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Public Personnel ManagementVolume 37 No. 4 Winter 2008

Contents

Identifying the Right Course for Talent Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .381By Special Editor Peter Reilly

Talent Management: Issues of Focus and Fit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .389By Valerie Garrow, PhD, and Wendy Hirsh, PhD

Talent Management in the Era of the Aging Workforce: The Critical Role ofKnowledge Transfer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .403By Thomas J. Calo, EdD, IPMA-CP

The U.S. Federal Senior Executive Service (SES) and Gender Diversity: Would Proposed Legislation Enhancing the Representational Diversity of Selection Panels Necessarily Increase the Number of Female Appointments to the SES? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .417By Martha Crumpacker, DBA and Jill M. Crumpacker, JD, LLM, SPHR

The Next Generation of Leadership Assessments: Some Case Studies . . . . . . .435By Marilyn K. Gowing, PhD, David M. Morris, PhD, JD, Seymour Adler, PhD, and Mitchell Gold, PhD

Managing Talent in the South African Public Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .457By Ruwayne Kock and Mark Burke

PublicPersonnelManagementIPMA-HR’s quarterly journal focusing on trends, case studies,and the latest research by top human resource scholars andindustry experts.

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“A Systematic Approach for Assessing the Currency (“Up-to-Dateness”) of Job-AnalyticInformation,” Philip Bobko, PhD; Philip L. Roth, PhD; and Maury A. Buster, PhD, 37(3), 261

“Blurring the Line Between Public and Private Sectors: The Case of Police Officers’ Off-DutyEmployment,” James R. Brunet, PhD, 37(2), 161

“Developing Effective Internships Within Public Sector Organizations,” Stephen Cupps, PhD, andKurt E. Olmosk, PhD, 37(3), 303

“E-Mail Policies of the 50 States: A Content Analysis,” Shamima Ahmed, PhD, 37(1), 1

“Hispanics and Anglos: The Role of Group Composition on Satisfaction,” Steven R. Ash, PhD,37(1), 15

“How Does the SCHIP Exclusion Affect Health Insurance Coverage for Children of Low Income State Workers?” Patricia Ketsche, PhD; Joan T. A. Gabel, JD; and Nancy R. Mansfield, JD, 37(3), 313

“Identifying the Right Course for Talent Management,” Special Editor Peter Reilly, 37(4), 381

“Job Characteristics of Officers and Agents: Results of a National Job Analysis,” David R. Shetterly,PhD, and Anand Krishnamoorthy, PhD, 37(1), 111

“Managing Talent in the South African Public Service,” Ruwayne Kock and Mark Burke, 37(4), 457

“Mentoring—A Relationship Based on Trust: Qualitative Research,” Ferda Erdem, PhD, and JansetÖzen Aytemur, PhD, 37(1), 55

“No Easy Path to HRM Performance Measurement Systems: Exploring the Introduction of the U.S.Human Capital Assessment and Accountability Framework and the Flemish Management Code,”Wouter Vandenabeele and Annie Hondeghem, PhD, 37(2), 243

“Nonrandom Response and Rater Variance in Job Analysis Surveys: A Cause for Concern?”Thomas A. Stetz, PhD; J. Mathew Beaubien, PhD; Michael J. Keeney, PhD; and Brian D. Lyons, PhD,37(2), 223

“Nursing Generations in the Contemporary Workplace,” Jennifer Blythe, PhD; Andrea Baumann, RN,PhD; Isik U. Zeytinoglu, PhD; Margaret Denton, PhD; Noori Akhtar-Danesh, PhD; Sharon Davies, MA;and Camille Kolotylo, PhD, 37(2), 137

“Policies for Managing the Training and Development Function: Lessons From the FederalGovernment,” Alan Clardy, PhD, 37(1), 27

“Psychological Testing in Personnel Selection, Part I: A Century of Psychological Testing,” WesleyA. Scroggins, PhD; Steven L. Thomas, PhD; and Jerry A. Morris, PsyD, 37(1), 99

“Psychological Testing in Personnel Selection, Part II: The Refinement of Methods and Standardsin Employee Selection,” Wesley A. Scroggins, PhD; Steven L. Thomas, PhD; and Jerry A. Morris,PsyD, 37(2), 185

“Revitalizing Human Resources Management in State Government: Moving From Transactional toTransformational HR Professionals in the State of Michigan,” William M. Mothersell, PhD; MichaelL. Moore, PhD; J. Kevin Ford, PhD; and Jim Farrell, 37(1), 77

“Talent Management in the Era of the Aging Workforce: The Critical Role of Knowledge Transfer,”Thomas J. Calo, EdD, IPMA-CP, 37(4), 403

“Talent Management: Issues of Focus and Fit,” Valerie Garrow, PhD, and Wendy Hirsh, PhD, 37(4), 389

Index to Volume 37 - by Title

Index to Volume 37 - by Title continued

“The Blended Workforce: Alternative Federal Models,” James R. Thompson, PhD, and Sharon H.Mastracci, PhD, 37(3), 363

“The Coachability and Fakability of Personality-Based Selection Tests Used for Police Selection,”Corey E. Miller, PhD, and Gerald V. Barrett, PhD, JD, 37(3), 339

“The Human Resource Competency Studies and the IPMA-HR Competency Training andCertification Program in China,” Li Sun, EdD, and Kan Shi, PhD, 37(3), 353

“The Impact of Work Redesign and Psychological Empowerment on Organizational Commitmentin a Changing Environment: An Example From Taiwan’s State-Owned Enterprises,” Huei-FangChen, PhD, and Yi-Ching Chen, 37(3), 279

“The Luevano Consent Decree and Public Personnel Reform,” J. Michael Martinez, JD, PhD, 37(3), 327

“The Next Generation of Leadership Assessments: Some Case Studies,” Marilyn K. Gowing, PhD,David M. Morris, PhD, JD, Seymour Adler, PhD, and Mitchell Gold, PhD, 37(4), 435

“The U.S. Federal Senior Executive Service (SES) and Gender Diversity: Would ProposedLegislation Enhancing the Representational Diversity of Selection Panels Necessarily Increasethe Number of Female Appointments to the SES?,” Martha Crumpacker, DBA and Jill M. Crumpacker,JD, LLM, SPHR, 37(4), 417

“Tomorrow’s Workforce: The Needs for Immigrant Workers and Strategies to Retain Them,” BaoQ. Nguyen, 37(2), 175

“Two Years Later: Hurricane Katrina Still Poses Significant Human Resource Problems for LocalGovernments,” P. Edward French, PhD; Doug Goodman, PhD; and Rodney E. Stanley, PhD, 37(1), 67

“Work-Family Experiences and the Insights of Municipal Government Employees: A Case Study,”Mary Secret, PhD, and Jennifer Swanberg, PhD, 37(2), 199

Shamima Ahmed, PhD, 37(1), 1Steven R. Ash, PhD, 37(1), 15Jennifer Blythe, PhD; Andrea Baumann, RN, PhD;Isik U. Zeytinoglu, PhD; Margaret Denton, PhD;Noori Akhtar-Danesh, PhD; Sharon Davies, MA;and Camille Kolotylo, PhD, 37(2), 137Philip Bobko, PhD; Philip L. Roth, PhD; andMaury A. Buster, PhD, 37(3), 261James R. Brunet, PhD, 37(2), 161Thomas J. Calo, EdD, IPMA-CP, 37(4), 403Huei-Fang Chen, PhD, and Yi-Ching Chen, 37(3),279Alan Clardy, PhD, 37(1), 27Martha Crumpacker, DBA and Jill M.Crumpacker, JD, LLM, SPHR, 37(4), 417Stephen Cupps, PhD, and Kurt E. Olmosk, PhD,37(3), 303Ferda Erdem, PhD, and Janset Özen Aytemur,PhD, 37(1), 55P. Edward French, PhD; Doug Goodman, PhD;and Rodney E. Stanley, PhD, 37(1), 67Valerie Garrow, PhD, and Wendy Hirsh, PhD,37(4), 389Marilyn K. Gowing, PhD, David M. Morris, PhD,JD, Seymour Adler, PhD, and Mitchell Gold, PhD,37(4), 435Patricia Ketsche, PhD; Joan T. A. Gabel, JD; andNancy R. Mansfield, JD, 37(3), 313

Ruwayne Kock and Mark Burke, 37(4), 457J. Michael Martinez, JD, PhD, 37(3), 327Corey E. Miller, PhD and Gerald V. Barrett, PhD,JD, 37(3), 339William M. Mothersell, PhD; Michael L. Moore,PhD; J. Kevin Ford, PhD; and Jim Farrell, (37)1,77Bao Q. Nguyen, 37(2), 175Wesley A. Scroggins, PhD; Steven L. Thomas,PhD; and Jerry A. Morris, PsyD, 37(1), 99Wesley A. Scroggins, PhD; Steven L. Thomas,PhD; and Jerry A. Morris, PsyD, 37(2), 185Peter Reilly, Special Editor, 37(4), 381Mary Secret, PhD, and Jennifer Swanberg, PhD,37(2), 199David R. Shetterly, PhD, and AnandKrishnamoorthy, PhD, 37(1), 111Thomas A. Stetz, PhD; J. Mathew Beaubien, PhD;Michael J. Keeney, PhD; and Brian D. Lyons,PhD, 37(2), 223Li Sun, EdD, and Kan Shi, PhD, 37(3), 353James R. Thompson, PhD, and Sharon H.Mastracci, PhD, 37(3), 363Wouter Vandenabeele and Annie Hondeghem,PhD, 37(2), 243

Index to Volume 37 - by Author

Guidelines for Contributors

As a leading, peer-reviewed journal in public sectorhuman resources, Public Personnel Managementparticularly encourages manuscripts from apractitioner’s perspective, as well as submissions onemerging national and international trends in publicpersonnel management. Articles in response topreviously published manuscripts are also welcome.

1. Public Personnel Management, the journal of theInternational Public Management Association for HumanResources (IPMA-HR), encourages contributions on allaspects of personnel management in the public sector.Manuscripts for publication should be sent to the editor.Authors are strongly advised to consult one or morerecent issues of the journal before submittingmanuscripts for publication. For questions or guidance indeveloping a manuscript, you may contact ElizabethKirkland, Editor, at [email protected].

2.Manuscripts are subject to a blind review process.Reviewers submit their recommendations as toacceptance, revision or rejection. In the cases of revisionor rejection, the unidentified reviewers comments will besent to the author.

3. Contributions should be accompanied by a statementthat if accepted for publication in Public PersonnelManagement, they will not be published elsewherewithout the agreement of the editor.

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5. Manuscripts should be in English. Submit five copiesof the manuscript. If less than five are submitted, youwill be requested to send the additional copies.Manuscript copies must be double-spaced throughout,and submitted on 81⁄ 2" x 11" white paper, single sided.Pages must be numbered consecutively. Manuscriptsmust also be submitted on a diskette at the time ofsubmission in Microsoft Word text format. All diskettesmust be PC-readable. Authors should keep an original ofthe manuscript. Manuscripts may also be submitted viae-mail to Debbie Tankersely-Snook at [email protected]. E-mail submissions are acceptable on firstsubmission and must be sent as “attached” files with theattached file in Microsoft Word text format.

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10. For general style and submission questions, IPMA-HRfollows the guidelines included in the APA (AmericanPsychological Association) Publication Manual; or, youmay contact the editor.

11. Public Personnel Management does not acceptmanuscripts that use the author/date style of references.Authors should use the automatically coded endnotes(not footnotes) function in the MS Word program.References should be presented as endnotes and benumbered consecutively in superscript. All notes shouldbe presented in a separate, double-spaced listing at theend of the article in both the paper copy and disketteversions of the manuscript.

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Identifying the RightCourse for TalentManagementBy Special Editor Peter Reilly

Talent management has always seemed to me to be a tricky subject. It is at riskof becoming mere hyperbole, as in the War for Talent,1 or of becoming the fadof the conference circuit because the term lacks a clear definition. Proposed

definitions are, at worst, a melange of different concepts strung together without aclear statement of what is meant by talent and how we might manage it. Talent man-agement’s very success as a rallying call to managers to give attention to the identifi-cation of the development needs of employees, though, means that we should notdiscard the concept.

Like employee engagement, which irritates some academics because it lacks arigorous theoretical underpinning, talent management seems to play well in theboardrooms of the world. Who could be against engaging employees or managingtalent? The active-sounding words and the explicit references to engagement andtalent fit with HR mangers’ notions of getting the best from people in a meritocraticenvironment. While the definition of employee engagement has become much clearerover time (even if its measurement is abused by some consultants), talent managementhas yet to achieve such clarity. Peter Cappelli, a keynote speaker at the 2008 IPMA-HRInternational Training Conference, has defined talent management as “simply a matterof anticipating the need for human talent and then setting out a plan to meet it.”2 Thisdescription has the great benefits of simplicity and being easy to understand. Thedifficulty remains, though, that the term talent is not defined and the planning methodis left open. Martha Crumpacker and Jill Crumpacker quote three definitions of talentmanagement, ranging from “developing, and deploying employees who are critical tothe company’s success” to the “development of all workers” in their article. So, in thedefinition of talent, is it a case of “you pays your money and you takes your choice”?

This special issue of Public Personnel Management gives us a chance to examinethis question and others relating to talent management, both from an internationalperspective and from a number of different methodological and content standpoints.We hope that readers will find that the concept of talent management emerges withmore practical utility by the end of the journal. Valerie Garrow and Wendy Hirsh’sarticle gets the collection off to a good start by raising the fundamental issues of whattalent management is about and the ways in which it can be delivered. Garrow andHirsh challenge organizations to ask themselves two vital questions: (1) What is talentmanagement’s focus? and (2) How does talent management fit into the organization’scontext? Answering these questions requires talent management advocates to say

Public Personnel Management Volume 37 No. 4 Winter 2008 381

whether, in their eyes, talent is an inclusive term that covers the whole workforce, onethat is restricted to, say, candidates for fast-track development to senior positions, orone that simply describes those who are already in senior positions in the organization.For example, Ruwayne Kock and Mark Burke answer the questions in theircontribution to this issue by defining talent management as a set of policies andpractices designed to attract, retain and engage “key and leadership talent.”

It is obvious that the selection of who is included under any definition of talentprofoundly affects the how—the activities—of a talent management program. Anorganization’s definition of talent will also determine the what of managementprograms. If talent is conceived as being those who are either holding seniormanagement positions or who have the potential to hold such positions, then anorganization will need to decide what criteria it wants to use to decide who has thecapacity for growth. (The identification of high-potential employees in top positions isgenerally easier, but an organization will still have to decide which grades of managersare eligible for the talent management program.)

Debate has raged over the years on how organizations should define highpotential. As Marilyn Gowing, David M. Morris, Seymour Adler, and Mitchell Gold pointout here, researchers started with notions of innate attributes—a set of abilities thatstem from their genetic makeup or early-life experiences and which are set by one’searly 20s. Which of those attributes are conducive to success as a leader it was thoughtcould be inferred from studying the traits of those who have held senior positions.Knowing what made past leaders successful made it easy, in theory, to find futureleaders. All an organization needed to do was search for others with attributes likethose of past leaders.

Some organizations, like Shell and its HAIR construct, tried to be more scientificwith the process of selecting these attributes. As an acronym representing what Shellwas looking for when identifying future company executives, HAIR stood for“helicopter,” which meant being able to survey the problem from a distance, yet diveinto the detail if necessary; “analytical” ability; “imagination” to be creative in solutions;and a sense of “reality” so that good ideas are well grounded in what will work inpractice.

Research commissioned in the 1960s suggested that having HAIR qualities in highmeasure was indicative of potential for top management.

Some organizations persist in using this sort of approach, but there is less faith inthe robustness of its theoretical underpinnings than there was. More organizationshave moved toward a competency-based method of looking for employees with theskills and behaviors necessary to succeed. The advantage of this is that there is morechance that competencies can be improved through learning and developmentinterventions. There has been recent criticism3 of this method, too, not least for itsoversimplification and generic approach.

In this issue of Public Personnel Management, Kock and Burke report mixedresults for competency-based talent management in South Africa. One risk is thatcompetency selection programs are biased. White middle-aged males tend to performwell on skills assessments because they are like the HR professionals who design the

Public Personnel Management Volume 37 No. 4 Winter 2008382

tools and who hold senior positions. Another criticism has been that there is notenough acknowledgement that, as Gowing and her co-authors point out in this issue,leadership is situational. Such an approach rejects the notion of charismaticleadership—the hero who can transform an organization through the power of his orher personality. Acknowledging that people have strengths and weaknesses, and thatsome strengths play better in some situations than others, is more realistic, but it doespose challenges to the assessment process, which is a subject that I will return to later.

