The prerequisites of talent management: a French SME case study

Citation

Naulleau, M. (2014), "The prerequisites of talent management: a French SME case study", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 13 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-10-2013-0097

The prerequisites of talent management: a French SME case study

Article Type: HR at work From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 13, Issue 2

Short case studies and research papers that demonstrate best practice in HR

Our study concerns action research (Dubost and Lévy, 2004) undertaken within a small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) operating in the building supplies sector wishing to implement a talent management policy. Like many companies today, the aim is not only to acquire fit, qualified or competent people, but also creative and innovative people with high added value who are able to guarantee the competitiveness of the company in the future.

Our research team followed the CEO team from May 2011 to June 2012 in the implementation of strategic talent management using the "talentship" approach developed by Lewis and Heckman (2006). "Talentship" concerns the managerial abilities of leaders to anticipate the needs of human resources, notably "talent" resources, and to clearly state how they can satisfy this need (Cappelli, 2008).

While this strategic approach is one of the most essential prerequisites to implementing talent management practices, there are also others depending on organization specific context. The aim of this research is to understand better these prerequisites through a study of an SME that has undergone in-depth change over the last few decades. The research shows how fast economic expansion, the threefold growth in employee numbers over a period of 20 years (800 employees in 1992 compared to 3,000 employees in 2011), the evolution of its corporate governance, the challenge of succession planning for the next five to ten years, and the openness to a process of internationalization have created conditions that do not facilitate or enable the development of talent management.

About the research

The action-research took place in two steps. The first step was the monitoring of the CEO team (eight top managers) from May 2011 to June 2012. The aim was to understand their specific vision of what talent means. The analysis of these interviews was presented to the CEO and his team during a three-hour collective meeting (August 2011), which sought to prepare the ground for the basis of a common vision on talent within the SME.

An additional objective was to encourage the company’s management team to make its strategic vision more precise in order to define its need for certain talents. Its difficulty in clarifying its own strategic vision led us to give our support to the elaboration of a process of strategic planning (October 2011 to June 2012).

The second step, in parallel with the first, consisted of conducting a study among the middle-managers. We led four focus-groups in March 2012, with about 30 people who represented all the activities of the company. The analysis of this data was also presented to the CEO team. The aim of this collective meeting was to present the team with a set of recommendations drawn from the results of our study for implementing an efficient and adapted policy for this SME’s talent management. Following are some of the findings of our research.

Environmental factors impacting the organization

The SME was subject to an unpredictable and changing environment, which made the implementation of a talent management strategy very difficult. For instance, the company is located in a highly competitive market that has undergone many in-depth changes, including the introduction of new construction laws, the high concentration of company markets, the emergence of new decision-makers, etc.

Furthermore, the organization did not anticipate the technological evolution (smart phones, social media, etc.) that has transformed the sales function. A new profile of consumers has also appeared. The consumer displays less loyalty to a brand or to a particular shop, is more expert in product knowledge and is more demanding concerning the advice and services offered. This rise in the expertise of consumers raises the need to have an expert sales force trained in new sales techniques, whereas the SME’s current sales team has not mastered such technologies.

All these evolutions require a clear definition and reworking of the competencies and skills of the SME to respond to market conditions.

Internal change and challenges

There were challenges resulting from internal change also, with the SME developing beyond its national business to become an international operation. Although an international group, it maintained its SME culture and its structure was based on an insufficiently adjusted SME model. As a result, there were a variety of different working practices present across the organization’s autonomous operations. This meant it lost clarity and led to a lack of cultural, organizational and occupational cohesion. By functioning through "silos," the company breaks the development of a spirit of talent and reduces the self-fulfillment of talented people by cutting opportunities for professional mobility across the organization.

Finally, the CEO team is unable to express clearly company strategy for the next five or ten years. This team is still paralyzed by the first traumatic strategy choice that decision-makers took during the economic crisis in 2009. Whereas competitors downsized their activity, the SME in question decided it would guarantee employment in order to respect the human values the company wished to embody. The management team now realizes that this has resulted in undesirable consequences. It has led to the maintenance of an organizational and working configuration that does not match the needs of the market.

These factors have frustrated the economic recovery of the SME, which therefore experienced zero growth for the first time in its long history in 2010. Decision-makers were not prepared for this, and were unable to reinvent the future of the SME. Therefore, the call for talent was a kind of magical incantation, which it was hoped would resolve all the difficulties experienced.

The need for clarity, commonality and maturity

The research allows us to deduce a number of lessons on the essential prerequisites for successful talent management. The first of these is the reaffirmation of the necessity to clarify the SME’s strategic vision. In this case there was a lack of clarification due to the major crises detailed above. These crises reinforced the chronic incapacity of the decision-makers in their definition of the "strategy for a sustainable competitive advantage" (Lewis and Heckman, 2006), which is the main and the initial step of talent management design. Without a well-defined strategic vision, an organization cannot define the talent it needs.

The second lesson drawn from the research is the necessity to clarify the talent-related techniques employed by those involved to create a common language and vision of talent. The case underlines a lack of differentiation among managers concerning the areas of talent, competency and potential – areas that cannot be defined on the same reference table.

The research also shows the necessity to reach a certain stage of maturity in human resources management before being able to implement talent management practices. Traditional HRM practices could be extremely useful to talent management in order to define important terms such as "a position" and "a talent" (Huselid et al., 2005) and for clarifying such aspects as the location of key jobs. A company without a clear strategy and/or without sufficient maturity in terms of human resources management could risk failing in the implementation of talent management.

Mickaël Naulleau
Audencia Nantes School of Management, Nantes, France

References

Cappelli, P. (2008), "Talent management for the twenty-first century", Harvard Business Review, March, pp. 74–78

Dubost, J. and Lévy, A. (2004), Recherche-Action et Intervention, Vocabulaire de Psychosociologie, Erès, Paris, pp. 391–416

Huselid, M.A., Beatty, R.W. and Becker, B.E. (2005), "A players or a positions? The strategic logic of workforce management", Havard Business Review, December, pp. 110–117

Lewis, R.E. and Heckman, R.J. (2006), "Talent management: a critical review", Human Resource Management Review, Vol. 16, pp. 139–154

About the author

Mickaël Naulleau is a Doctor of Management Sciences and also holds MAs in Human Resources Management and Clinical Psychology. He is Assistant Professor of Management, Organization and Law at Audencia Nantes School of Management, France. His main themes of research concern human resource management and the psychosocial aspects of employment risks and relationships. Before joining Audencia Nantes, he held a number of management positions at Altédia, a human resources consultancy present in 60 countries. Mickaël Naulleau can be contacted at: http://mnaulleau@audencia.com