The Contribution that Talent Management Makes to Organisational Agility _{30 November 2010}

Lisa and I were delighted to be asked to deliver a couple of sessions earlier this month at this-years CIPD annual Learning and Development Conference at Exeter Racecourse.

The group were keen to understand how Talent Management can help to sustain business performance through the development of Organisational Agility. Quite an ambitious target to be set for us, but a great topic to bring to life and to share our experiences of. We were joined by Jonathan Noall from the National Trust who shared a case study which explained how the well known charity had developed their internal consulting capability by utilising the skills and attributes of a talented group of employees.

It’s not difficult to imagine why organisations need the power to move quickly and easily and the ability to think and draw rapid conclusions. In reality, it is quite difficult if you haven’t got the momentum of the business behind you. We spent a lot of time thinking about the case and how to influence key decision makers so that the business benefits and return on investment were easily identified and not just a short lived project.

We know that organisational agility is a core differentiator in today’s rapidly changing business environment and that nearly 90% of executives in a recent survey by the ‘Economist Intelligence Unit’ believe that organisational agility is critical to business success. It also notes that half of CEO’s agree that rapid decision making and execution are critical to a business’s success and that agile companies grow revenue 37% faster and generate 30% higher profits than non-agile companies.

It is therefore alarming to read that over a quarter (27%) of organisations surveyed say that their organisation has a competitive disadvantage because they are not agile enough. It found that the main obstacles to business responsiveness were slow decision making, conflicting departmental goals and priorities, risk adverse cultures and silo based cultures.

So what is the key to developing organisational agility? At the Talent Pool we believe that businesses can put themselves in better shape by developing their organisational and leadership capability. Talent Management programmes should ensure that they are integrated into the business strategy. This will help to generate greater compulsion to willingly embrace it due to the strong business rationale. In turn, this will accelerate the rate and spread of behaviour change needed to keep the organisation flexible and to develop individuals that are agile enough able to keep up with the degree of complexity and challenge, both today and tomorrow.