So organizations have to define what they mean by talent management and howthe concept applies to their leadership cadre—however they define leadership—usingthe research evidence and fitting the resulting professional development policies andpractices to their organizational needs and circumstances. The questions of fit arediscussed by Garrow and Hirsh as they relate to the issues of organizational culture,wider HR practices, the psychological contract that exists between employer andemployees, and management capabilities.

Raising questions of the fit of talent management is a timely reminder that talentmanagement should not stand alone from other people management practices in anorganization. What an organization values, say, teamwork and collaboration, should bereflected in how employees’ performance is managed and rewarded, in how jobs aredesigned, and in what constitutes successful talent. The alternative to integrating talentmanagement with other HR systems is to engage in a series of disconnected processesthat confuse managers and employees.

Talent management should also accord with an organization’s psychologicalcontract. Is the deal one of organizational investment in the individual for long-termreturn to the organization and employee? If so, career management and developmentprocesses can operate in that context. Conversely, if employees want immediaterewards and the organizational expectation is for immediate performance, then talentmanagement will have to adjust to that reality.

Finally, what is doable in talent management will depend in large measure onwhat senior managers are prepared to back in practice, not just in theory, and howskilful line managers are in delivering on their people management responsibilities. Itmight be a disappointment to talent management advocates who have preconceivednotions of the “right” methodology, but HR professionals must design talentmanagement systems that managers in their organizations will support with their timeand energy. Account also has to be taken of the degree of organizational siloism andpoliticking. Will managers act corporately, or will they simply concern themselves withshort-term, parochial issues.

All the above has profound implications for talent management processes such asworkforce planning, assessment, development, career management, and successionplanning. Gowing and colleagues concentrate on leadership assessment. They makethe obvious, but still important, point that success is contingent on defining what youneed to assess in order to predict who will be the successful leaders.

Like Garrow and Hirsh, Gowing et al. believe in customizing talent managementpolicies and programs to fit particular organizational characteristics. They alsoemphasise the importance of procedural fairness. If participants do not have faith in


the process they will not buy into the results, and this may prove true for the successfulas well as the unsuccessful. Assessment systems may also introduce biases—a pointalso made later by Kock and Burke. Face-to-face or resume-driven approaches to talentidentification may prejudice assessors against particular types of candidate. Web-basedtools get round this problem but favor the computer literate, which might work againstolder, non-office based applicant. Both Crumpacker, in relation to gender differences,and Tom Calo, regarding the aging workforce, emphasize the requirement to besensitive to the audience for talent assessments, which includes both the assessors andthe assessees in the particular organizational context. These considerations willdetermine, for instance, whether assessment tools will be high or low tech andwhether the assessment will involve a high or low proportion of knowledge workers.

Calo emphasizes another aspect of context, namely the demographics of anorganization’s workforce. Organizations may be aware of the challenges they face inthis regard, but others, as Calo notes, may be in denial, delaying their response, ordoing nothing at all. In a U.S. or European setting, the principal worry is the aging ofthe labor supply, whereas in other parts of the world, there is an oversupply of youngworkers. Both situations present challenges that demand responses.

The tight labor markets in many countries during recent years found has giventhis issue more urgency. Writing this article just after the Lehman Brothers’ collapse, itmight be that, for the time being in the West, the power in the labor market has movedback to employers. And just as the demographic time bomb of the 1970s did notexplode, so external change may bail out the deniers and the organizations that havedone nothing. However, a more short-term imperative may prompt action.

Workforce reductions by organizations may mean that much quality talent will belost and their knowledge with them. This may be particularly true where there areincentives for early retirement, thereby making the older workers who remain feelexpendable. The economic downturn may initially offer the public sector a bigger poolto recruit from, but will eventually squeeze the public purse and lead even governmentagencies and other public sector organizations to pursue efficiency drives and cost-saving that will involve cutting jobs. The risk then is that talent is inadvertently lost inpoorly specified “right-sizing” programs.

Avoiding this situation seems to be to a good argument for organizations to doworkforce planning, to establish the flow down their talent pipelines, and to constructa number of scenarios to describe possible future realities. Account should be taken ofthe age profile of the organization’s workforce and the number and nature of those onshort-term or temporary contracts. Organizations must be willing to reconsider theirviews regarding older workers’ fitness and motivations and on the commitment ofthose on “atypical” contracts. Negative stereotypes can inadvertently lead organizationsto make false assumptions that adversely influence resourcing decisions.

Calo also asks a vital question that applies in normal times: In downsizingexercises and where a cohort of baby boomers is retiring, how can an organizationtransfer knowledge? As with workforce planning, raising the need for knowledgetransfer emphasizes that talent management is not just about dealing with individualemployee issues, but is important for addressing organizational issues and is linked to


organizational performance. So, as Calo suggests, organizations must estimate thenumber of departures, establish who among those who might be leaving holdimportant information, and establish mechanisms for capturing and passing on what isin those people’s heads. A broader talent management program would fosterknowledge transfer as well as the retention of older workers, while also maximizing thecontributions new recruits can add to the organization’s existing store of expertise.

So HR professionals should be strategizing about what the labour market contextwithin which talent management is taking place; conducting risk managementexercises to identify resource vulnerabilities (individuals and groups); designingapproaches that are adaptable to the changing external environment—be it “boom” or“bust.”

Crumpacker focuses on the issue of gender diversity, and asks whether additionallegislation is needed to get a better balance in the Senior Executive Service of the U.S.Federal Government. Crumpacker describes how the SES Diversity Act would requirefederal government agencies to develop a diversity plan to improve the position of “ofminorities, women, and individuals with disabilities” and to identify and eliminatebarriers impairing the ability of these groups to obtain appointments.

In the context of legislation, readers working in other geographies might ponderwhether stronger legislation might be the right approach to creating a diverseworkforce and especially within senior management, be it from the perspective ofethnic minorities, gender or age. Research in the UK trying to explain the disparity infemale pay compared to male, suggests that outright discrimination against womendoes occur, but is less important than is occupational segregation (the career choicesmade by women) and the effect of their non-work lifestyle choices, domesticresponsibilities (especially child rearing). In this context, legislation may have highsymbolic value but may be a blunt instrument to effect change, unless a policy ofpositive discrimination is adopted—and that brings another set of problems. Theexisting policies of measuring diversity performance and identifying obstacles to fairrepresentation seem to have made some progress, but to move further forward mayrequire addressing the sort of social and educational issues described by the MeritSystems Protection Board report “A Question of Equity—Women and the GlassCeiling,” quoted by Crumpacker. In her conclusions she does indeed argue that one ofthe main weaknesses of the SES Diversity Act is the fact that it has not established theactual cause(s) of the shortfall of women in executive positions, and moreover thatdata collection in the recruitment process will not be geared to giving some answers towhere the problems lie.

Individual public sector organizations must indeed do that and perhaps look atwhat success the private sector has achieved, or not, and draw lessons from thatquarter too.Like the aging workforce, the challenge of getting more women into seniormanagement positions cries out for good workforce planning and succession planning.Organizations should know the gender composition of their employee base, ascertainhow it benchmarks against the labour market within which it operates and determineswhat out-turns it wants. If the organization is well short of its target for women in


management it will almost certainly have to take action to improve the supply. Like thesuggestions for a diversity plan, set out in the SES Diversity Act, this might be throughinternal development programs or through external hiring, but based on anunderstanding of what are the impediments to creating a better balanced, morerepresentative workforce.

This issue of Public Personnel Management includes a case study of how talentmanagement has been implemented in a non-Western country. Kock and Burkedescribe talent management programs in the post-apartheid South Arica, focusing onthe country’s Public Service. The article exemplifies the importance of context. SouthAfrica suffers from high unemployment and serious skill shortages, not least becausethe country’s education and training systems are not yet up to the task of producinglarge numbers of highly skilled workers. Kock and Burke describe how in thesecircumstances the state has a development role. Its activities in policy formulation,enacting legislation, and delivering services place the state in the role of working toachieve social transformation. In parallel, the state must work to improve workers’skills and remove barriers to business growth in order to facilitate the transformation.For the government to fulfil its role, Kock and Burke believe that there has to be a shiftfrom public administration to public management and that people are central tomaking this shift happen.

In this context we can again see the imperative of aligning talent managementefforts with an organization’s strategic goals, other HR systems, and culture as aprecondition for success. Organizations also must have sufficient professionalcapability to make and sustain change, gain high-level sponsorship of developmentactivities to give them legitimacy and impetus, improve the data upon which decisionsare based, and make proper use of technology. Kock and Burke commend what theysee as the private sector’s integrative and incremental implementation of talentmanagement programs. They argue for a step-by-step building up of the support fortalent management so that when a program is launched, it is likely to be well received.

While perhaps more problematic in South Africa than in some other countriesthat have been at this task longer, the lack of good policies and processes for HRfunctions like succession planning and career management and the emphasis on HRmanagement as a controller rather than a facilitator of career management areubiquitous problems, as is the short-term focus of many managers. Readers may wellsympathize with Kock and Burke’s plea “get line managers to talk as passionately abouttalent as they do about organizational results.”

Kock and Burke offer a Talent Wheel with employee engagement at its core as amodel of how to conduct talent management processes. The processes themselves areunlikely to be contentious, but not all organizations would see employee engagementas the core activity. Making it the core, however, does raise a debate about how muchtalent management is about securing the right resources in the right place to improveorganizational performance and how much talent management is a more people-centric, developmental system at the individual level. Most organizations wouldprobably vote for a balance between the ends of the spectrum, where talentmanagement has to deliver meaningful results for the organization and ensure that


talented employees prepared to stay and are motivated because if not the organizationwill suffer.

Kock and Burke are also concerned about the ability of public sectororganizations to compete with private sector organization for talent. They encouragepublic sector employers to grow their own talent so that they do not need to meet thiscompetition head on.

Another question is whether talent management should be organization- orpeople-centric. Kock and Burke seem to incline towards the latter approach, whereasother commentators, such as Pan Kim (forthcoming) argue that HR managers “shouldfit talent to the task.” This suggests taking a more directive approach toward workallocation, but it might simply be a wish to align individual skills better with anorganization’s activity. The UK civil service’s recognition that there are different careerpaths for different skill sets would be a similar approach. Certainly, the Enronexperience so graphically described by Gladwell shows the risks of letting talent loosewithout ensuring proper performance management or organizational alignment.4

Certainly, in the context of the public sector, a talent management programshould emphasize that employees should not just have the knowledge, skills, andabilities, but also the proper values. This may act as a bulwark against corruption ornepotism, but it also is a way of preventing the self-indulgence of the Enron highfliers.Public service should come before pursuing one’s own interest.

This issue of Public Personnel Management will, we hope, give readers ideas forresolving some of the difficult issues in handling talent management. As with so muchin good management, the way one starts a journey is key one’s subsequent successfularrival: head off down a cul-de-sac or a winding byway and one will either never arriveat one’s destination or if one does, one will surely be exhausted by the effort. Oneshould ask oneself why one has any talent management program, to what businessobjectives it is aligned; who will be part of it as a consequence of answering the firstquestion; and through what processes and by what criteria will one decide what is“talent” in the organization. Again, like good management practice, one needs to trackprogress (having decided your Key Performance Indicators) and evaluate theperformance of the program against one’s objectives.

This series of journal articles will hopefully be helpful to readers in selecting theright path for the journey.

Notes1 Michaels, E., Handfield-Jones, H., & Axelrod, B. (2001). The war for talent. Boston: Harvard

Business School Press.

2 Cappelli, P. (2008, March). Talent management for the twenty-first century. Harvard BusinessReview, March, 74–81.

3 Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe and John Alban-Metcalfe (2008). Engaging leadership: Creatingorganizations that maximize the potential of their people. Chartered Institute for Personnel andDevelopment, London.

4 Gladwell, M. (2002, July 22). The talent myth. The New Yorker, pp. 28–33.


AuthorPeter Reilly

Director of HR Research and ConsultancyInstitute for Employment StudiesMantell BuildingUniversity of SussexBrighton BN1 9RF, UK+44 (0) 1273 [email protected]

Peter Reilly joined the Institute for Employment Studies in 1995 after a 16-year careerwith Shell where he held a number of HR posts in the UK and abroad. At the Institutehe is director of HR research and consultancy. He leads the both consultancy andresearch work on reward/performance management and on the HR function. He alsocontributes to projects on HR and skills planning. Clients come from all sectors and hisinvolvement ranges from facilitation, through expert advice to design and evaluation.Reilly has written various articles and books on these subjects, but especially on the HRfunction.


Talent Management:Issues of Focus and FitBy Valerie Garrow, PhD, and Wendy Hirsh, PhD

Talent management has dominated management literature for several years butorganizations approach implementation in many different ways. This articlesuggests that the two key dimensions that require careful consideration are thoseof “focus” and “fit.” “Focus” relies on a clear strategy for how talent managementwill contribute to organizational objectives, what parts of the organization andwhich job roles will be priorities and where talent pools will be sourced. “Fit”ensures that talent management processes support the strategic objectives,resonate with but possibly also challenge the organizational culture, take intoaccount the psychological contract between employer and employee and sit wellwith existing HR processes.

T alent management has been high on the agenda of HR professionals in theUnited Kingdom for the past few years. This high level of interest is reflectedin a number of recent case study-based research reports that describe a broad

range of organizational practices and highlight some of the tensions and dilemmasthat arise as employers try to come to grips with the idea of talent management. Someof the most useful summaries have come from the Chartered Institute of Personneland Development (CIPD)1,2 Ashridge3,4 Roffey Park5 and Incomes Data Services (IDS).6

Between them, these studies give a fairly comprehensive overview of how large organ-izations in the UK are facing the talent management challenge.

This article draws on published research and also on the considerable practicalexperience of the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) in supporting organizationsin implementing their own talent management strategies. Much of the work IES workhas done has been with public sector organizations, particularly with nationalgovernment departments and agencies and local government authorities of varyingsize and sophistication.

Talent Management: Upsides and DownsidesThe idea of talent management is attractive for several reasons. Managers and HRprofessionals feel they should be doing more about developing their organization’sworkforce for the future, and talent management is assumed to be just about this. Theterm can also encompass career development, which has been difficult to position inorganizations for a while, since individuals have been left to sort out their own careers.7

Talent management is about positive things—doing things for your best people,investing in developing them, building on potential and, therefore, helping people


make the best use of their strengths and improve on their weaknesses. The term talentmanagement can also has the potential to apply both to meeting the needs of theorganization and of the individual, which is in tune with the current sense of what HRprofessional should be trying to do.

The phrase talent management also sounds a bit important, rather strategic, andeven exciting. As one HR director commented at an IES conference on this subject, “Itplays well as a term in the boardroom.”

However, there is no clear, shared definition of talent management. CIPD definestalent management as “the systematic attraction, identification, development,engagement/retention, and deployment of those individuals with high potential whoare of particular value to an organization.”8 This definition explicitly includes the termpotential, but it also includes the much more general term particular value, which canmean just about anything.

Attempts to define talent management tend to get confused on two fronts. First,the parts of the workforce to which the term talent might apply can range from a smallnumber of potential senior leaders to the whole workforce. Second, the HR professionhas extended the core ideas of attracting and developing talent into every -ingimaginable—retaining, motivating, rewarding, and so on. So at one extreme, talentmanagement can be taken to encompass the whole of human resources managementfor the whole of the workforce, which is not very helpful when trying to narrow downwhat one means when one talks about talent management. Why call it “talentmanagement” when what is being done is simply normal, proper workforcemanagement and development of all the organization’s people?

This confusion means that the term talent management does not always play sowell outside the boardroom. We have found that mentioning talent management inmany organizations makes people rather nervous. They start to wonder, “What do wemean by ‘talent?’ Talent for what? If I am talent, what will ‘managing’ me mean? What if Iam not talent? And if I am a manager, will I need to tell some people that they are not astalented as they thought they were?”

Especially in the public sector, people often fear that talent management will cutacross equality of opportunity and the transparent processes that allow people to applyfor higher-level jobs in order to further their careers.

Partly because of these tensions, we have noticed a lot of hot air being spoutedabout talent management strategies but seen much less useful action.

Reframing the Debate: Focus and FitSo how do we help organizations move forward with using the positive ideas of talentmanagement, clarifying what talent management will entail, and making talentmanagement something that is of benefit to both the organization and theorganization’s workers?

The authors of several research reports have advocated defining what a particularorganization means when it uses the term talent.9 However, this makes it sound asthough talent is an abstract commodity and will only have one definition in a given


organization. IES has found it helpful to slightly reframe this question as, “Where doyou need to focus your talent management effort?” The focus an organization originallychooses need not be not fixed for all time, and several areas of focus can be defined, aswill be illustrated below.

