Schweer, M., Assimakopoulos, D., Cross, R. & Thomas, R. J. (2012). Building a well-networked organization. MIT Sloan Management Review, 53(2), 35-42.One organizational area I have long felt needs improvement (and one that I did not see mentioned in this week's reading) is talent management. I have experienced short-comings in this area in more than one of my employers, and I know from conversations with individuals at other organizations that I am not alone. Consider, for example, how many departmental managers in large organizations with central human resources departments are hesitant or even refuse to let in-house recruiters make a first pass at reviewing applicants and sending only those that are most qualified for the open positions to the hiring managers. Why is it so difficult to develop a sense of trust between in-house talent management teams and hiring managers? Perhaps because there is little or no attempt on the part of both talent management and hiring managers to tap into informal networks within their own organizations.
According to the authors of the above-referenced article, excellent talent management has the potential to increases an organization's earnings and improve operational and process performance. Their research also shows that companies that align their integrated talent management programs with business strategy and operations are more likely to be high-performing organizations than those that don't. One way companies can get more from their investment in talent management is to focus on collaboration. In fact, a recent survey revealed that high-performing organizations are more than 50% more likely to provide their teams with collaborative and social networking tools. Additionally, research has also found that well-networked organizations out-performed their less-networked counterparts in terms of higher market share and profits.
The authors suggest that senior managers should pay as much attention to developing and encouraging networks as they do to organizational structure and reporting relationships. The difficulty in this is that things like job design and performance management are typically based on individual accountability even though most work is now done in collaboration with others. By the same token, work flows and decision processes do not usually take into account the collaborative nature of work and innovation. Consequently, talent management practices tend to focus on individual competencies and overlook the importance of employee networks.
So how can talent management work with what companies are already doing to improve and enhance collaboration and informal networks? To begin with, unit level leaders need to be able to visualize talent within social networks and be aware of how collaboration between top performers and key experts takes place. Once they've mastered this, they will be able to define ways to make informal networks more effective than the collective sum of individual employee contributions. An organizational network analysis can help managers with this effort in some unexpected ways. While such an analysis would allow managers to see specific relationships such as mentoring, sharing of best practices and client introductions, it can also bring to light high performers who may not be being leveraged to the fullest extent of their capabilities.
By working with human resources to obtain individual employee data and then overlaying that data onto an organizational network view, managers can obtain a multi-dimensional picture of performance levels that will enable them to better utilize and develop the talent that currently exists within their organization. The individual data would allow them to study employees in terms of succession or workforce planning, while also examining them in terms of their broader collaborative contributions. Using a framework such as this shows managers where they can improve both individual and organizational performance through network-centric talent management.
In today's economy, where many organizations are looking for ways to maximize resources, the framework suggested in this article seems to me to be a logical step for organizations, especially large ones, to take. For organizations that already have an in-house talent management team within their human resources departments, there should be little or no cost associated with this exercise and, as the authors state, the benefits can prove to be significant. Why, then, aren't more organizations doing it? My feeling is that the level of trust that must exist between talent management and the departments they are meant to support is not strong enough, nor are talent management staff acting in a proactive manner to make departments aware that they do indeed have the expertise to facilitate such an exercise.
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