Developing future leaders: the contribution of talent management

Talent Management is more than HRM, leadership development initiatives or succession planning. It is the collective approach to recruiting, retaining and developing talent within the organisation for its future benefit, and extends beyond the domains listed above to include strategy, organisational culture, and change management. While much has been written in the form of 'how to do' and '10 steps to talent management', the picture emerging is more complex than that. Drawing on a series of in-depth case studies into the talent management processes of 7 complex, multinational organisations, this paper discusses the contribution that talent management can actually make to the development of future leaders in an organisation. Key developmental dimensions emerged from the case studies requiring decisions to be made as to an organisations development approach, assessment, and implementation plans. For example, will talent follow the same but accelerated approach to leadership development in the organisation, or will they have a specialist route? Where is the focus of the organisation's development plans---do they focus on strengths or address individual's weaknesses? While organisations may have clear ideas about where they lie on these dimensions they are not always aware of the consequences. For example, an unintended consequence of an accelerated talent development path could be the arrested moral development of the talented individuals that are developed. In the moral development literature, one study found that the amount of work experience an individual had, correlated with levels of ethical behaviour, such that the more experienced an individual is, the more ethical their behaviour is likely to be. Another found that seniority within the company hierarchy seems to lower the levels of ethical decision making, such that the more senior within the organisation a person becomes, the less ethical their decisions become. Taking these two findings in parallel suggests that some talent management ideas might actually lead to the development of less ethical leaders in the future. If an organisation has an accelerated talent management system which results in people being fast-tracked through the ranks of promotions, they could actually be raising their seniority levels while reducing the amount of experience they have at each level, and thus contributing to a downward trend in ethical considerations and decision making. This paper draws on the literature and case studies of organisations talent management initiatives to offer a critical perspective of the role that talent management is really playing in developing the future leaders of organisations.