The second idea which IES finds useful in practice is that of fit, which is finding away to meet the objectives of talent management by doing things that mirror orcomplement the other things the organization does in terms of human resourcesmanagement.

Focus: For What, Where, and When andDevelopment GoalsHaving a clear talent management strategy provides focus by addressing three types ofquestions. The first type involves questions about what part of the organization—whatkinds of job roles, such as senior manager—would be better served by taking a morepurposeful approach to developing potential job holders.

The second type includes considerations of where in the organization—oroutside of it—can the right kinds of people be found for the target roles and how farahead—that is when—the organization needs to start developing those people so thatthey will be good candidates by the time they compete for the target roles. So, forexample, an organization with a strong pool of middle managers might be looking at anumber of current employees who have the potential to become skilled seniormanagers. If, however, an organization has a weak group of junior managers, it may dowell to start talent management interventions earlier in career and to improve itsrecruitment.

The third type of question concerns what development outcomes theorganization is looking to achieve. If an organization doesn’t know what its goals are interms of employee development, there will be no point in launching any HR initiativesor identifying potential participants in such initiatives. Goal-setting is essential to talentmanagement programs because the goals will guide the identification of talent poolsand recruiting to avoid resourcing difficulties. If an organization want to develop seniormanagers from within its ranks, then, it might seek to give some of its good middlemanagers broader career experiences outside their own functions or businessdivisions. This will make the middle managers stronger candidates for a range of futuresenior management vacancies and also equip them to perform better if they attain sucha position.

Common Types of Talent FocusDifferent organizations have different resourcing challenges, draw on different labormarkets, and operate on different time frames. So they may well need different types offocus for their talent management efforts.

There are many situations in which organizations attract recruits of quite goodquality who can grow fairly naturally into more senior roles when they are providedappropriate learning and development experiences. In such cases, it is reasonable to


describe the whole of those organizations’ workforce development efforts as “talentmanagement.” Organizations that take this approach include parts of the UK NationalHealth Service (NHS), where positive learning strategies are well-structured for manyof the professional groups. Professional development is less available for those in morejunior support and administrative roles, however (see for example North Wales NHSTrust).10

1. Step-by-Step Focus

In organizations where career paths work fairly well to supply more-senior or more-skilled jobs, a light touch to talent management can involve all managers looking foremployees with the potential to take another career step and what could be called step-by-step development to prepare people for their next career move. In manyorganizations, for example, administrative supervisors are prepared this way by givingpersonal development support to the most promising individuals within groups ofadministrative staff if those people are interested in becoming supervisors.

Talent management as a more proactive approach to both skill and careerdevelopment has the most to offer when there are more specific types of role that arehard to fill, either because recruitment is difficult or because career paths require verydifferent skills and experience at different levels in the organization. In such cases, wesee several kinds of focus within the organization.

2. Leadership Focus

The most common focused talent strategy addresses the future supply of leaders, oftencalled the leadership pipeline.11 An organization needs to consider carefully where inthat pipeline it needs to act and with what outcomes. If an organization leaves it untiltoo late to develop future leaders, it will find it difficult to give people the range ofcareer experiences that might equip them well.

The examples of Panasonic12 and of Lloyds TSB13 show the common focus largecompanies have on the future supply of leaders. In the public sector, for example, theUK Civil Service is currently engaged in the positive development of midcareer peoplewho may have potential for to serve in its senior levels either in the short-term (one ortwo years) or the longer term (say five years). The outcomes the Civil Service wants toachieve are improving leadership skills and, when there is time, exposing talentedmidcareer people a broader range of business experiences inside the Civil Service and,sometimes, outside of it.

The Civil Service is also investing in the development of people who are in thelater stages of their careers who may already be senior civil servants or who are veryclose to being so. These professionals, especially those who deal with the public, areoffered coaching as a way of enhancing skills. In several parts of the UK public sector,intensive development support is often provided for a period of time to individualswho will be taking on a very senior role for the first time, such as a new member of ahealth trust board or a local authority.

Programs have also been implemented for early-career civil servants in the UK.The UK Civil Service Fast Stream is a long-standing example of a high-potential


university graduate entry scheme. Its two objectives are to bring young people of highability into the Civil Service and to give those individuals accelerated and broad careerdevelopment for their first five years or so of government employment. Without thisscheme, the national Civil Service would probably lose many of its best recruits toprivate sector companies such as professional service or consultancy firms. Manycurrent senior civil servants were originally recruited through the Fast Stream.

A relatively common talent management strategy combines a step-by-stepapproach for the workforce in general with more specific and centralised interventionsfor those with senior leadership potential. CIPD researchers found this combination oftwo strategies to be quite common. The first has the short-term broad purpose of“attracting and retaining individuals to meet the immediate business needs at alllevels”. The second arm of strategy has a longer-term focus on those people with “themost potential to progress to more senior roles.”14

As Tansley et al. showed, the professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers,recruits graduates of high quality and needs to give all of them positive career anddevelopment attention to retain them and to develop and deploy their skills. Thecompany also looks for key talent among it employees—defining key talent as peoplewith the skills and attitudes to fill the most senior roles in future—and provides extraopportunities and resources to the best people as they emerge in mid- and later career.

In a similar way, the Kent County Council15 combines a light touch to step-by-stepdevelopment within departments with a more centralized focus on developing peoplein a senior management talent pool via assignments, work shadowing, and projects toincrease their experience.

3. Functional, Level, or Workforce Group Focus

Talent management does not have to be about developing either the whole workforceor selected candidates for senior leadership positions. In many organizations, there areother parts of the workforce that need positive attention in order to meet futureresourcing needs.

Functional or professional groups are often hard to recruit and retain. Skillsshortages often limit the effectiveness of such groups as accountants, informationtechnology professionals, and engineers, and focusing on someone from their earlyprofessional formation through to a group leadership role or a senior specialist rolecan benefit many organizations. The examples of account management in Fujitsu16 andof attracting and developing creative chefs in Gordon Ramsey’s restaurant chain17

illustrate how private sector organizations succeed by keeping their functional talentpipeline primed. In the public sector, the BBC has undertaken several initiatives inrecent years to strengthen its supply of people with the right skills in its critical needsareas of journalism, production/commissioning, and audio/music production.

Sometimes it is difficult to make the transition from one level of an organizationto the next level. The Derby City Council, for example, is concerned in the long termabout developing top managers, but it is currently focussing its talent managementefforts on employees who may have potential to fill the 100 or so head of service jobsacross the council. These are not the very top leadership posts, but having a strong


pool of managers will make it easier for the council to fill its top leadership jobs infuture. So the council is looking to develop future heads of service as a starting pointand giving people with potential for that level up to three years of development.

The National Audit Office (NAO) similarly chose as an early focus for its talentmanagement activities rather more junior managers in the organization. Again, thelogic is to focus on the area or level where proactive attention is likely to yield thebiggest gain for the organization. Taking such an approach does not preclude attendingto the career development needs of other groups at a later date, and, indeed, the NAOintends to move higher up the leadership pipeline with its talent managementinitiatives in due course.

Often a combination of level and function defines a suitable focus for talentmanagement. For example, IES and the Improvement and Development Agency forlocal government (the IDeA) worked with a county council that had persistentshortages of good supervisors in the finance function. A modest but focused programhelped those employees with the potential for, and interest in, such posts to developthe specific skills and gain the experience they needed.

Such examples also show the need to think about how many people must be intalent pools and how many an organization can afford to develop. The fact that suchquestions arise indicate that talent management initiatives need to be designed andcarried out in conjunction with workforce planning.18 The finance supervisorsdevelopment program described above involved quite a small group, and the councilonly needed to find five or 10 quality candidates to make a real difference in easing itsproblem. This figure was based on a careful analysis of turnover patterns over severalyears.

4. Specific Critical Posts

A less common talent management strategy is to focus on individual posts that are hardto fill and present a risk to the business if they cannot be filled. Virgin Holidays, forexample, combines a focus on leadership positions with a focus on hiring individualswho will eventually be able to rise to specific critical posts that are hard to fill.19 Whenfocusing on specific posts, an organization often needs to understand the externallabor market very well because it is likely that the best candidate for a critical post willnot be someone who has spent his or her entire career with the organization.

Finding the Right FitHaving looked at how organizations might focus their talent management strategy, it isnecessary to describe how to find which talent management approaches are the rightfit for an organization seeking to support and develop its people to meet its businessneeds. For an approach to fit, it must be appropriate to the organization, which meansit must not clash with the organization’s culture and it must meet the needs of theworkforce.

A talent program can take many different forms and might involve a majorinvestment or be cost-neutral. The word program is used broadly in this article to


denote both development activities and the architecture that supports those activities.Most talent programs offer a range of activities, from formal external programs to on-the-job coaching and corporate projects or career moves into new areas of work. Someactivities are for all talent pool members, and some are tailored to employees’ specificneeds. At the NAO, for example, activities for all employees include an externalassessment center, mentoring, master classes, action learning, and personaldevelopment planning. Tailored activities include carefully selected secondments ortemporary assignments to developmental roles, further education, challengingprojects, and new job roles.20

How a program is put together largely depends on fit, bearing in mind that theintroduction of talent management efforts may signal a more general culture change inresponse to the operating environment.

There are several dimensions to getting the fit right. These include

• Fit to Focus: How will the process achieve the strategic objectives?• Fit to Culture: Will the process reflect the organization’s values, purpose, and

underpinning philosophy? • Fit to Workforce and the Psychological Contract: What do employees want

talent management to do for them, and how far will the psychological contracthave to shift to work for both the employees and the organization?

• Fit to Other HR Practices and Policies: How will talent management integrateand be supported by other HR practices?

• Fit to Management Capability and Roles in Managing People: Does thecurrent workforce and management have the capability and capacity to maketalent management work?

Fit to FocusThe focus of talent management as it relates to organizational needs for different typesof workers, organizational gaps in capability and capacity, and the time frames in whichthose issues need to be addressed has already been discussed.

The way talent program architecture and activities are developed andimplemented has to support an organization’s strategic focus and engage both seniormanagers and the workforce. A recent article in Harvard Business Review identifies“deep-seated commitment from senior executives” as a critical success factor in talentmanagement.21 The more a talent program is aligned with an organization’s strategy,the more likely senior managers are to remain engaged. These leaders’ visiblecommitment sends out an important public signal of the importance of developingpeople in the organization.

Additionally, linking the talent program to the organization’s strategy means thatthe program will never be static and will remain future-oriented. Bristol-Myers Squibb,for example, holds talent reviews every four to six months to determine both who is inits talent pools and how high-potential employees are being developed. The NAO also


monitor the progress of staff in its talent pools and review whether developmentactivities are meeting organizational needs.22

As the nature of work changes, with more collaborative, cross-boundary workingand more global and virtual working, models of leadership are also shifting. So talentprograms have to flex to accommodate new organizational needs and new approachesto organizational and individual development.

A final reason that the talent program should be tied to organizational strategy isthat the attainment of strategic goals will dictate the pace of employees’ development.Knowing what it wants to accomplish will help an organization decide whether itshould take the steady pipeline approach to talent management, where leadershipskills are developed in a staged and incremental way, or whether it should foster fast-track development by giving its high-potential employees access to an intensivedevelopment package in order to move those individuals more quickly into hard-to-fillor new posts.

Fit to CultureAs noted earlier, the meaning of the term talent management is neither clear norcomfortable in many organizations in the UK. Some organizations use a talentmanagement approach but decide not to describe it as such. UK public sectororganizations have found the whole concept of talent to be culturally difficult, as theyplace great emphasis on equality of opportunity and open HR processes. Initially in theNAO, a talent program was felt to be elitist and difficult to reconcile with equalopportunities and the high standards for all entrants. In one county council, there wasreported discomfort at what people felt to be an old boys’ network.23

Cultural challenges also arise from structural issues such as whether theorganization operates in a centralized or devolved way, particularly in terms ofcorporate or global versus unit or local talent markets. The organizational structuretends to dictate what is done more readily at the corporate center and what can bemore devolved.

There are also cultural dimensions to how decisions about people are made andthe degree of transparency and objectivity involved in selecting candidates for a talentprogram. Organizations that do not gather or use people metrics very much tend tostruggle with talent approaches based on elaborate databases and very formal methodsof assessing potential. Such organizations can do better by adopting a lighter-touchprocess in which talent conversations can be more informal, or at least rely more onmanagement judgement backed by examples. Smaller organizations often operatetheir talent programs in this way.

The degree of openness in an organization, such as transparency of pay scales andsuccession plans and opportunities for employee involvement in decision making, is animportant contextual factor for getting the talent program fit right. First, the degree ofopenness needs to be reflected in the talent process, as it is difficult to introduce atransparent process in a secretive organization, and vice versa. Second, the degree ofopenness will dictate the degree of involvement that individual employees have in thetalent program, determining whether they are able to self-nominate, whether


managers nominate them anonymously, or, indeed, whether they are spotted by theHR staff or by senior managers. Third, it will inform how a new talent program iscommunicated inside the organization and how people relate to the program.

Having achieved some kind of cultural fit, an organization would do well to heedthe salutary warning from Gladwell24 that, taken to extremes, talent management cangenerate overconfidence and an inappropriate culture of risk-taking. Gladwell basedhis warning on lessons learned from the demise of Enron, which had been described asthe “ultimate talent company” where high-flyers were rewarded disproportionately andnot held accountable for their actions.

Fit to WorkforceEnsuring that talent management processes fit the workforce requires anunderstanding of the psychological contracts between the organization and itsemployees employees’ career paths and their contributions to the organization.Professional cultures are challenging in this regard, as the employees’ loyalty tends tobe towards their profession rather than one organization. Examples include cliniciansin the NHS and information technology professionals and accountants in all sectors.Well-targeted and -communicated talent management processes may help buildstronger employer–employee relationships and promote greater engagement amongthese professional groups.

A new talent program can either enhance or breach the psychological contractwith regard to how individuals expect their careers to progress. Acceptance into atalent program usually shifts the balance of what an individual gives to the organizationand what the individual gets from the organization. Talent approaches that simply givea lot more to those in talent pools and are seen as taking away attention from otheremployees can cause discontent. It often seems fair, both to those in the talent pooland those outside it, that the extra development attention given to selected employeesshould be balanced by expecting those in the select group to show extra commitmentthrough the way they perform, the range of assignments they are willing to accept, andtheir willingness to undertake development activities partly on their own time.

Individual Perspective

Once he or she is in a talent pool, an employee will closely monitor how theorganization delivers on its side of the deal. The organization is often less diligent indoing the same. For example, if an individual coping with an intensive talent programfinds there are no promotional opportunities, the employee is likely to see theorganization as having broken its promise—to have, in other words, breached thepsychological contract. Therefore, it is important to manage expectations realisticallyfrom the outset.

Another key issue, of course, is managing applicants who fail to gain a place in atalent program, which can be a real blow to the employee’s confidence and self-esteem. The UK Legal Services Commission has built into its talent process a launchevent during which potential candidates are encouraged to consider the implicationsof joining the program and how they will react if they are accepted or turned down.25


Occasionally people make the talent pool but derail later on. Being talent-managed brings its own stresses, strains and expectations. Royal and Sun Allianceensure that there is a development process and support mechanisms in place foremployees who fall out of its talent pool, and the company also encourages people totake sabbaticals from the talent pool when needed or if their personal circumstanceschange.26

Many organizations encourage open competition for promotion opportunitieswith employees who are not in talent pools so that the talent management processdoes not close down career opportunities for employees who have not been spotted.

Organizational Perspective

Many organizations worry that investing in the development of high-potentialemployees is risky. With the passing of the so-called “old” psychological contract in the1990s, the new deal between employers and employees is supposedly less about loyaltyand long service and more about self-managed careers and chasing the better deal. It iscurrently a widely held belief that Generation Y workers are a fickle bunch with highexpectations and little sense of loyalty.

Building talent management into the psychological contract and the performancemanagement process is an important way for organizations to ensure they reap thebenefits of their investment. By openly discussing the expectations and obligations ofboth parties (the organization and the individual), line managers and employees areable to monitor their respective levels of satisfaction with the talent program. Forexample, has the participant had adequate opportunities to share learning and transferit back to the workplace, to move to challenging posts or developmental roles, or to bepart of a project team where they can hone and share their new skills?

Fit to Other HR PoliciesTalent management is sometimes supported by a dedicated team in an organization’sHR department, but responsibility can sit with business partners or in learning anddevelopment. The talent program is usually seen as supported by the HR staff butowned by line managers. Wherever it is positioned in the organization, the talentprogram needs to fit with other HR processes and policies. This aspect of fit is bothabout mechanics—how the processes align and work strategically together—andabout style—the degree of transparency and involvement. The HR processes that needto considered in conjunction with the talent program include

• Workforce planning and labor market intelligence, which provide the focus fortalent management.

