Sunday, November 16, 2008

MIHRM Summit 2008...

Last week November 11 & 12 I was at the 2 day human resource summit...oh well, human capital as they fashionably would like it to be referred to these days (hehe). MIHRM or the acronym for the the Malaysian Institute of Human Resource Management, out sourced the organization of their summit to a consulting firm. I was a panelist at the closing session on the 2nd day. It was held at the Sunway Resort with a theme 'Talent Management & Succession Planning' (whatever that means perrghh). I have always been critical and skeptic about the term 'talent management' when in fact, in the old days what it meant (hmm even today i suppose hehe) was simply people management. I suspect two things. One, it is a crafty schemy plot by HR consultants to make HR practitioners feel good about what they are doing. its like flavour ofthe month management buzzword to make the CEO to oso feel good hehe. Two, the usual contamination by other functional specialists trying to turn HR into rocket science. I have been bashing the IT guys enough with their software and hardware development geared towards dominating the HR school of thought. ok ok nevermind all that. MIHRM President, in his closing remarks concurred with my view that talent management is essentially talking or just paying attention to the top 5% of people or the top talent as they say, so it seems! And Succesion Planning? Oh pleez...please never let a HR or human capital director (especially if the fella is from a particular ethnic group has really so very the pekat loghat one... hahaha) utter those words (succesion planning) loudly in public please! hahahaha (if you know what I mean). Succession Planning is a must have, good to have, nice to have tingy too and from my own personal observations (I may be wrong hehe) the moment a succesor is identified, in our culture, more othen than not, he or she could just be dead meat! Imagine the other corporate vultures swooshing down on him/her....poor fella (hehe). Anyway, I reminded participants to pay attention to what professor Chatterjee had said at the start of the summit! (please see below). Have a great sunday and thanks for dropping by, folks!
LEADING MINDSETS FOR UNLEASHING TALENT

By Debashis Chatterjee

The availability and management of talent is considered to be one of the most difficult globalization challenge for CEOs—more so in the Asian context. Most talent managers in Asia don’t seem to realize that there is very little co-relation between a manager’s effectiveness and his or her talent.

One of the conventional measures that most recruiters use to assess talent is academic performance. Yet, our research tells us that more than 50% of all the CEOs in Fortune 500 Companies had C or C- average in college. Interestingly, more than 50% of millionaire entrepreneurs never finished college.
Another measure that HR managers often use for mapping talent is a battery of psychometric tools. More often than not these tools do no more than measure test taking ability rather than managerial ability.

According to our research what expands our talent is the right mindset. If the CEO can craft right mindsets, he will be able to lead in a way that unleashes talent in the direction of effectiveness.

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