Talent management in the Social Age

By Julian Stodd

We live in the Social Age, a fundamentally evolved ecosystem: transformed by social collaborative technology, characterised by a new nature of work, defined by a shift from formal to social power, and largely misunderstood, denied, or ignored by many of the organisations around us.

In the old world, your employer owned your career: in the Social Age, there is no career, except that which we piece together, within the arms of our community: against that truth, the notion of ‘talent management’ should, perhaps, be replaced by ‘talent enablement’, a term that better defines our role: not to control and own, but to enable and engage.

In the Landscape of Trust research, we see that 54% of people have low or no trust in the organisation that they work for: against that background, we have lost the right to ‘own’ talent. Rather, we should find ways to enable individual agency, to co-create change.

It starts with mindset: there are two aspects of the organisation, one formal, one social. ‘Talent’, exists in both, but it exists in a dynamic tension. We need formal approaches to talent development, whilst creating spaces for the tacit, tribal knowledge to thrive.

We need strong Social Leadership: a deep-seated capacity to ‘sense-make’ within communities, and to drive our organisations to be fairer.

I believe that our future lies in building Socially Dynamic Organisations: united around purpose, creating opportunities to engage, nurturing talent, earning trust.