Organisational management has come some ways, from top-down to side-ways to bottom-up. There is a missing magic wand where “talent management” (TM) has remained “talent spotting”, the management does not manage the talent. What TM does is shape the talents that are, or recruited, to align with organisatioal goals for long-term targets.
Organisations are not in the business of “developing” the individual. Some do, and will, direct invest (money) in an individual for their training, study, professional development and so on, even with no strings attached (legally speaking, on contract). However, the exact needs of the organisational, for which they want people’s talents to match, is often a never-ending saga of …. something like trying to parallel park a car on a road with busy traffic, of cars, bicycles, buses, animals, hawkers and so on. By an large, organisations leave it to the individual to train themselves.
Ethically speaking, there is some credibility in that it is the individuals to want to train, and it’s far better that they train to whatever is required, or is best, to match what is required by the organisations. So far so good, but therein lies a slight problem in that organisations rarely come forth directly to say these are the requirements, and since you have met them, you will get the role or promotion or both.
Appointment and selection is such a complicated activity. In the past decades, there is a developing trend in opening entry level roles for people as much as posible only on merit. For example, if you are capable of working at the checkout, let’s say get in 5am 3 days a week, and ensure the job logs are not more than a day’s late, then the role is open to you. If there was any personal interview, it was not an assessment but more like a last-step orientation thing whereby the joiner could decide not to continue. This approach suits many people with little experience to show but plenty of very exact talent and capabilities to show. Time will tell if this approach works and to what extent, but the fact that it is operating has served many who would otherwise stand no chance of walking into any kind of employment, or even consider approaching for the opportunity.
Ethically speaking, too, that organisations need to play a careful role in people who would not or / and could not fully align with organisational activities, processes, goals and objectives. For a start, things have changed from the day they were appointed. There is, however, tremendous pressure on these “mis-aligned” people that they need to fall in, into the new sets of organisational activities to fulfil new organisatioal visions. Falling in is one thing, the capability that comes with job performance on the “new benchmark” is quite another thing. Employees cannot be trained each time a new way of working is introduced, if that is the case, then they are changing their ways of working every 3-5 years. So of these ways of working are fundamentally so different that it feels like waking up in a completely alien house, preparing meal for a completely different spouse and their family.
Organistion leaders, consider these.