• Recruitment and assessment processes, which feed the talent pipeline and linkto the employer’s brand.

• Performance management, which is a core activity for talent spotting anddevelopment; its level of sophistication in discriminating between high, good,average and poor performance is vital to the success of talent management.

• Training and development, which supports employees in talent pools.


• Relevant and up-to-date competency frameworks such as Professional Skills forGovernment (PSG), which provide the basis for professional development.

• Reward and recognition, which have to align with both the organization’s andemployees’ expectations for the talent management approach.

• Promotion and deployment processes, which need to be informed by talentinformation; there needs to be clarity about whether individuals apply for newopportunities or are assigned career moves.

• Succession planning; this has traditionally related to coverage of key posts, butsome organizations such as Proctor & Gamble are described as “talentfactories27 because they can identify a strong field of candidates for importantbusiness within minutes through their global databases of talent profiles.

• Diversity management; in many cases this works alongside talent managementto avoid elitism and increase access to poorly represented groups.

A growing number of organizations have actively built diversity into their talentmanagement approaches. Standard Chartered Bank has used the talent process toencourage a greater representation of women. The NAO involves two board membersin the talent interviews, one of whom is responsible for functional diversity while theother serves as a diversity champion.28 Against a backdrop of an aging workforce, talentmanagement also needs to be pragmatic and examine nontraditional pools of high-potential employees, such as older and migrant workers.

Fit to Management CapabilityMaking a talent program work in an organization requires commitment and capabilityfrom many stakeholders. A key question is, “Who will deliver a talent program?” Aplethora of talent management roles and functions have been established over the lastfew years, but success depends on developing what is often referred to as a talentmind-set throughout the organization.

Senior Managers

As noted above, senior management commitment is a critical factor for the success oftalent management efforts. Senior managers should be prepared to give their practicalsupport, which might be as a champion, member of a talent panel or board, or mentoror coach. They need to role-model appropriate behaviors such as not hanging on totalented employees to the detriment of other parts of the organization, not showingfavoritism or solely selecting people “in their own image” and dedicating time andenergy to identifying and developing talented individuals.

Line Managers

Probably the most important people are the line managers, who play pivotal roles intalent spotting, providing development opportunities, managing performance, givingfeedback, and coaching and supporting employees who carry the burden ofexpectations once they are labelled as “talent.” Organizational readiness for


introducing talent management often depends on the people management skills of theline managers and their experience in coaching, developing and managing theperformance of their staff. This may be a particular issue in the early years of a talentprogram, when there is a generation of line managers who have achieved success thehard way and may resent fast tracks and easy access to professional developmentopportunities.

Line managers need access to good HR support and development in order tofulfil their role as talent managers successfully and must understand the business logicbehind the talent program. They need clear guidance on where to look for talent andwhat they are looking for. They also need to be clear about how they will talk to theirpeople about perceived potential, as well as an understanding of whether the talentapproach changes any of their established people management practices.

Line managers can also be extremely powerful in blocking the talent pipeline byhanging onto to individuals who boost their own department’s performance.Unblocking “silos” requires a firm top-down commitment to the mobility of talentedemployees for the benefit of the whole organization.

Assessors

Another group of people who require particular skills are members of the panels thatdo the formal assessment of talent, if this is done internally. Talent panels made up ofsenior managers and corporate board members, HR and development professionals,and, occasionally, line managers that weigh up the evidence of employees’ potentialand performance are tasked with making important decisions about the future ofindividuals, and panelists require access to a full range of tools and measures. Assessingpotential and future skill requirement, particularly in the field of leadership, calls for ahigh degree of sophistication.

SummaryIn summary, having a clear focus can turn talent management from an abstract idea intosomething more practical. It is important that areas of focus are ones in whichproactive attention to attracting and developing talent will make a real difference to theorganization, usually by creating a better pool of people from which suitablyexperienced and trained candidates can be drawn in future. Any one organization mayneed several areas of focus for its talent management effort. It is also important that thesize of a talent pool is appropriate, and that the time frame for developing peoplereflects the organization’s needs and the current workforce supply situation.Determining an appropriate focus requires an organization to define what outcomes itwants to achieve by developing high-potential employees, specifically which skills andexperiences people in a talent pool will need to have so they are equipped to assumehigh-level positions in the organization in the future.

Equally important is the ability to engage the whole organization in developing atalent mind-set. While the introduction of talent management may be a response to achanging business environment and signal a shift to a more proactive culture of


employee development and performance management, it also needs to fit with otherpeople management practices and support the core values and purpose of theorganization.

Notes1 Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. (2006). Reflections on talent management:

Change agenda. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

2 Tansley, C., Turner, P., Foster, C., Harris, L., Sempik, A., Stewart, J., & Williams, H. (2007). Talent:Strategy, management, measurement—Research into practice. London: Chartered Institute ofPersonnel and Development.

3 Lubitch, G., Devine, M., Orbea A., & Glanfield, P. (2007). Key research findings. In Talentmanagement: A strategic imperative. Hertfordshire, UK: Ashridge Consulting.

4 Lubitch, G., & Smith, I. (2007, Spring). Talent management: A strategic imperative. 360° TheAshridge Journal, 6–11.

5 McCartney C., & Garrow, V. (2006). The talent management journey. Horsham, UK: Roffey ParkInstitute.

6 Incomes Data Services. (2008, May). Talent management (IDS HR Study 869). London:Thompson and Street & Maxwell.

7 Yarnall, J. (2007). Strategic career management: Developing your talent. Oxford, UK:Butterworth-Heinemann.

8 Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. (2006), op cit.

9 Tansley, C., Turner, P., Foster, C., Harris, L., Sempik, A., Stewart, J., & Williams, H. (2007), op cit.

10 Ibid.

11 Charan, R., Drotter, S., & Noel, J. (2001). The leadership pipeline. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

12 Incomes Data Services. (2008, May), op cit.

13 McCartney C., & Garrow, V. (2006), op cit.


15 Incomes Data Services. (2008, May), op cit.



18 Lubitch, G., & Smith, I. (2007, Spring), op cit.


20 Ibid.

21 Ready, D. A., & Conger, J. A. (2007). Make your company a talent factory. Harvard BusinessReview, June 2007 85(6): 69-77.


23 Ibid.

24 Gladwell, M. (2002, July 22). The talent myth. The New Yorker, pp. 28–33.


26 Ibid.


402 Public Personnel Management Volume 37 No. 4 Winter 2008

27 Ready, D. A., & Conger, J. A. (2007)


AuthorsValerie Garrow, PhD

Associate DirectorInstitute for Employment StudiesMantell BuildingUniversity of SussexBrighton BN1 9RF, UK+44 1273 [email protected]

Wendy Hirsh, PhD

Principal AssociateInstitute for Employment StudiesMantell BuildingUniversity of SussexBrighton BN1 9RF, UK+44 1273 [email protected]

Dr. Valerie Garrow is associate director at the Institute for Employment Studies, anindependent apolitical, international research centre, where she leads the HR researchand consultancy team. Her research interests embrace various aspects of organizationaldevelopment including the human dimension of mergers, acquisitions and partnershipsand the impact of major change on the psychological contract. She also works withorganizations on talent management and leadership development and has recentlydeveloped the Leadership Qualities Framework for a large UK public sector organization.

Dr. Wendy Hirsh is an independent researcher and consultant in the fields of employ-ee and management development, and strategic human resource planning. Wendyworks closely with a number of centres in the UK, including the Institute for Employ-ment Studies where she is a principal associate. She works with many leading employ-ers, both private and public sector, to examine their changing needs for people and howthey might best be met. Wendy has a long standing interest in career development fromboth the corporate and individual perspectives, and therefore in how succession plan-ning and talent management can meet both corporate and individual needs.

Talent Management inthe Era of the AgingWorkforce: The CriticalRole of KnowledgeTransferBy Thomas J. Calo, EdD, IPMA-CP

Organizations have been confronting many of the demographic changes occurringin the workforce, such as increasing racial and ethnic diversity along with greaternumbers of women workers. The workforce is also rapidly aging, though hisdemographic shift is only beginning to be addressed by many organizations as astrategic and competitive challenge. As the baby boom generation transitions intoretirement, organizations must plan for the replacement of this large andknowledgeable cohort of workers. This article addresses the particular risks andchallenges that organizations face in ensuring the transfer of the valuableknowledge that older workers possess before they retire.

Imagine you are an HR executive and there are two possible scenarios you mightexperience. In the first scenario, you are fully aware of and concerned about theaging of your organization’s workforce. You are especially concerned about the

retirements of knowledgeable and experienced baby boomers and that steps have notyet been taken to transfer those potential retirees’ valuable knowledge to others inthe organization. You bring this concern to the attention of senior managers, but youfeel like the little pig crying wolf when you are accused of unnecessary alarmism andfailing to have your priorities straight. Or, equally troubling, you remain silent becauseyou happen to work for an organization where negative news is unwelcome, and youfear the inevitable fate of the messenger who brings bad news. Either way, the organ-ization fails to address its aging workforce challenge in a timely manner.

In the second scenario, you are not sufficiently informed about the aging of yourorganization’s workforce and the risks from a large number of retirements. Or, equallytroubling, you have such an awareness, but you do not think the aging workforce is animmediate or particularly serious concern for your organization because of otherpriorities. As a result, you take no immediate action. Subsequently, after the magnitudeof the problem becomes apparent in the organization, you are summoned before theexecutive committee to explain why you, as the senior HR professional, did not alertmanagement to the risk of the aging workforce.


Where do such scenarios leave the HR professional? Not, it must beacknowledged, in an altogether comfortable position. Consider for a moment, though,that these and similar scenarios are likely to manifest themselves in most organizationsin one form or another over the next few years. Organizations must take steps todevelop a strategy for successfully transferring the valuable knowledge that resides intheir older workers to other members of their workforce. Denial, delay, or doingnothing may be appealing responses in the short term, especially when there is someevidence that older workers are working longer and that the supply of workers appearsto be in balance with or exceeding demand. Taking action is also more difficult duringtimes of economic slowdown, when an organization is focusing on controllingexpenses.

The Critical Importance of KnowledgeResearchers and practitioners have discussed the importance of knowledge transfer toan organization’s success, and knowledge has become recognized as the moststrategically significant resource of organizations.1 When Peter Drucker2 alertedorganizational leaders to the rise of the knowledge society, he described the radicalchange in the meaning of knowledge and how knowledge had assumed even greaterimportance than either capital or labor for nations. As the workforce driving theknowledge economy ages, new challenges will arise, particularly the risk of a significantloss of valuable knowledge as older workers retire from the workforce. In theknowledge economy, even flawless execution cannot guarantee an organization’scontinued success, as the failure to incorporate new information can cause anorganization to fall behind.3 Intellectual capital and employee talent have become areasof competitive advantage, and even of survival, for organizations.

Many executive decision makers are increasingly treating equipment, technology,unskilled labor, and capital as commodities. Employee knowledge, experience, andwisdom, however, are not organizational commodities, and they cannot be managed ascommodities. The knowledge held by individuals must be passed on to others in orderfor that knowledge to be leveraged.4 Yet it is noteworthy that so many organizationscontinue to maintain a short-term focus by laying off talented workers and facilitatingearly retirements before putting in place a strategy to capture and retain the valuableknowledge that is lost when the most experienced individuals leave the organization.

Recruiting, motivating, and retaining a talented workforce are not short-termproblems or passing fads. They are systemic, protracted, and chronic problems thatorganizations will face for the foreseeable future. Demographic and workforcemanagement will be as critical a strategic issue for organizations as financial andtechnological management. This harsh reality may be difficult for many organizationalleaders to appreciate and accept. Workforce demographics have almost always workedto the advantage of organizations. Yet current and projected workforce supply anddemand challenges are complex and multifaceted. These challenges may be broadlyconceptualized as a “perfect demographic storm.” A perfect storm is a situation inwhich multiple undesirable and uncontrollable conditions come together at the same


time. Currently, there is a convergence of three demographic-influenced realities thatwill affect the ways in which organizations’ workforces must be strategically managed—the loss of knowledge due to the retirement of baby boomers, a projected shortage ofworkers, and an overall aging workforce.

Loss of Knowledge From Baby Boomer RetirementsAn inevitable reality of organizational life is that valued employees leave theorganization, voluntarily or otherwise. Some of this loss of talent can be predicted andcontrolled, but some loss cannot. Death, disability, voluntary resignation, and other lifeevents cannot always be predicted and controlled. Yet organizations have greatopportunity and resources to both predict and, to some extent, control the retirementof baby boomers.

Organizations run the risk of losing great stores of knowledge from theimpending retirement of large numbers of baby boomers. Many of these employeeshave amassed great knowledge, skills, and wisdom that has either not been capturedwithin the organization’s collective memory system or which has not been personallytransferred to other individuals in the organization. Given the age demographics ofmany organizations, an unprecedented loss of human capital will occur between nowand 2020 unless steps are taken to proactively transfer the knowledge from valuedlongtime employees. The risk of knowledge loss is especially acute in the public sector,as job tenure tends to be greater in the public sector than in the private sector.

What organization would not take immediate corrective action if it identified asteady decline in customers, a rise in customer complaints, or a billing system that waslosing it money? Yet many organizations do not act with the same sense of urgencywhen the lack of a knowledge transfer process results in a continuous loss ofunrecoverable knowledge as valued employees transition to retirement.

Knowledge management is a broad concept that has been defined as “aconscious strategy of getting the right knowledge to the right people at the right time”5

and as a way of putting knowledge into action to improve organizational performance.How to transfer knowledge from one person to others or to the broader organizationalknowledge base is a challenging aspect of the knowledge management processbecause knowledge transfer does not occur spontaneously or naturally. Ensuring aneffective transfer of knowledge requires having an understanding of the dynamics andorganizational processes of the knowledge transfer process.

In reflecting upon what he learned from archaeology, Robinson6 noted that theancients knew many valuable and significant facts that no one knows today and that theamount of lost knowledge is beyond estimation. Once it is lost, knowledge can neverbe fully recovered. It is wise, therefore, for organizations to focus on capturingknowledge before it is lost rather than on trying to buy knowledge or recover it. Whileit is difficult to accurately calculate the financial consequences of losing criticalknowledge, the risks certainly include lost productivity, increased errors, anddiminished creativity. The essential point organizational leaders need to recognize isthat once knowledge and expertise has left their organization, it is difficult to recover,so difficult as to be unlikely. Knowledgeable older workers will be leaving organizations


in record numbers over the coming decade, so before they leave, it is imperative thatorganizations take steps to retain their knowledge.

A Shortage of WorkersDemography is not an exact science, but it provides reliable and useful data forworkforce planning. Demographers, like climatologists who can alert us to changingweather patterns such as global warming, can alert us to changing patters of birth andlongevity rates. It is up to us to decide what to do with this information.

The evidence that the populations of developed countries are aging rapidly dueto decreased birth rates and longer life spans is undeniable. For example, the fastestgrowing segment of the workforce in the United States is individuals older than 55years, whereas the population of workers who are between 35 and 44 years of age,which are considered the prime executive development years, is declining.7 Therewere early indications that the workforce was aging when Workforce 20008 waspublished in 1987, but the predictions about aging issues were overshadowed by themore immediate issues of racial, ethnic, and gender changes in the workforce thatneeded to be confronted by organizations. Now is the time to meet the challenges ofthe aging of the workforce with the same vigor with which those other challenges weremet.

During the downsizing drives of the 1980s and early 1990s, many organizationsreduced hiring and training. As a consequence, many organizations are nowexperiencing shortages of midcareer managers and employees with the skills,experience, and institutional knowledge to fill the knowledge void that will occur whenolder workers retire. Much of this dilemma has been precipitated by practices inorganizations that focused on removing older workers from the workforce. Olderworkers became increasingly viewed as an expendable resource to eliminate ratherthan as a valuable resource to retain. In times prior to the downsizing era, olderworkers were the group most likely to be protected by internal labor markets, but theyhave seen a dramatic decline in their job stability. Medoff9 found that the proportion ofprime-age workers (ages 35–54) permanently displaced from their jobs nearly doubledbetween the 1970s and the early 1990s. Men aged 55–64 saw their job tenure fall from15.3 years to 10.5 years between 1983 and 1996.10 There has been a noticeable shift,then, from previous periods in which job loss was traditionally determined by the “last-in, first-out” rule. Whereas in these previous periods of job loss, in which younger(versus older) workers and shorter-service (versus longer-service) workers were morelikely to be displaced, these patterns have largely been reversed in the period of jobloss from corporate downsizing and reengineering.

