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All Together Now: The Practical Realities of Talent Management Integration

Kevin D. Wilde

Integrated talent management” is one of the top buzz phrases in the learning and development industry. The main idea is that by aligning the various disciplines and data streams of talent efforts, we can create higher value and more work that will make an impact. Visualize the various boxes of HR specialties all lined up neatly in columns and rows, with lines and arrows linking everything together, like schoolchildren holding hands while crossing the road.

In my own organization, we have seen the significance of talent integration. For example, a common, simple, yet powerful set of leadership expectations is embedded in recruiting and selection routines, which are brought to life in career development and learning systems, rewarded and reinforced with performance coaching and incentives, and relied upon for succession and talent forecasting initiatives. HR performs from a common playbook and is guided by a mutual scorecard. It’s not perfect, and it needs constant attention to keep the integration glue holding, but the reward of work that has more of an impact is apparent.

Unfortunately, integration isn’t easy and can quickly degrade over time. The reality is that knitting talented beings together is hard work, because there are as many forces pulling us apart as pushing us together. Figure 18-1 illustrates the magnitude of the challenge.

Why Apart? It’s the People

Classic organization design practices cause work to be broken down into subunits for efficient focus and resource optimization. And it usually works quite well:

The good people in compensation create programs to deliver cost-effective and competitive pay practices.

The skilled professionals in recruiting bring in the most qualified new employees as quickly as possible.

The pros in learning and development produce online and classroom material for all those well-paid and well-placed employees.

HR generalists cast a narrow field of view when offering HR services to a slice of the organization, hoping for a little more help and a little less distraction from compensation, recruiting, and training.

 

The strategies and objectives are isolated from each other.

The cycle of new practices and change initiatives springs forth mostly independently.

Rewards and resources go to subsets, rarely the whole.

Blending and integrating is an unnatural act. Each HR tribe attracts a certain type of talent:

Like numbers and analytics? Compensation clan.

Like being a teacher? Learning gang.

Get charged up finding new friends? Recruiting squad.

Rather take action than do too much analyzing? Generalist posse.

HR tribes generate their own mini-cultures and jargon. They see their spots in the organization and how to add value differently. Most important, they individually strive to be shining examples of business partners at the big table and not those poor HR souls dismissed by line clients to the kid’s picnic bench in the back.

Why Apart? It’s the System

The information age of HR ushered in automation to more efficiently manage the transactions of each subgroup (each one state of the art with a different software vendor):

compensation systems to process payroll and incentives

recruiting systems to sort résumés and track candidates

learning management systems to document competencies and course completions.

Over time, attempts have been made to link these systems. The best systems providers are promoting integrated, full-suite talent management systems. The evolution is promising, but the conversion process usually means that someone gives up their favorite functionality for the greater (promised) good.

How Together?

There are barriers aplenty to integration, but there is hope as well. It takes extra effort and the kind of intelligent, willful change management effort that we advise line organizations to apply. In my experience, I have seen a few common enablers that pull the practices and systems of talent management together:

common planning

clear accountabilities and measures

competent processes

collaborative values.

Let’s explore each of these practices in more detail.

Common Planning

Think short-term thematic and long-term strategic. The author and consultant Patrick Lencioni presents the useful idea of a thematic goal as a way to pull multiple departments together. Thus, I’ve seen the power of crafting a talent management thematic goal by posing the question “If we don’t get anything else done in the next six months together, we must do . . . ?” Then, by getting specific multiple-unit efforts behind the common thematic goal, a road map is created to achieve the collective mission. Once the short-term thematic goal is reached, the common planning cycle is repeated, and short-term success builds momentum.

Long-term strategic goals pull together the various HR teams to sketch out a road map for three to five years. A good offsite retreat or a burst of half-day sessions of the key players can create the long-range common plan as well as provide time to build cohesion. As rework, consider a small cross-sectional team to draw out a holistic representation of how the various HR units are currently integrated and where the key value-creating processes and practices cut across organization boundaries. When the full group gathers, here are useful questions to think through together aloud:

What are the most critical business needs, strategies, and capability needs in the next three to five years that call for a common HR approach? This topic is better tackled in a top-down approach versus a roll-up of the disparate subfunction goals and views.

Where can the various components of HR be better linked together to coordinate the achievement of these long-range objectives?

How do we see our collective strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in our integrated approach? Which of these factors is most important to address, and what actions should we consider?

Where could we leverage our resources together? How can we best evolve our information systems to enable the common mission?

In the future, how can we better coordinate our individual strategic plans?

Clear Accountabilities and Measures

Integration means great teamwork and, much as in the sports world, winning teams perform well because they have clearly understood and coordinated individual contributions. It is all too common to find promising HR initiatives unwind due to the simple lack of dedicated time to establish and revisit role expectations. An integrated talent management thematic, once established, should be followed by answering the question “Who is going to do what, by when, to make this happen?” Agreed-upon roles and responsibilities can grow fuzzy or impractical as the constant march of change has an impact on the organization. Revisiting and renegotiating sessions are ways to keep everyone accountable and in sync.

