BUS603: Managing People

Eddington: For human capital management to have its transformative impact the culture needs to embrace talent. As you walk around the importance of talent in that organization needs to be visible. What might you see? The executive director makes talent a key piece of every management and board meeting. Managers who hire and develop future leaders are visibly rewarded. Staff fully embrace spending time recruiting and are rewarded for doing it well. The organization's strategy and annual operating goals are referred to at least once every week as people focus their efforts to support their achievement. Once the key building blocks of a talent culture are in place, it's much easier to implement and continuously improve each human capital management practice.

Markovits: Tom is absolutely correct. Looking at some steps in that transformation can make it more concrete. For example, building a great team requires setting high standards, discussing performance honestly, and addressing underperformance with compassion and candor. Another example: great leadership development requires the current leadership team to want to develop talent that will become able to take their roles. As you can imagine, in some organizations - either for-profit or nonprofit - the culture makes these practices difficult, while in others these kinds of steps are consistent with the current culture, feel relatively comfortable to do, and successful implementation mostly just requires the right training.