In addition to the layoff option, many organizations opted to offer earlyretirement incentives to long-serving employees. So, accelerating the exit of olderworkers from the workforce of many organizations was either a conscious strategy or,at a minimum, a passive acceptance that it was in the best interests of the organizationfor older workers to exit the workforce sooner rather than later. Retirement and benefitsystems were also designed to anticipate, and even encourage, this “normal” process.Such practices, however, should not be evaluated entirely critically in light of current


realities, but they should be understood in terms of the realities that existed at thetime.

Looked at with proper perspective, these practices not only becomeunderstandable, but actually understood as appropriate. As baby boomers beganentering the workforce in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, they were thelargest generation in U.S. history and also the most highly educated and ambitious. Asthey reached the prime of their careers, the only obstacle baby boomers faced toentering the senior ranks was the presence older managers in the executive suite.Moreover, the supply of talented and motivated baby boomers seeking career growthfar exceeded the demand and number of opportunities. Facilitating the retirement ofolder workers served to ease the pressure organizations felt to keep their then-youngerand better-educated workers happy. Much like oil before the 1970s, the supply of babyboomers far exceeded demand, and decision making was made in terms of that reality.

A second factor contributing to this pattern was that many organizations operatedunder the concept of the psychological contract. Levinson et al.11 have described therelationship that exists between employee and employer as a psychological contractbecause there are mutual behavioral expectations between the organization andworkers. For most of the post-World War II era, this psychological contract was that inexchange for hard work and loyalty to the organization, the employee was reasonablyassured of continued employment and financial security. This implicit arrangementexists today in only very few, primarily public sector, organizations.

Until its demise, however, which occurred during the era of organizationaldownsizing and reengineering, the lifelong psychological contract was the dominantemployer–employee arrangement in many organizations. Under this model, theorganization had an obligation to provide a secure and certain retirement to long-serving and loyal employees. Workers expected to be able to retire, and organizationsanticipated employees would retire when they reached a certain age or number ofyears of service. From the perspective of both the employees and the organization, itwould have been seen as unfair and a violation of the psychological contract not toprovide for the retirement of workers on this basis, and there was no reason for thispattern not to continue because the organization had many options for replacingretiring workers.

From the vantage point of hindsight, we can acknowledge that this old paradigmwas relevant and appropriate for the time in which it held sway. Kuhn,12 who studiedthe embedded resistance to change, taught us that paradigm shifts do not occur easily.The current debates over how to deal with older workers in organizations is a classicmanifestation of a struggle for a paradigm shift, which is often strongly resisted byentrenched perceptions and organizational systems. As in most situations requiringchange, the warning signs are evident but often ignored.

Demographically, the United States has reached the point where the labor that isneeded and the labor that is available are starting to diverge. Where, previously, supplyexceeded demand, there are now credible predictions of a general labor shortage.13

Cappelli,14 however, has noted that most studies predicting future labor shortagesmake the assumption that retirement patterns will not change and that people will


continue to retire at the same age as they always have (i.e., between 60 and 65), even asindividuals’ life expectancy and ability to work longer increase. Capelli may be correctthat such assumptions are unrealistic, if for no other reason than that financialconsiderations will require people to work longer, as well as because the rising age forSocial Security eligibility will delay many retirements.

Still, the broader problem, as noted earlier, is more than just the availability ofworkers or when older workers retire. A smaller cohort of workers followed the babyboomers. It has been estimated that this cohort, often referred to as the “baby bust”generation, is approximately 16% smaller in numbers than the baby boomers.15 Theseunprecedented changes in workforce demographics pose threats of both labor andskill shortages, and are already being seen in unwanted turnover, skill shortages, andpoor bench strength. To address these problems, organizations will need to changethe nature of the employment relationship and learning opportunities for older andyounger workers alike.16 Moreover, there is also the risk of losing a significant amountof the knowledge and skills of the retiring baby boomers (whenever they retire) if theknowledge and skills are not transferred to others before they leave the workforce.

An Aging WorkforceMost of the concerns that have been expressed regarding the risk of the agingworkforce have involved the loss of knowledge from the retirement of the babyboomers and on the potential shortage of workers to fill the gaps left by exits from theworkforce. A distinct but related concern that must be addressed is how to make thebest use of older workers who remain in the workforce. Today, the workforce of mostorganizations has a higher overall age than at any time in history. While many olderworkers are members of the first wave of baby boomers, the 50-54 age group is thefastest growing segment of the population, and the 45-49 age group is the secondfastest growing. The concerns, then, should not be only about the imminentretirement of the first wave of the baby boomers, but that organizations will need toconfront many new issues as a result of having a larger number of older workers ontheir payrolls.

Strack, Baier, and Fahlander,17 for example, have identified two categories ofdemographic risk facing organizations. The first, capacity risk, involves the impendingretirement of large numbers of baby boomers and the loss of accumulated knowledgeand expertise. The second is productivity risk, which Strack and colleagues describe asthe risk of the overall effect of having older workers still on the payroll. While age oftenbrings valuable expertise and wisdom, age can also mean a lack of fully up-to-date skills,health problems, and lowered motivation due to job and career satisfaction or inertia.Preparing only for the retirement of older workers, then, is an insufficient response tothe aging of the workforce.

It appears that work motivation does not necessarily subside as workers age, butthe factors of motivation do change. In the United States, aging is assumed to result ingeneral decline, particularly in cognitive and intellectual capabilities. But research in anumber of domains has shown that an assumption of general decline with age issimplistic and incorrect.18 Organizations have given little or no attention to


understanding how aging and adult development affect work motivation andperformance. While additional research is needed in this regard, the available evidencesuggests that achievement motivation (i.e., the desire to demonstrate mastery andexcellence as compared with others) appears to decline with age, whereas motivationsto have a positive affect and a positive self-conception become stronger with age.19

Organizations will need to consider many systems and processes such as job redesignand career planning in order to enhance the work motivation and job performance ofmidlife and older workers.

Knowledge Transfer as a Talent ManagementStrategyTalent management has been defined by Cappelli20 as “simply a matter of anticipatingthe need for human talent and then setting out a plan to meet it.” He claimed that mostorganizations have not proactively addressed the challenge of talent managementbecause they have either considered the issue meaningless, or they have relied uponoutside hiring whenever a need for talent has arisen. As the demand for talentcontinues to grow, however, so will the competition for that talent. Organizations thatrely primarily upon external hiring to buy the knowledge lost through turnover andretirements will find that strategy to be decreasingly effective. When the talent supplyexceeded demand, external hiring may have made sense as a primary strategy, but thetalent pool is shrinking and the demand for talent is escalating. Even if external talentcan be bought, the competitive costs will continue to increase.

Even more significant is the concern for the organizational loyalty and cultural fitof externally recruited talent, as well as the concerns of existing organizationalemployees who are passed over for an opportunity that is provided to an external hire.Consequently, necessary and interrelated strategies for organizations are to retain andgrow talent internally and to ensure the transfer of knowledge within the organization.

Because of the importance of knowledge retention and transfer, organizationshave begun to institutionalize knowledge by creating institutional memory systems.Organizational knowledge is a distinct attribute of an organization that is different anddistinguishable from the knowledge of individuals. Organizational knowledge residesin an organization’s memory system, not just in the heads and experiences ofindividuals. This knowledge does not disappear as individual employees come and go,and its existence is what makes it possible for collective action to occur in anorganization.21 Consequently, the loss of knowledge decreases an organization’scapacity for effective action or decision making.22

The reality in most organizations is that much of, if not most, institutionalknowledge resides with individuals. Every organization has its share of people who areknown to be the experts on specific problems or issues. Herzberg23 referred to suchpeople as “wise old Turks,” referring to the character whom Zorba The Greek soughtout for all practical wisdom. Many of these individuals are likely to be seasonedveterans and members of the baby boom generation who are at risk of retiring before


their valuable knowledge is transferred to others or to the institutional memorysystem.

Ensuring the transfer of wise old Turks’ knowledge must become a critical priority fororganizations. Appreciating the importance of knowledge transfer requires anunderstanding of organizational knowledge and of the types of such knowledge.

Expert versus Tacit KnowledgeOne of the principal reasons why knowledge once lost cannot be fully recovered is thatknowledge can be broadly classified into two fundamental types—explicit knowledgeand tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge tends to be “unambiguous, observable, andindisputable.”24 As such, it is highly codifiable and can be readily transferred within anorganization or between individuals without loss of meaning. Explicit knowledge existsin the form of documents, databases, and policy and procedures manuals.25

Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, “is inexpressible and not readily transferableto others.”26 Tacit knowledge is informal and uncodified, and it exists in the heads ofemployees and in the experiences of the organization.27

Organizations must be able to transfer knowledge, especially tacit knowledge.Since tacit knowledge is embedded in individuals and contexts, its transfer betweenpeople can be slow and uncertain, making tacit knowledge transfer one of the mostdifficult aspects of the knowledge management process.

If the value of knowledge transfer is so apparent, why does it not occur morenaturally and extensively? The reality is that most employee behavior is determined byorganizational culture, and while there are some cultures that reward and encourageknowledge transfer, other cultures unintentionally discourage knowledge transfer.Watson and Hewitt28 have asserted that knowledge contribution is an altruistic actbecause it is done for the benefit of others in the organization. The authors believe thefact that individuals do contribute their knowledge for the benefit of others can beexplained by social exchange theory, which posits that individuals will contribute theirknowledge even when doing so is not formally rewarded. In studying how extrinsic andintrinsic benefits may differ in terms of impact on knowledge contributors,Kankanhalli, Tan and Wei29 found that enjoyment in helping others was more importantthan organizational rewards as a motivator for knowledge contribution. It should beevident, therefore, that knowledge contribution would occur even more extensively ifan organization’s culture supported, encouraged, and fostered knowledge transfer.

In far too many instances, practices and assumptions from before the dawn of theknowledge society continue to prevail in organizations, meaning employees are oftenseen as interchangeable and easily replaceable parts. When dealing with knowledgeworkers as opposed to low-skilled workers in a highly structured or routine job,knowledge cannot simply be extracted from an older experienced worker andtransplanted into a younger worker. Knowledge, especially tacit knowledge, is verypersonal, and knowledge workers need to be provided with opportunities andincentives to want to pass it on.


The Role of the HR Professional in the KnowledgeTransfer ProcessThe two people primarily responsible for an organization’s talent supply are the chiefexecutive officer and the head of human resources. CEO’s must visibly support theorganization’s commitment to knowledge transfer and overall workforce changes toaccommodate changing demographics, since many of the strategies required to dothese things will necessitate changing past practices and ingrained attitudes.30 Ifmanaging the risks of an aging workforce is going to be an ongoing part of anorganization’s approach to dealing with its workforce, it will be essential for theorganization’s HR function to be a true strategic partner with top management, whichis a role HR professionals should have assumed long ago.31

The policies and practices that are necessary for knowledge transfer to occurreside within the HR function, so the involvement and leadership of HR management isessential. HR executives must provide expert and wise counsel to the CEO andexecutive team on all matters relating to the workforce. HR executives must also beresponsible for the organization’s staffing procedures to ensure that employees andjob candidates with the right talent is in the right place at the right time.32 HRprofessionals should have great incentive to develop and implement the necessarypolicies and practices that will encourage and facilitate the transfer of criticalknowledge within the organization before knowledge is lost and becomesunrecoverable.

There are certain preconditions, though, for knowledge transfer to occur. All thebest intentions will not achieve the desired results if an organization’s workplaceenvironment and culture do not encourage and support knowledge transfer. Factorssuch as management support and performance-related rewards are necessarypreconditions for knowledge sharing to occur on a fully voluntary and ongoing basis.33

In addition to being exposed to and offered the right culture, environment, andsupport systems, retirement-eligible baby boomers must be motivated to keep workingand to transfer their knowledge to their younger colleagues. Basic psychology,especially behaviorist theory, tells us that an organization’s policies, practices, andreward systems affect employees’ behavior. While some policies provide incentives forengaging in certain behaviors, other policies provide disincentives for certainbehaviors. For instance, a salary bonus plan could provide an incentive for an employeeto achieve specified goals. On the other hand, a pension plan that ceases employercontributions at a certain age or has a maximum number of years of credited servicemay be a disincentive for employees to continue working beyond the point wherepension benefits accrue. Consequently, HR leaders must conduct an objective andcritical assessment of all of their organization’s HR policies and practices to determineif they are helping or hindering the organization’s efforts to retain older workers and tofacilitate the transfer of knowledge among workers.

While not proposed as an exhaustive list, the following critical areas should formthe basis of an initial HR plan of action for enhancing the retention of older workersand for facilitating the transfer of knowledge from these valued workers.


Demographic Inventory and ProfileGathering information is critical to effective decision making. While it is essential to beaware of and understand the impact of broad demographic changes to the workforce,what those changes mean for one’s particular organization must be made explicit. Animportant first step for doing this is to take an inventory of the organization’sworkforce. Based upon the ages, lengths of service, and provisions of theorganization’s pension plan, it is possible to calculate the number of workers who areeligible to retire now, as well the number who will be eligible each year until a targetplanning date, such as the next five years. Historic patterns are also important to assess.There may be a cultural expectation that employees retire at a certain age, or thatprovisions of the pension plan encourage or discourage workers from retiring atcertain ages. With this information available, needed policy or cultural changes can beidentified.

Knowledge Risk ProfileClosely related to retirement risk is knowledge loss risk. If critical older workers leavethe organization, there is also the risk that the knowledge they possess will leave withthem. It is especially important to identify critical jobs that are essential to theorganization that are occupied by retirement-eligible incumbents.

Conducting such a knowledge risk assessment requires the active involvement ofall managers throughout the organization. Managers should be tasked with theresponsibility of identifying the at-risk positions, and then of developing a plan toidentify a successor, of having an accelerated learning plan for the identified successor,and of facilitating the transfer of knowledge from the incumbent workers to successors.This emphasizes the overall institutional commitment to a knowledge transfer process.

Policy AssessmentAn assessment must be made of the extent to which the organization’s existing policiesare affecting retirement patterns and knowledge transfer practices. Conceptually,organizational managers and HR professionals need to eliminate old thinking thatassumes there is a specific timing for retirement that is predicated upon an employee’sage or number of years of service. On the basis of their research, Dyctwald, Erickson,and Morison34 concluded that the concept of retirement is outdated and should bereplaced by a more flexible approach that benefits both employees who want tocontinue working and organizations that will retain the skills of workers well past thetraditional age of retirement.

Adapting the work environment to the needs of older workers should requireonly an application or extension of many of the family friendly policies and practicesthat organizations adopted in the 1980s, such as job sharing, telecommuting, flex-timework, and part-time work. The organization, however, needs to be proactive in creatingexpectations among managers that older workers need to be provided with suchopportunities and in convincing managers that older workers will be willing tocontinue working if given attractive opportunities to do so.


Cultural, as well as policy changes, will be necessary to transition organizations toa more enlightened and needed approach to retirement. Phased retirement, forinstance, describes a wide range of formal policies and informal practices that fosteremployees’ gradual transition to retirement rather than their abrupt separation fromthe organization.

Job and Career RedesignPerhaps the most difficult strategy for retaining older workers and providing theenvironment for knowledge transfer is redesigning jobs and career paths. A commonassumption among organizations is that older workers have the same motivations nowas they did when they were younger. Again, however, older workers are not necessarilyless motivated than when they were younger, but they are differently motivated.Accepting this reality leads to the realization that the content of jobs and the careerpath for older workers need to be modified, which will require a shift in a firmlyembedded principle of HR.

A long-standing debate among HR researchers and practitioners has beenwhether we fit people to jobs or fit jobs to people. The nearly universal conclusion hasbeen that people need to be fitted to jobs, as the jobs have been designed andevaluated. Many HR systems, from recruitment and compensation to performanceevaluation, are firmly embedded in this paradigm. Yet if organizational managers andHR professionals are able to get beyond the philosophical and policy hurdles that thisparadigm has given rise to, the possibilities for retaining older workers and facilitatingknowledge transfer will be expanded greatly.

While many managers may resist changing the HR paradigm, the strongestresistance is likely to come from HR professionals. But by designing jobs to fit theunique needs and talents of older workers will benefit the individual and theorganization. HR visionaries should take the lead in the development andimplementation of what may best be referred to as age-appropriate careers tracks.