Closely related to defining accountabilities is clarifying the guideposts of common work progress measurements. As systems improve, useful data scorecards can be crafted to keep everyone tracking the same way. The danger here is to either rely on each specialty’s metrics or chase reported numbers that fall short of generating insight or action. Here again, upfront discussions on scorecard items that reflect agreed-upon indicators of progress and desired outcomes are better than just an aggregation of HR department reports. This is where the new generation of integrated talent management software holds the most promise in providing a common, linked database offering a single view of the numbers and useful, enterprise- or initiative-wide scorecards.

Competent Processes

Smart, integrated talent management software installations take the right amount of time to map out the current and optimal way a process occurs and then configure the information system to effectively enable the complete practice, not just any one subunit. Getting different HR departments together in a room to create a mutual view of how real work happens is always educational and sometimes transformational. But don’t let the software impose new practices that are too aggressive. I’ve never seen an organization overcome poor managerial talent management habits by imposing a sophisticated out-of-the-box software package.

Another dimension of competent processes to address when integrating is the need to set some informal rules of the road for tackling work together. An underserved or forgotten aspect of collaborative effort is taking time to overtly agree how decisions and trade-offs will be made as work progresses. Decide where empowerment rests in a particular department and where advanced consulting and input gathering across boundaries is called for. Establish where communication and information flow need to be strengthened for big projects and sticky work handoffs. Certainly, new technologies can keep everyone in the loop better. I’ve seen the quality of cross-team decision making and communication improve by simply opening up HR department meetings to a broader audience, even establishing rotated representation spots to formalize the connection.

Collaborative Values

Let’s be candid here: There can be peer jealousies and functional infighting across HR departments. Integrating the “hardware” of talent management calls for investing in the “software” of mutual trust and collaboration. Devoting time to bring different groups together to renew healthy relationships is as smart an investment as any new software package or redrawing the HR organization chart. As mentioned above, we might all live under the big HR tent, but we tend to camp out with our subspecialties with our own secret handshakes and rituals. This is just normal human nature, but it’s still the biggest long-term threat to integration.

All the traditional tools of trust building and team cohesion apply here. Useful routines include dedicated meetings and meals together, where getting to know you better is the main course. I know time is short and it’s a hard commitment to maintain, considering the rush of business today. Think of it this way: All pro sports teams begin with time for training before the season begins. World-class orchestras and performing arts companies devote countless hours to practicing together to find the optimal blend of extraordinary individual talent and group unity. Can we in HR skip that, jump onstage together, and expect flawless performances? Not likely.

Finally, seemingly rock-solid interpersonal trust can crack under reward and recognition routines that elevate individual unit accomplishment above common achievement. Adding new ways to reward “together” and decreasing individual incentives can be the sustaining element for all the common goal setting, coordinated roles, supportive systems, and routines. Set up mutual bonus pools or incentives based on overarching organizational or broad HR initiative success. Strengthen community celebrations and increase your recognition of common achievements (and heartfelt support when we fall short together). Moreover, the greatest enabler is the most senior HR leader who really values collaboration and teamwork across the various HR units. Public team leadership and private coaching solidify the value of collaboration.

In conclusion, integrated talent management is really managing naturally divergent HR teams more than installing a shiny, new mega– software system. The reality is that dynamic forces pull us apart more than they push us together, and in so many ways—how we organize to approach our work and how we overspecialize when growing our HR talent. But there is nonetheless hope, and I see four main ways to pursue better-integrated talent management in HR:

To begin, initiate new planning routines where common thematic objectives are set in functionwide strategy development sessions.

Next, ensure solid coordination efforts across the HR organization, with clearly understood and supported roles to integrate work.

Back up the goals and roles with better-coordinated processes, including enhanced communication, inclusive decision making, and problem solving that brings operational excellence for the greater good.

Finally, invest in the magic ingredient of all high-performing teams: the value and willingness to work together despite any shortcomings in the legacy organization design and traditions.

About the Author

Kevin D. Wilde is vice president and chief learning officer at General Mills, Inc., where he is responsible for worldwide talent management, executive development, and the Leadership Institute. In 2007, Chief Learning Officer magazine selected him as CLO of the year. Before joining General Mills, he spent 17 years at General Electric in a variety of human resources positions in the healthcare and capital divisions, as well as corporate assignments at GE’s renowned leadership center, Crotonville. He is a columnist for Talent Management magazine and serves on the editorial boards of a number of professional journals. His work has been published in more than a dozen books, including the chapter “The General Mills & Pillsbury Merger” in Coaching for Leadership: The Practice of Leadership Coaching from the World’s Greatest Coaches (2nd ed., Pfeiffer, 2005), and the Pfeiffer Annual on Leadership Development (Pfeiffer, various years). He received a bachelor’s degree in marketing and education from the University of Wisconsin–Stout and a master’s degree in administrative leadership and adult education from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.