useful model for defining TM. TM is describe in term of several key concepts:
Ethos; embedding values and behavior, known as a “talent mindset,” to support the view that everyone has potential worth developing.
Focus; knowing which jobs make a difference and making sure that the right people hold those jobs at the right time.
Positioning; starting at the top of the organization and cascading throughout the management levels to make this a management, not HR, initiative.
Structure; creating tools, processes and techniques with defined accountability to ensure that the work gets done.
System; facilitating a long-term and holistic approach to generate change.

29. aim of talent management.
Organizational aim, rather than an individual one:
Geared towards ensuring that an organization is able to do what it sets out to do today and in the future; Capacity
Assumes that capability is based on an organization’s principal source of value and competitive advantage in a developed economy: its people
Making capability match commitments

30. Talent Management Platform
Business Goals and Business Performance
Acquire
Talent Sourcing
Contingent Labor Procurement
Selection
Onboarding
Develop
Performance Management
Career Planning
Leadership and Succession Planning
Align
Reporting
Goal Management
Internal Mobility
Assess
Talent Analytics
Assessment
Workforce Planning

31. Making capability match commitments
Three core processes:
1. Understand what your people can do
2. Deploy them better today
3. Ensure they can do more tomorrow
These processes are not supposed to suggest that people are objects owned by an organization.
People may be assets in a loose accounting sense, but they are not chattels.

32. Focus of Talent Management in 2009
Most answers in recent surveys focused on the development and training of key, existing talent:
Developing talent %
Retaining talent %
Deploying/aligning talent %
Acquiring talent %

33. Drivers of Talent Management
Key drivers of your talent management priorities in 2009:
leadership and management development (68.3%)
building or maintaining organizational culture and values (41.5%) and
top talent development (41.5%),
“Revisiting vision, strategies and goals and ensuring alignment should be among an organization’s top priorities right now, and it appears that the respondents feel similarly,” said Susan Miele, Senior Partner of Camden Consulting Group.

34. Top 10 Talent-Management Challenges
1. Attracting and retaining enough employees at all levels to meet current and future needs.
2. Creating a value proposition that appeals to multiple generations.
3. Developing a robust leadership pipeline.
4. Rounding out the capabilities of hires who lack the breadth of necessary for global leadership.
5. Transferring key knowledge and relationships.
6. Stemming the exodus of Gen X'ers from organizations.
7. Redesigning talent management practices to attract and retain Gen Y's.
8. Creating a workplace that is open to Boomers in their "second careers.”
9. Overcoming a "norm" of short tenure and frequent movement.
10. Enlisting executives who don't appreciate the challenge.

35. Important Talent Management Processes Include:
Simply put, Talent management is helping organizations find their highest and best use of people through:
·Talent Selection
·Talent Alignment
·Talent Development
·Talent Retention

36. Talent selection A function of 4 components:
·Testing candidates on job-specific predictors of success
· Interviewing against these same success predictors
·Doing background checks for performance and success predictors
·Fitting in personal chemistry and company culture

37. Talent Alignment
Assessing strengths across a variety of jobs to determine highest and best use of your workforce
Talent Audit:
Competences
Performance
Coaching
Focus training

38. Talent Development
focus primarily towards job-specific success factors that predict performance, and secondarily towards any additional factors deemed important

39. Talent Retention
personal engagement in one’s job, in the immediate team or department, and in the organization
engagement include the degree to which:
Employee “owns” and is empowered his/her job
Employee is part of a closely knit team
Employee is recognized for his/her value to the organization
Employee has freedom to learn and advance
The culture of the company matches employee’s values
1.Retention Matters Because It costs money
2. Replacing workers – whatever the cause - is expensive
3. Losing knowledge is expensive if workers leave
4. Lost opportunities because of talent shortfalls are expensive

40. Assessment is a Major Activity in Talent Management Systems
Performance
Refers to the individual’s current level of performance relative to the performance goals and objectives for their current position.
Readiness
Reflects an individual’s ability to take levels of responsibility in a higher job classification or in a more complex role, based on demonstrative behaviors, assuming reasonable opportunities for development.
Criteria developed to assist with assessment of readiness I.e., competencies for success at next level.
Employees complete a readiness self-assessment and managers complete a readiness assessment for each employee and assign a readiness rating
Willingness
Indicates the degree to which an individual is willing to assume a new role as well as the organization’s capacity to accommodate this.
Employees record their willingness on the TM system

41. Assessment Categories and Levels
Performance (current)
Outstanding
Fully Effective
Conditional Achievement
Readiness (new)
Promotional Priority; move now (within 3 to 6 month)
Promote With Development; move in future (within 24 month); focused development to prepare for move
Contribute in current level; remain in current role; development based on career goals, achieving success in current role or mastering current role
Willingness (new)
Employee is willing to assume a new role
Organization has the capacity to accommodate employee’s willingness to move

42. What Should Public Sector Organizations Do?
Define the “business”
Develop a solid talent management strategy – aligned with the “business” plan
Measurement matters: Understand your organization and anticipate where the shortages will be (get better at workforce planning)
Be discerning/strategic in your efforts: Focus first on mission critical positions
Invest in filling the gaps…quickly

43. Some Lessons from the Field
Solutions…
Be proactive…think about anticipatory hiring
Leave no stone unturned. Get better at tapping into untapped and underutilized pools of talent.
Remove barriers to the full participation and advancement of underutilized pools of talent. This is about diversity in its broadest sense.
Utilize staff and students in the recruitment process
Improve the on-boarding process (orientation)
Deliver on promises made

44. Some Lessons from the Field
Solutions…
Accelerate the learning and improve learning and development opportunities
Diversity of opportunity is one of governments’ greatest selling points!
Strip away obstacles to staff movement between and among departments/units
Culture counts! (big time): Move from a status quo culture to one that embraces and encourages creativity, innovation and risk-taking – and diversity

45. Some Lessons from the Field
Solutions…
Develop managers, support them, and reward and recognize them for desired behaviours
Hold people accountable for change
Leaders must lead

46. Talent Is Never Enough! John C. Maxwell
Everyone Has Talent
Develop the Talent You Have Not the One You Want
Anyone Can Make Choices That Will Add Value to Talent

47. Key Choices for Maximizing Talent
Belief; Lift your Talent
Passion; Energizes Your Talent
Initiative; Activates your Talent
Focus; Directs Your Talent
Preparation; Positions Your Talent
Practice; Sharpens Your Talent
Perseverance; Sustains Your Talent
Courage; Tests Your Talent
Teachability; Expands Your Talent
Character; Protects Your Talent
Relationships; Influence Your Talent
Responsibility; Strengthens Your Talent
Teamwork; Multiplies Your Talent

48. John Maxwell argues that “too much emphasis” is placed on talent alone.
Although some level is a necessary requisite for success, talent is often overrated and frequently misunderstood.
Everyone has talent.
The challenge is to discover, develop and make choices that will add value to talent.
This is true for individuals and organizations.

49. Thank You!
Questions?