A principle component of the individualized approach to job design for olderworkers should be mentoring. Fostering relationships between knowledge holders andemployees who can benefit from that knowledge will go a long way toward ensuringknowledge transfer.35 It should not be surprising that mentoring and coaching areprobably the most effective ways of transferring explicit and tacit work-relatedknowledge from one person to another because mentoring builds close personalrelationships and creates a positive organizational culture.36

HR CompetenciesFinally, but very importantly, it must be acknowledged that if organizational changeefforts are going to be led by HR professionals, then the HR function itself must itselfchange. The reality is that many senior HR leaders themselves developed professionallyduring the era in which workforce demographics were quite different from what theyare today, and those HR leaders were responsible for developing and administeringmany of the very policies and practices that must now be changed.


To continue helping their organizations meet the challenges of an agingworkforce, senior HR leaders, and all HR professionals in the organization, mustdevelop a new set of competencies, many of which are the complete opposite of theirexisting competencies. An appropriate example is that during the late 1980s and intothe mid-1990s, an expected core competency for senior HR leaders in manyorganizations was the ability to find creative (and legal) means for ensuring thetransition of older workers out of the organization. Contrast that competency with thenew need to find creative means for retaining older workers.

A self-evident core competency for all HR professionals is having an awarenessand understanding of demographic changes and how demographic issues such as theaging of the workforce dictates the development and implementation of effective HRpolicies and practices. If they lack such knowledge and perspective, both on a globalbasis and at the individual organization level, it will be difficult for HR professionals toconfront these issues in a proactive way. Senior HR leaders need to ensure that thiscompetency is prominent among all HR professionals in their organizations.

Cappelli37 rightly criticized organizations for failing to develop HR competencies,especially in the areas of recruitment and retention. Organizations did not see the needfor these competencies when they were downsizing and restructuring, so therecruitment function and retention strategies eroded. With greater pressure to retainworkers and to hire externally, these competency areas will need to be enhanced.

Senior HR leaders are advised to assess the existing competencies of their HR staffto ensure that the needed competencies are rapidly developed. HR professionals mustmanifest the competencies needed to address the HR plan of action for retaining olderworkers. In some instances, it may even be necessary for HR talent to be hired by theorganization, or for HR consultants be used strategically. Regardless of the stepsrequired, it must be recognized that the HR function must develop its own competencybase before it will be able to provide the needed leadership for addressing thechallenges of retaining older workers and ensuring knowledge transfer amongemployees.

In summary, talent management is not a passing fad. It is a pressing andcompetitive priority for all organizations in this era of an aging workforce. An essentialcomponent of any talent management strategy is ensuring that valuable institutionaland professional knowledge held by older workers is transferred, as appropriate, to theinstitutional knowledge base and to designated individuals. These challenges are clearand present, as lost knowledge is usually unrecoverable. Organizational and HRexecutives must demonstrate bold leadership in instituting policies, practices, andcultural changes to facilitate the smooth and comprehensive transfer of knowledgewithin their organizations.

Notes1 Grant, R. M. (1996). Toward a knowledge-based theory of the firm. Strategic Management

Journal, 17, 109–122.

2 Drucker, P. F. (1993). The rise of the knowledge society. Wilson Quarterly, 17, 52–69.


3 Edmondson, A. C. (2008, July–August). The competitive imperative of learning. HarvardBusiness Review, 86(7), 60–67.

4 Cabrera, E. F., & Cabrera, A. (2005). Fostering knowledge sharing through people managementpractices. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 16, 720–735.

5 O’Dell, C., & Grayson, C. J., Jr. (1998). If only we knew what we know. New York: Free Press.

6 Robinson, D. S. (1925). The logical significance of rediscovered knowledge. The Journal ofPhilosophy, 22, 346–353.

7 Dychtwald, K., Erikson, T. J.; & Morison, R. (2006). Workforce crisis. Boston: Harvard BusinessSchool Press.

8 Johnston, W., & Packer, A. (1987). Workforce 2000. Indianapolis IN: Hudson Institute.

9 Medoff, J. (1993). Middle-aged and out of work: Growing unemployment due to job lossamongst middle-aged Americans. Washington, DC: National Study Center.

10 Judy, R., & D’Amico, J. (1997). Workforce 2020: work and workers in the 21st century.Indianapolis IN: Hudson Institute.

11 Levinson, H., Price, C., Munden, K., Mandl, H., & Solley, C. (1962). Men, management, andmental health. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

12 Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: The University of ChicagoPress.

13 Dychtwald, K., Erikson, T. J., & Morison, R. (2006), op. cit.

14 Cappelli, P. (2003). Will there really be a labor shortage? Organizational Dynamics, 32,221–233.

15 Ibid.

16 Dychtwald, K., Erikson, T.J., & Morison, R. (2006), op. cit.

17 Strack, R., Baier, J., & Fahlander, A. (2008, February). Managing demographic risk. HarvardBusiness Review, 86(2), 119–128.

18 Kanfer, R., & Ackerman, P. (2004). Aging, adult development, and work motivation. Academy ofManagement Review, 29, 440–458.

19 Kanfer R., & Ackerman, P. (2004), op. cit.

20 Cappelli, P. (2008, March). Talent management for the twenty-first century. Harvard BusinessReview, 86(3), 74–81.

21 deHolan, P. M., & Phillips, N. (2004). Remembrance of things past? The dynamics oforganizational forgetting. Management Science, 50, 1603–1613.

22 DeLong, D. W. (2004). Lost knowledge. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

23 Herzberg, F. (September-October,1974). The wise Old Turk. Harvard Business Review, 52(5),70–80.

24 Turner, K. L., & Makhija, M. V. (2006). The role of organizational controls in managingknowledge. Academy of Management Review, 31, 197–217.

25 O’Dell, C., & Grayson, C. J., Jr. (1998), op. cit.

26 Turner, K. L., & Makhija, M. V. (2006), op. cit.

27 O’Dell, C., & Grayson, C. J., Jr. (1998), op. cit.


28 Watson, S., & Hewitt, K. (2006). A multi-theoretical model of knowledge transfer inorganizations: Determinants of knowledge contribution and knowledge reuse. Journal ofManagement Studies, 43, 141–173.

29 Kankanhalli, A., Tan, B., & Wei. K.K. (2005). Contributing knowledge to electronic knowledgerepositories: An empirical investigation. MIS Quarterly, 29(1), 113-143.

30 Dychtwald, K., Erikson, T. J.; & Morison, R. (2006). op. cit.

31 Strack, R., Baier, J., & Fahlander, A. (2008, February), op. cit.

32 Dychtwald, K., Erikson, T. J.; & Morison, R. (2006), op. cit.

33 Cabrera E. F., & Cabrera, A. (2005), op. cit.

34 Dychtwald, K., Erickson, T. & Morison, B. (2004, March). Its time to retire retirement. HarvardBusiness Review, 82(3), 48–57.

35 Murray, S. R., & Peyrefitte, J. (2007). Knowledge type and communication media choice in theknowledge transfer process. Journal of Management Issues, 19, 111–133.

36 DeLong, D. W. (2004), op. cit.

37 Cappelli, P. (2003), op. cit.

AuthorThomas J. Calo, EdD, IPMA-CP

Franklin P. Perdue School of BusinessSalisbury University 1101 Camden Avenue Salisbury, MD 21801-6860 (443) 614-2244 [email protected]

Dr. Thomas J. Calo, IPMA-CP, is an assistant professor of management in theFranklin P. Perdue School of Business at Salisbury University, located in Salisbury, Md. Hereceived his doctoral degree in human and organizational learning from The GeorgeWashington University. His primary research interests are in business ethics and in thepsychosocial and organizational issues associated with the aging of the workforce. Priorto his academic career, he was a director of human resources in both the private andpublic sectors. Calo is a certified professional of the International Public ManagementAssociation for Human Resources (IPMA-HR), and he currently serves on the IPMA-HRProfessional Development Committee.


The U.S. Federal SeniorExecutive Service (SES)and Gender Diversity:Would ProposedLegislation Enhancingthe RepresentationalDiversity of SelectionPanels NecessarilyIncrease the Number ofFemale Appointments tothe SES? By Martha Crumpacker, DBA and Jill M. Crumpacker, JD, LLM, SPHR

The number of women in senior government positions has steadily increased overthe past 30 years, but the percentage of women in the Senior Executive Service(SES) of the federal government continues to lag behind the percentages ofwomen in both the civilian labor force and the federal government workforce.During 2007–2008, congressional leaders introduced the SES Diversity AssuranceAct to increase the number of women and minorities in the SES. This Articlediscusses whether the provisions of the proposed legislation that address initialselection into the SES, as presented, would achieve the intended result ofincreasing gender diversity in the SES.

Keywords: Diversity, Gender, Selection, Senior Executive Service, SES, Senior ExecutiveService Diversity Assurance Act, Talent Management

The Senior Executive Service (SES) corps consists of high-level managersthroughout the U.S. federal government who hold positions just below thelevel of presidential appointee. Career members of the SES provide a link

between politically appointed leaders and the rest of the federal workforce to over-


see and operate government programs and activities.1 As of September 2007, womencomprised 46.3 percent of the U.S. labor force,2 43.2 percent of the U.S. federal gov-ernment workforce,3 and 29.1 percent of career members of the SES.4 If the senior-most leadership corps of the federal government is supposed to reflect the broaderlabor force, then gender diversity in the SES is a topic ripe for discussion.

During the 110th Congress (2007-2008), legislation was introduced in both theU.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate to provide for greater diversitywithin, and to improve policy direction and oversight of, the SES.5 Titled the SeniorExecutive Service Diversity Assurance Act (SES Diversity Act), the legislation creates aSenior Executive Service Resource Office (SESRO) within the U.S. Office of PersonnelManagement (OPM), with a mission to:

• improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity of the SES throughpolicy formulation and oversight;

• advance the professionalism of the SES; and • ensure that, in seeking to achieve a[n] SES reflective of the nation’s diversity,

recruitment is from qualified individuals from appropriate sources.6

As of the date this Article was submitted for publication, the SES Diversity Act hasnot become law. The proposed legislation was introduced, in part, due to legislativeconcern that “there are flaws in the selection process, and [. . .] a lack of oversight andaccountability when it comes to promoting and hiring minorities in the SES.”7 Thisconcern and a continuing interest among legislators, as illustrated in part by thenumber of reports they have requested during recent years from the U.S. GovernmentAccountability Office (GAO) addressing diversity in the SES, suggests the SES DiversityAct or similar legislation, will be introduced and possibly enacted during the nextCongress. This Article explores the provisions of the proposed legislation that addressinitial selection to the SES, including the likely effect of these provisions, if passed asdrafted, on agencies to increase gender diversity within the SES.

Gender Diversity in Federal Employment

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII)8 protects employees and applicantsfrom discrimination in compensation, and in terms, conditions, or privileges ofemployment because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.More than ten years after enacting Title VII, Congress determined that minorities andwomen were underrepresented in certain federal agencies and at higher levels offederal government employment.9 The Congress concluded: “The disproportionatedistribution of minorities and women throughout the federal bureaucracy and theirexclusion from higher level policy-making and supervisory positions indicates thegovernment’s failure to pursue its [. . .] policy of equal employment opportunity.”10

Finding the exclusion of minorities and women to be the result of systemicdiscriminatory practices, Congress extended Title VII coverage to include federalemployment. In passing the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978,11 (CSRA), Congress statedthat “it is the policy of the United States [. . .] to provide [. . .] a federal workforce


reflective of the Nation’s diversity.”12 The CSRA established that recruitment should bedesigned to achieve a federal workforce from “all segments of society.”13 Thus,employment decisions for federal government positions may not be based onstereotypes or assumptions about abilities, traits, or performance due to sex (gender).14

Talent Management and Federal Agency Responsibilities

Ensuring agencies have qualified, capable leaders available to keep governmentrunning smoothly is a crucial responsibility for human resources professionals and foragency leadership. Talent management has been defined as a process of “identifying,assessing, acquiring, developing, and deploying employees who are critical to thecompany’s success.”15 Talent management has also been defined as an outcome of“ensur[ing] the right person is in the right job at the right time.”16 And, talentmanagement has been defined as including not only leadership succession planning,but also development of all workers, at all levels.17 As applicable to federal agencies,OPM has defined talent management to be a system “that addresses competency gaps,particularly in mission-critical occupations, by implementing and maintainingprograms to attract, acquire, develop, promote, and retain quality talent.”18

In implementing their talent management activities, federal agencies must seek toachieve representations of various protected classes in all job groups, reflective of theoverall U.S. civilian workforce, in order to comply with the requirements of anti-discrimination laws.19 Federal agencies conduct merit-based recruitment activities forcareer positions within the federal workplace.20 To that end, agencies must ensure thefollowing:

• Recruitment should be from qualified individuals from appropriate sources inan endeavor to achieve a workforce from all segments of society, and selectionand advancement should be determined solely on the basis of relative ability,knowledge and skills, after fair and open competition which assures that allreceive equal opportunity.21

• All employees and applicants for employment should receive fair and equitabletreatment in all aspects of personnel management without regard to politicalaffiliation, race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age, orhandicapping condition, and with proper regard for their privacy andconstitutional rights.22

As part of their statutory or regulatory responsibilities, OPM and the EqualEmployment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) have a lead role in enforcing,overseeing, and administering equal employment opportunity and merit systemprinciples throughout the federal government. The OPM administers and enforcesapplication of merit system principles throughout federal workplaces and also overseesagency human capital programs, including the activities of the Chief Human CapitalOfficer (CHCO) Council.23 The EEOC enforces Title VII and related anti-discriminationlaws, and also oversees agency EEO programs.24


Federal agencies are required, by law, to review and report annually on the statusof their workforce, both to OPM and to EEOC. For instance, through the Federal EqualOpportunity Recruitment Program (FEORP) report,25 agencies update OPM on theiractivities geared toward eliminating underrepresentation of women or members of aminority in specific federal job categories.26 Through the Human Capital Assessmentand Accountability Framework (HCAAF)27 agencies demonstrate to OPM strategies inplace to improve and/or maintain workforce diversity. Agencies also file annual reportswith OPM addressing specific talent management actions directed to specificpopulations of workers, including veterans, Hispanics, and individuals with disabilities. In accordance with EEOC’s Management Directive 715 (MD-715), agencies evaluatetheir workforce data annually using designated benchmarks, including the civilian laborforce, for potential barriers that could restrict or limit opportunities for opencompetition in the workplace.28 For purposes of the MD-715, a barrier may include anyagency policy, principle, or practice that limits or tends to limit employmentopportunities for those of a particular gender, race, or ethnic background, or based onan individual’s disability status.29 Low representational rates in an agency, for example,are considered indicative of a potential barrier. If one or more potential barriers areidentified, the agency must examine all related policies, procedures, and practices todetermine if an actual barrier exists. Where barriers are present, agencies mustundertake actions to eliminate them.30

From a broader perspective, in accordance with its charter, the CHCO Council“advises and coordinates the activities of members’ agencies on such matters as themodernization of human resources systems, improved quality of human resourcesinformation, and legislation affecting human resources operations andorganizations.”31 The CHCO Council must report its prior year activities annually toCongress.32

Gender Diversity Among Career SESCongress established the SES to “ensure that the executive management of theGovernment of the United States is responsive to the needs, policies, and goals of thenation and otherwise is of the highest quality.”33 The SES corps includes both non-career appointees and career appointees. Non-career appointees serve in time-limitedpositions and are appointed by and serve at the pleasure of the political appointingauthority. Career appointees serve in positions that are not time limited and that affordincumbents certain civil service entitlements and protections. Unlike non-careermembers of the SES, initial appointment of career members of the SES must occurthrough a competitive merit staffing process.34 According to GAO, there areapproximately 6,555 career members of the SES who implement policy, provideleadership, and oversee the operations of government programs throughapproximately 75 agencies.35 OPM oversees the allocations of SES positionsthroughout the government and among agencies to ensure the number of positionsreserved for career members remains within the overall number that must bemaintained government-wide.36


According to GAO data, in fiscal year 2007 (October 1, 2006 – September 30,2007) women comprised 29.1 percent of the SES, as compared to 46.3 percent of theU.S. labor force37 and 43.2 percent of the U.S. federal government workforce.38 Thisrepresents a steady increase from 11 percent representation in 1990,39 to 19.1 percentrepresentation in 2000,40 to 29.1 percent in 2007.41 Within the government employeerecruitment pools from which agencies typically source future career SES candidates,however, during 2007 women comprised only about 34.3 percent of all federalemployees in higher-graded positions42 (see Table 1). The percentage of women in theSES lags behind the corresponding percentage of women in the workforce, as does thepercentage of women occupying positions from which SES candidates are oftensourced.

