These are indeed exciting times for HR and OD practitioners and the organizations they serve because the business and socioeconomic implications of managing talent have never been so well understood, measureable, or vital. There are immense opportunities for HR and OD professionals to collaborate and actually lead the formulation and execution of winning talent management strategies in their organizations. The demand for strategy-based talent management has never been greater. Senior management, boards of directors, analysts, and investors often factor a company’s talent management maturity and the quality of its workforce into the valuation equation. Considering that staff costs including salaries and benefits comprise a very large percentage of most companies’ overall spending, it is vitally important to run talent management like a business in order to drive maximum return on investment in people.
In this article we focus more on what the actual work is rather than who should deliver it. The fact is that who actu- ally has responsibility for the different elements of talent management varies from organization to organization. By focusing on the work to be done or HR and OD domains, it is our hope that business and HR and OD leaders will have a guide to help them define specific roles, responsibilities and structures that best suit and leverage their organizations’ values, vision, mission, and strategy. Our goals for this article are to:
1. Examine examples of current role confusion and overlap between HR and OD practitioners when it comes to practicing talent management.
2. Review the strong business case for talent management and position it as the only potential sustainable competitive advantage that a company can develop.
3. Explore opportunities for HR and OD to collaborate and use their valuable interdependencies and complimentary skill sets, knowledge, and roles to leverage their unique purview of the whole organization and have impact at the whole system level. We propose a structure to more clearly define the separate domains of HR and OD work and the area of overlap we call integrated talent management.
4. Introduce a conceptual yet practical model of integrated talent management that helps HR, OD, and others work together more effectively and realize synergies created by their complementary strengths and capabilities.
HR + OD = Integrated Talent Management (Download the PDF)