Women in the SESThe reasons for the disparity between the available pool of potential female federalexecutives and the number who actually ascend to the senior-most ranks ofmanagement in government agencies have been the subject of debate and study foryears. For instance the 1992 Merit Systems Protection Board report A Question ofEquity: Women and the Glass Ceiling detailed findings from a survey that identified anumber of objective barriers to career advancement among women, including shorteraverage lengths of federal service than male counterparts, fewer years of formaleducation on average, and a greater tendency to decline promotions that wouldrequire relocating.43 The report also indicated that women faced barriers toadvancement in the form of “subtle assumptions, attitudes, and stereotypes whichaffect how managers sometimes view women’s potential for advancement and, in somecases, their effectiveness on the job.”44

During the present decade, the GAO has issued numerous reports on the statusof the SES workforce, primarily in the form of year-end data snapshots, which reflectthe gender diversity within the SES corps at various federal agencies (see Table 2). TheGAO’s reports have not included specific analyses identifying actual causes for agencieshaving low diversity in their SES ranks.45 Table 2 depicts the gender diversity in 24federal agencies’ SES ranks as of September 2007.


Table 1: Representation of Women Governmentwide: Career SeniorExecutive Service (SES) Members and the SESDevelopmental Pool, September 2007

Governmentwide Number Percentage of Women

SES Members 6,555 29.1

SES Developmental Pool (GS-15s and GS-14s) 149,149 34.3

Source: From Diversity in the Federal SES and Senior Levels of the U.S. Postal Service andProcesses for Selecting New Executives (GAO-08-609T) (p. 4), by the U.S. GovernmentAccountability Office, April 3, 2008, Washington, DC: GAO.

Appointment to the SES – Current Law

Initial appointment as a career member of the SES occurs through a merit-based,competitive recruitment process managed by an agency’s executive resources board(ERB).46 The Agency head appoints the members of the ERB from among existingexecutive employees within the agency.47 The Agency head is responsible forestablishing qualifications standards for each SES position in the agency.48 Vacancyannouncements must be posted to OPM’s USAJOBS website (www.usajobs.gov) for aminimum of 14 days, open to all groups of qualified civil service employees. At theagency’s discretion, the announcement may also be open to qualified individuals


Table 2: Representation of Women in the Career Senior ExecutiveService (SES), September 2007

Agency Number of SES Percentage of Women

Agriculture 318 28.3

Agency for International Development 22 45.5

Commerce 317 28.4

Defense 1,123 22.6

Education 66 36.4

Energy 421 22.8

Environmental Protection Agency 261 37.5

General Services Administration 80 28.8

Health and Human Services 356 44.1

Homeland Security 325 26.2

Housing and Urban Development 89 38.2

Interior 221 31.7

Justice 645 22.2

Labor 133 33.1

NASA 431 23.4

Nuclear Regulatory Commission 146 19.9

National Science Foundation 79 44.3

Office of Personnel Management 42 38.1

Small Business Administration 36 27.8

Social Security Administration 134 41.8

State 114 32.5

Transportation 188 36.2

Treasury 386 36.8

Veterans Affairs 236 30.9

Source: Adapted from Diversity in the Federal SES and Senior Levels of the U.S. Postal Serviceand Processes for Selecting New Executives (GAO-08-609T) (pp. 4–5), by the U.S. GovernmentAccountability Office, April 3, 2008, Washington, DC: GAO.

outside the civil service. After the recruitment period closes, the ERB must screen, rate,and rank the candidates and prepare a written certification list of those deemed bestqualified, which the ERB then forwards to the selection panel or selecting official forapplicant interview(s) and/or a hiring decision, as appropriate. 49

OPM regulations mandate that “all candidates compete and be rated and rankedon the same basis, and that selection be based solely on qualifications and not onpolitical or other non-job-related factors.”50 The ERB assesses the technical andexecutive qualifications of each SES applicant. To demonstrate technical qualifications,each candidate must submit written narratives that illustrate his/her specific, job-related technical knowledge and skills related to the advertised position/job. Todemonstrate executive core qualifications (ECQs), each candidate must submit writtennarratives illustrating his/her executive leadership experiences and potential forsuccess within the SES, beyond his/her technical expertise (see Table 3).

ERB panels often access candidates using a crediting plan, which outlines themanner in which the ECQs and any mandatory qualifications are to be rated for eachcandidate. The purpose of the crediting plan, which is generally prepared with theassistance of the servicing human resources officer, is to guide ERB members inassessing each candidate’s application package in a consistent manner and also toprovide a means by which to document the consideration and rating given each. TheERB must document and certify its actions, including issuing written recommendationson all eligible candidates, through a list provided to the selecting panel or official(s).51

Unless no selection is made, the selecting official/appointing authority is required toselect from among the candidates the ERB identified as best qualified. As with therating and ranking process, the selection decision must be based on the qualificationsof the candidates, not on political or other non-job-related factors.52

Once the appointing authority makes a selection from the best qualified list ofcandidates for a particular SES position, but prior to the selectee’s initial appointmentas a career SES, an independent OPM qualifications review board (QRB) must certifythe selectee’s ECQs.53 The purpose of the QRB is to evaluate and certify that theproposed selectee possesses executive skills and an understanding of governmentsufficient to lead, as opposed to being simply technically proficient.54

OPM manages multiple QRBs to review the qualifications of candidates in a timelymanner. A QRB generally consists of three SES members, a majority of whom must becareer SES and, generally, one of whom who has previously served on a QRB panel.OPM does not allow QRB members to evaluate candidates from their own agencies orto compare candidates. In addition, the QRB may not rely on any information otherthan what OPM provides. An OPM QRB administrator convenes each panel andensures the panel process is conducted according to OPM requirements.

The members of the QRB meet and assess whether each candidate presentedmeets management and executive competency standards, based upon one of threecategories of criteria, listed as criterion (A), (B), and (C). Specifically, current lawrequires that SES candidates be evaluated based upon: (A) consideration ofdemonstrated executive experience; (B) consideration of successful participation in acareer executive development program which is approved by the Office; or (C)



Table 3: Senior Executive Service Executive Core Qualifications(ECQs)

Leading Change Leading People Results-Driven Business Acumen Building Coalitions

Definitions

This corequalificationinvolves theability to bringabout strategicchange, bothwithin andoutside theorganization, tomeetorganizationalgoals. Inherentto this ECQ isthe ability toestablish anorganizationalvision and toimplement it in acontinuouslychangingenvironment.

This corequalificationinvolves theability to leadpeople towardmeeting theorganization'svision, mission,and goals.Inherent to thisECQ is theability to providean inclusiveworkplace thatfosters thedevelopment ofothers,facilitatescooperation andteamwork, andsupportsconstructiveresolution ofconflicts.

This corequalificationinvolves theability to meetorganizationalgoals andcustomerexpectations.Inherent to thisECQ is theability to makedecisions thatproduce high-quality results byapplyingtechnicalknowledge,analyzingproblems, andcalculating risks.

This corequalificationinvolves theability tomanage human,financial, andinformationresourcesstrategically.

This corequalificationinvolves theability to buildcoalitionsinternally andwith otherfederalagencies, stateand localgovernments,nonprofit andprivate sectororganizations,foreigngovernments, orinternationalorganizations toachievecommon goals.

Creativity andInnovation

ExternalAwareness

Flexibility

Resilience

StrategicThinking

Vision

ConflictManagement

LeveragingDiversity

DevelopingOthers

Team Building

Accountability

CustomerService

Decisiveness

Entrepreneur-ship

Problem Solving

TechnicalCredibility

FinancialManagement

Human CapitalManagement

TechnologyManagement

Partnering

Political Savvy

Influencing/Negotiating

Source: From Senior Executive Service: Recruitment & Selection—Executive Core Qualifications,U.S. Office of Personnel Management Web site, http://www.opm.gov/ses/recruitment/overall_ecq.asp.

Competencies

sufficient flexibility to allow for the appointment of individuals who have special orunique qualities which indicate a likelihood of executive success and who would nototherwise be eligible for appointment.55

The QRB approval of criterion (A) cases are based on a review of ECQs, thevacancy announcement, and other information OPM may provide. When reviewingcriterion (B) cases, the QRB receives OPM documentation of the ECQs, reflecting thatthe candidate has successfully completed an OPM-approved executive candidatecourse of study/development, such as those run by most federal agencies. In suchinstance, the QRB simply accepts the ECQ certification and does not recertify theECQs. Finally, the QRB reviews criterion (C) cases from the broadest perspective,based upon the agency’s entire submission, which may include an individualdevelopment plan and or additional obligations on the agency to ensure thecandidate’s successful completion of the proposed executive development activities.56

Appointment to the SES - Proposed Legislation

In June 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R.3774, the SES Diversity Act.A companion bill, S.2148, was also introduced in the Senate and referred to theCommittee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Later, S.2148 wasreferred to the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the FederalWorkforce, and the District of Columbia, where it remains as of the date of submissionof this Article for publication. While unlikely to become law during the 110th Congress,the passage of the SES Diversity Act legislation in the House and the introduction ofcompanion legislation in the Senate, make reintroduction of this, or similar legislation,a reasonable expectation during the 111th Congress.

The proposed legislation approaches SES diversity from two perspectives: (1)selection of women, minorities, and individuals with disabilities into the SES; and (2)planning and programming activities to maximize the opportunities for these groups tobe selected into the SES. This Article explores the first perspective, as it relates to initialappointments/selection of females to the career SES.

1. Enhanced Diversity on the ERB

The SES Diversity Act amends current law with respect to composition of agency ERBs,directing OPM to issue regulations that would require federal agencies and OPM toconsider diversity when designating members of SES ERBs. For the purpose of“[p]romoting diversity in the career appointments process,” this proposed legislationrequires, agencies to do the following:

In establishing an executive resources board, the head of the agency shall, to theextent practicable, ensure diversity of the board and of any subgroup thereof orother evaluation panel related to the merit staffing process for career appointees,by including members of racial and ethnic minority groups, women, andindividuals with disabilities.57


At first blush, enhancing the representational diversity of an agency’s ERB wouldnot appear to improve the gender diversity of the agency’s SES corps. For example, ifonly females applied for a particular SES position, then, regardless of therepresentational diversity of the agency’s ERB, only the names of female candidateswould be forwarded to the selecting official(s) on a list of best-qualified candidates.Conversely, if no females applied for a particular position, regardless of therepresentational diversity of the ERB, obviously no female candidates would beforwarded to the selecting official on the ERB’s certificate listing of the of best-qualifiedeligible candidates.

If, under the first scenario, either no selection was made or the recruitment actionwas cancelled, further inquiry may be appropriate. Perhaps a hiring freeze precludedfilling the position initially. Cancelling the recruitment for a budget-related reasonwould likely withstand questions about potential violations of merit-staffing principlesdue to discrimination or some other possibility of a barrier to a full and openrecruitment. If, however, the recruitment was cancelled, only to be re-initiated within arelatively short time-period, and the position was subsequently filled by a malecandidate, questions may arise about the recruitment process and/or the actions of theselecting official(s). Further investigation to determine the cause for non-selectionfrom the initial recruitment, which generated only female candidates, may bewarranted to determine whether a violation of merit-staffing principles occurred, basedon discrimination. Thus, there are numerous possible causes that affect therepresentational percentages among the SES within various federal agencies. Withouta review of the actual recruitment action(s), however, one should not unequivocallyconclude the representational status of the ERB made a difference.

Although not addressed specifically in the proposed legislation, there arearguably several activities during the SES selection process where diversity could havean impact, in terms of possibly resulting in enhanced gender diversity of initial SESappointments. These activities include: determining qualifications standards for eachSES position, interviewing best-qualified candidates, and checking the references ofthe potential selectee prior to finalizing the selection decision.

Under Section 3392 of Title 5, U.S. Code, agency heads must establishqualification standards for each career SES position in the agency in accordance withOPM requirements before filling the position(s). OPM has set forth these requirementsin 5 C.F.R. §317.402, as follows:

(a) The qualifications standard must be in writing and identify the breadth anddepth of the professional/technical and executive/managerial knowledge,skills, and abilities, or other qualifications, required for successful performancein the position.

(b) The standard must be specific enough to enable applicants to be rated andranked according to their degree of qualifications when the position is beingfilled on a competitive basis.


(c) Each qualifications criterion in the standard must be job related. The standardmay not emphasize agency-related experience, however, to the extent that itprecludes otherwise well-qualified candidates from outside the agency fromappointment consideration.

(d) The standard may not include--

(1) A minimum length of experience requirement beyond that authorized forsimilar positions in the General Schedule;

(2) A minimum education requirement beyond that authorized for similarpositions in the General Schedule; or

(3) Any criterion prohibited by law or regulation.58

Whether the agency ERB or another group develops the qualifications standardsfor SES positions, diversity among the participants may enhance the quality of theresulting product, if for no other reason than the realization among all involved that thecriteria required for successful job performance may not be viewed the same orperformed the same by all. Clearly, any group of subject-matter experts (or those whoare familiar with the duties and qualification requirements for a position) coulddevelop acceptable qualifications standards. A diverse group, however, may improvethe final standards in two ways: by drafting standards that (1) encourage applicationsfrom the broadest possible group of candidates, and (2) provide the rating and rankingpanel consistency of evaluation, across all applications received.

A second activity in which diversity may improve the selection process occursduring the interview phase. Individuals involved in the rating and ranking panel for aparticular position should not also participate on the interview panel for that position,to ensure a fair process. To the extent that SES interview panels reflect diversity,however, the overall selection process and outcome is enhanced, for the agency as wellas for the candidate. For the agency, a diverse interview panel affords the panel, andultimately, the selecting official, a broader assessment of the candidate’s qualificationsand qualities. Exposure to a diverse interview panel also provides an opportunity forthe candidate to personally obtain a sense of what s/he may reasonably expect in termsof the agency’s culture, different SES perspectives and personalities, and the level ofinclusiveness, all of which, to varying degrees, may be gleaned from interacting with adiverse interview panel.

Third, diversity among those who conduct the reference checking phase of theselection process may provide an opportunity to assess a potential SES candidate’sECQs from a vantage broader than a static review of a resume and qualificationsstatement(s). Confirmation, through reference checks, of information previously learned could support assessment of the core competency of honesty/integrity or ofinterpersonal skills.


2. Enhanced Diversity on the QRB

The SES Diversity Act amends current law with respect to composition of the OPMQRBs. In establishing QRBs, the proposed legislation directs OPM that:

Consideration should also be given to improving diversity by including membersof racial and ethnic minority groups, women, and individuals with disabilities onqualifications review boards.59

The OPM QRB process provides existing SES members a unique opportunity tobe part of the merit-staffing process for new SES appointments government-wide.Statistics regarding the number of SES candidates that OPM’s QRBs declined to certify,and under what criterion (A, B, or C), are not readily available. Additionally, the QRBmembers are required to consider only those documents which OPM provides to themfor review; therefore, the role of the QRB is limited. The extent to which a diverse QRBcould impact the gender diversity of initial SES selectees may be most likely to occurthrough the consideration of Criterion (C) cases in which, arguably, as compared to theother criteria, a holistic review of the proposed selectee is required. Otherwise,whether increased representation diversity of a particular QRB panel would necessarilyresult in enhanced gender diversity of new appointments to the career SES seemsunclear.

3. Reporting Requirements of Diversity of the ERB and QRB

The proposed legislation establishes reporting requirements for publication ofstatistics that agencies and OPM would have to submit to the SESRO annually. Statisticsto be collected include: the total number of career SES positions at each agency; thenumber of vacancies and of those, for how many vacancies the agency is seekingcandidates; the number of individuals certified by an OPM QRB and theirrepresentational composition; and the representational composition of the SES,agency ERBs, and OPM’s QRBs.60 The data would be posted on the OPM internet site.61

Finally, the proposed legislation would require that “[t]he head of each agency shallprovide the [OPM] with such information” as needed for the SESRO to compile thestatistics.62

During an April 2008 hearing on the proposed legislation, OPM’s AssociateDirector for Strategic Human Resources Policy, Nancy Kichak, noted that the U.S.Department of Justice had advised that such requirements are likely “unconstitutionalunder governing equal protection precedents.”63 Collecting and posting statistics toOPM’s website depicting representational data of agency ERBs and OPM’s QRBs,without corresponding causal supporting evidence, could be met with potential legalcomplications and may unnecessarily introduce an element of distrust in the civilservice merit-staffing principles.

For example, the proposed legislation amends current law by requiring that“consideration” be given to the appointment of women, racial minorities, andindividuals with disabilities on ERBs and QRBs.64 Another section of the proposed


legislation, however, requires OPM to “establish and maintain annual statistics [. . .] onthe composition of executive resources boards with regard to race, ethnicity, sex, andindividuals with disabilities; and the composition of qualifications review boards withregard to race, ethnicity, sex, and individuals with disabilities.”65 When read together,the legislation could be construed as either indirectly or directly requiring agencies toinclude gender and race in their selection process. If so, this would result in a conflictwith the principles of civil service merit-staffing and may also be viewed as a barrier tocompetition.

The requirement that agencies provide specific information regarding therepresentational composition of the SES, ERBs, and or QRBs may also place pressureon smaller agencies to assign ERB or QRB responsibilities to the same individual(s)over and over, in order for the OPM data posted to the website to reflectrepresentational diversity. This may not only burden those called to serve multipletimes, but may also result in other potential ERB or QRB members being denied theopportunity to serve, thereby potentially raising reverse discrimination issues.

Finally, such reporting requirements could also be viewed as disregarding thebroader perspective of diversity that transcends the representational perspective ofrace or gender, and encompasses culture, experience, values, attitudes, etc.66

ConclusionAt 29.1 percent, the representation of women holding senior executive positions

in the U.S. federal government lags behind the 46.3 percent of women in the U.S. laborforce and the 43.2 percent of women in the U.S. federal government workforce.During the past year, Subcommittee Chairmen in both the U.S. House ofRepresentatives and the U.S. Senate have expressed interest in the need to take actionto increase the diversity of career appointees to the SES, in order to reflect the diversityof the Nation served. In furtherance of this goal, the SES Diversity Assurance Act wasintroduced during the 110th Congress. This Article explored the provisions of thisproposed legislation that address initial selection to the SES.

The present-day civil service system requires merit-based recruitment and staffingto uphold the public’s expectation that career service in the federal government isopen to all, free from patronage, and staffed by competent career servants. It is unclearwhether a change to the existing selection process of initial appointments to the careerSES is needed at this time or whether such a change would increase gender diversityamong the career SES. A focus on increasing the representational diversity within thecareer members of the SES by legislatively mandating a representational diversityrequirement for selection panels disregards the broader perspective that diversityencompasses more than representational status. Such a mandate may also result inunintended consequences. For instance, if enacted as currently drafted, the proposedprovisions discussed in this Article, may create legal tensions with the existing civilservice merit system principles, including creating a perception that future careerappointments to the SES are to be quota-based and that current selection processes areinherently faulty.


Although low representation of a particular group is, according to EEOC,indicative of a potential barrier to equal employment opportunity, it is not definitive.Before legislating change to the existing process, it may be beneficial to Congress ifeither GAO or the CHCO Council undertook further study of the matter. The GAO orthe CHCO Council could analyze SES recruitment actions government-wide through arepresentative sampling of agencies for a specific time period to determine what, if any,underlying causes may impact the rate at which female applicants are selected to jointhe career SES. Identification of specific causes would then enable agencies to initiate,with specificity, steps to eliminate any identified barriers.

Notes1 See generally, P.L. No. 9-5-454 (Oct. 13, 1978).

2 Current Population Survey, Annual Averages, 2007. Retrieved on 09/13/2008, fromhttp://www.catalyst.org/publication/132/us-women-inbusiness.

3 Annual report on the Federal Workforce. Fiscal Year 2007. The U.S. Equal EmploymentOpportunity Commission. Available at www.eeoc.gov.

4 U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2008, April 3). GAO-08-609T. Diversity in the FederalSES and Senior Levels of the U.S. Postal Service and Processes for Selecting New Executives.Available at www.gao.gov.

5 H.R.3774, 110th Congress, 2d Sess. (2008, June 3). Senior Executive Service DiversityAssurance Act.

6 Ibid at Section 4(b)(1)(A), (B), (C).

7 Remarks of Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Federalworkforce, Postal Service, and the District of Columbia. (2007, Oct. 9). Congressional Record,E2090.

8 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a).

9 Legislative History of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, Congressional Findings,pp.82-86, 421-425.

10 Ibid.

11 See supra, Note 1.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Fineman, Michal and Starkman, Jodi. (2006, July-Aug.). “Talent Management: a StrategicApproach to Development and Retention of Key Human Resources.” PIHRAScope, pp. 16-20.

16 Lewis, Robert E. & Heckman, Robert J ( June 2006). Talent Management: A Critical Review,Human Resource Management Review, 16(2), 139-154.

17 Ibid.

18 See generally, 5 C.F.R. §250.203. Available at https://www.opm.gov/hcaaf_resource_center/2-2.asp.

19 EEOC Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures. Available at www.eeoc.gov.

20 5 U.S.C. §2301.


21 5 U.S.C Section 2301(b)(1).

22 Ibid. at (b)(2).

23 Pub. L. No. 107-296 (Nov. 25, 2002).


25 5 C.F.R. Part 720, Subpart B.

26 5 CFR §720.202(a).


28 EEO MD-715 (2003, Oct. 1).

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Chief Human Capital Officers Council Charter, available at http://www.chcoc.gov/Charter.aspx.

32 Ibid. See also, Crumpacker, Martha and Crumpacker, Jill M. (2004, Sept). “Elevating, Integratingand Institutionalizing Strategic Human Capital Management in Federal Agencies through theChief Human Capital Officer (CHCO),” Review of Public Personnel Administration, 24(3), 234-256.


34 See 5 U.S.C. §3393(b).


36 5 U.S.C. §3133(e)(1).



39 U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (1992, Oct.). A Question of Equity – Women and the GlassCeiling. p. x. Available at www.mspb.gov.

40 Ibid.


42 Federal Equal Opportunity REcruitment Program Fiscal Year 2007 Report, at 41. Available athttps://www.opm.gov/About_OPM/Reports/FEORP/index.asp.


44 Ibid.

45 See supra, Note 4 at p. 6.

46 5 CFR §317.501(a).

47 Ibid.

48 5 C.F.R. §317.401(a).

49 See generally, 5 C.F.R. §317.501

50 5 C.F.R. §317.501(c)(1).

51 Ibid. at (c)(4).

52 Ibid. at (c)(6).

53 5 C.F.R. §317.502(a).


54 Ibid. at (c).

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid. See also, OPM website at https://www.opm.gov/ses/recruitment/qrbprocess.asp#role.

57 H.R. 3774 at Sec. 5(a)(1).

58 5 C.F.R. §317.402.

59 See supra, Note 57 at Sec. 5(b)(2).

60 Ibid at Sec. 4(b)(7).

61 Ibid at Sec. 4(b)(8).

62 Ibid at Sec. 4(d).

63 Losey, Stephen. (2008, April 6). “Lawmakers, OPM Clash Over How to Promote SES Diversity.”Retrieved on 08/02/2008 from http://federaltimes.com/index.php?S=3464008.

64 See supra, at Notes 61 and 62.

65 See supra, at Note 62.

66 Crumpacker, Martha, and Crumpacker, Jill M. (2007, Winter). “Succession Planning andGenerational Stereotypes: Should HR Consider Age-Based Values and Attitudes a RelevantFactor or a Passing Fad?” Public Personnel Management, 36(4), 349-363.

AuthorsMartha Crumpacker, DBA

P.O. Box 4006Topeka, KS 66604(785) [email protected]

Jill M. Crumpacker, JD, LLM, SPHR

P.O. Box 150561Alexandria, VA 22315(703) [email protected]

Martha Crumpacker, DBA, is an associate professor of management at the WashburnUniversity School of Business in Topeka, KS. She teaches or has taught strategic humanresources, management, and organizational behavior in the graduate and undergraduateprograms. She has also designed and delivered custom training in human resources andmanagement to Fortune 500 companies and public sector organizations. A past contrib-utor to Public Personnel Management, she has also published in a number of otherpeer-reviewed journals, including the Review of Public Personnel Administration.


Jill M. Crumpacker, JD, LLM, SPHR, is currently the deputy director of human capi-tal management for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC. She previ-ously served as executive director of the U.S. Federal Labor Relations Authority inWashington. She has also served as a staff attorney for a board member of the NationalLabor Relations Board and as director of employment and training for the KansasDepartment of Labor. A past contributor to Public Personnel Management, she has alsopublished in a number of other peer-reviewed journals, including the Review of PublicPersonnel Administration.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and inno way purport to represent an opinion, policy, or position of the Washburn UniversitySchool of Business, the U.S. government, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Noth-ing in this article should be considered legal advice.


The Next Generation ofLeadershipAssessments: SomeCase StudiesBy Marilyn K. Gowing, PhD, David M. Morris, PhD, JD, Seymour Adler, PhD,and Mitchell Gold, PhD

In this article, we provide a brief overview of leadership theory and research, somebackground on the traditional assessment center process, and detaileddescriptions of three of the latest approaches to leadership assessment, alongwith case studies drawn from public and private organizations. The threeapproaches include the Telephone Assessment Program, LEADeR, and video-based assessment centers. We conclude with some suggestions for newdirections in leadership simulation design.

Great leaders. We know them when we see them, but how can we identifythose high-potential employees who will one day run their organizations?Workforce planners have been warning for years of the impending wave of

baby boomer retirements. Many organizations are finally heeding those warnings andtaking steps to identify and nurture leadership talent.

While professionals in psychology have been in the forefront of leadershipassessment for many decades, some fascinating new approaches have recentlyemerged that allow organizations to maximize the use of technology, and these aregaining broad acceptance in corporate America and in local, state, and federalgovernment organizations.

In this article, we provide a brief overview of leadership theory and research,some background on the traditional assessment center process, and detaileddescriptions of three of the latest approaches to leadership assessment, along with casestudies drawn from public and private organizations. We conclude with somesuggestions for new directions in leadership simulation design.

The first of the new approaches we shall describe is the Telephone AssessmentProgram (TAP), which was created by one of the authors of this review, Seymour Adler,PhD. TAP was one of the earliest attempts to take the complex and costly assessmentcenter process and make it more efficient.

A later innovation that will be described here is LEADeR, which is a miniassessment center on computer. Aon Consulting was the first company to market thefully automated leadership simulation developed by Kirk Rogg, PhD. Sadly, Dr. Rogg


passed away in 2007, ending a brilliant career much too soon. This article is dedicatedto Dr. Rogg, as well as to Dr. Mark Lifter, the former head of the Aon Consulting TalentSolutions practice, who supported the LEADeR research.

The third approach we describe, Video-Based Assessment Centers, is anotherattempt to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of an assessment center process byusing videotape in creative ways. David M. Morris, PhD, JD, president of Morris &McDaniel and the designer of this innovative, streamlined assessment system, is alsoone of the authors of this review.

What Does the Leadership Research Tell Us?We are fortunate to have an excellent summary of the history of leadership theory andresearch in the form of a 2007 special issue of the American Psychologist.1 This issuebegins with a compelling quote by Robert Sternberg: “The United States became agreat nation because of the leadership skills of the Founding Fathers. Whether it willremain a great nation will depend, in large part, on the leadership skills of those inpower today.”2 So, with the success of our organizations, our government, and ourfuture depending upon our leaders, what should those responsible for developingtomorrow’s leaders be assessing?

Assessing the PersonZaccaro has summarized the evolution of trait-based leadership theories.3 He beganwith the earliest leadership studies and their emphasis on the unique attributes ofleaders that were inherited and part of leaders’ genetic makeup.4 Zaccaro indicatedthat this perspective, suggesting that leadership qualities were traits that were largelyimmutable and not amenable to development, guided the preponderance of theleadership research into the 20th century until Stogdill and others suggested that trait-based leadership was insufficient to explain leaders’ effectiveness.5 Zaccaro added,“This rejection [of trait-based leadership] was widespread and long lasting, and itechoed in most of the major social and industrial and organizational psychologytextbooks for the next 30 to 40 years.”6

Zaccaro noted that in the 1980s, charismatic and transformational leadershipmodels again surfaced, emphasizing extraordinary qualities of individuals asdeterminants of those people’s effectiveness. Zaccaro concluded that recent studies,including his own research, have linked personality variables and other stable personalattributes to leaders’ effectiveness, providing a substantial empirical foundation for theargument that traits do matter in the prediction of individuals’ effectiveness as leaders.7

Many theorists have gone beyond traits, emphasizing extensive lists of abilities,competencies, and skills that are essential for leadership effectiveness.8

Assessing the SituationWhile many theorists have been concentrating on the identification of individualattributes that contribute to leaders’ effectiveness—whether they be stable personalitytraits, competencies, knowledge, values, or something else—others have focused on


the environment in which leaders operate. Vroom and Jago9 credited Stogdill10 withbeing among the first to conclude that an adequate analysis of leadership involves notonly a study of leader attributes, but also an investigation of the situations in which aleader operates.

The Ohio State studies in the 1950s and 1960s, with Shartle, Stogdill, Fleishman,and others, focused on leadership behavior. Vroom and Jago suggested, “Leaderbehavior research was a step in the direction of acknowledging the role of situation orcontext in leadership. Unlike traits, behavior is potentially influenced not only by theleaders’ dispositions, but also by the situations that leaders confront. … Leaderbehavior can therefore be an effect of subordinate behavior as well as a cause of it.”11

There were also a number of pure situational theorists who found that very littleof the organizational outcome variance could be explained by changes in leadership.12

Assessing BothVroom and Jago have summarized the current state of leadership theory best, writing,“Most social scientists interested in leadership have now abandoned the debatebetween person or situation in favor of a search for a set of concepts that are capable ofdealing both with differences in situations and with differences in leaders.”13 Theseapproaches have yielded contingency theories that try to describe what type of peopleand behaviors are effective in different situations.14 Vroom and Jago concluded thatleadership, which involves the process of influence, is represented in all aspects of thatprocess, including the traits of the source of influence, the cognitive process of thesource, the nature of the interaction that makes influence toward a goal possible, andthe situational context of that process. With so many variables influencing theeffectiveness of a leader, the leadership assessment had best be complex. What betterway to capture and manipulate these various aspects of leadership than in simulations?

The Traditional Assessment Center ProcessFor more than 25 years, assessment centers have been seen as a valid—by some, themost valid—method for assessing leadership potential.15 A core element of theassessment center method is deploying a team of trained assessors who evaluate eachcandidate’s job-relevant leadership competencies by observing the candidate inmultiple simulation exercises. In addition, assessors often also draw on otherassessment tools such as tests and interviews. Traditionally, final candidate evaluationsare arrived at through a judgment process that involves discussions between theassessors of their individual evaluations and the formation of a consensus opinionregarding a candidate.

It is important to note that a half century after Douglas Bray first introducedassessment centers in a nonmilitary context for leadership assessment at AT&T,16 it isstill not entirely clear why assessment centers are valid, as C.E. Lance has discussed.17

What is clear is that assessment centers, when properly designed and administered,provide valid information for making hiring, promotion, and development planningdecisions for leadership positions.


For most of the past 50 years, leadership assessment centers have been physicallocations, with multiple candidates and multiple assessors present for periods rangingfrom one to four days.18 In the most typical setup, 10 to 12 candidates, six assessors,and an administrator come together at a central facility that has one or two conferencerooms and six or more smaller rooms for breakout sessions. Candidates come to thelocation for a day or two of assessment exercises, interviews, and tests. The assessorsstay a day or two longer to discuss each candidate and to develop a compositecandidate profile and final overall evaluation for each candidate. This traditionalstructure is still widely used, especially in the public sector.19

This traditional bricks-and-mortar design for assessment centers is costly andcumbersome. The notion that this traditional design is the only acceptable way to doassessments has, over the past 20 years, led many organizations to move away fromusing assessment centers despite the centers’ proven effectiveness and towardalternative and often inferior ways of assessing employees’ and possible hires’leadership potential. Other organizations have increased assessment center efficiencyby videotaping participants’ performances on exercises and scoring the participants ata later time.20 Lievens and Thornton21 discussed the increased use of computerized inbaskets or video simulations in which participants provide responses to multiple-choice questions. They also pointed out that, while such uses of technology canincrease the efficiency and flexibility of assessment centers, those efficiencies andflexibilities come at a significant cost in terms of lowered fidelity of the simulationexercises and, thus, the credibility and validity of the exercise results.

One of the key benefits of using assessment centers in which candidates andassessors interact face to face is the rich behavioral information the interactionsprovide about a candidate. That information can be critical in a developmentalassessment center when participants receive diagnostic feedback and work with amanager or coach to create a specific and actionable individual development plan. Itcan also be valuable in a selection/promotion assessment center for promotingperceptions of procedural fairness.22

In the next sections, we describe three alternatives to the traditional assessmentcenter design that incorporate all the elements that make bricks-and-mortarassessment centers valid and behaviorally rich, but which leverage technology to makeassessments flexible, simple, and significantly less costly. We describe how each ofthese nontraditional approaches was developed; detail how they are designed,validated, and applied in real-world settings; and present case studies on theirapplication for leadership assessment.

Breaking Out of Bricks and Mortar: The TelephoneAssessment ProgramIn 1979, a major financial services firm, under a court order to develop a moreobjective, job relevant selection procedure for hiring account executives, engagedAssessment Solutions Incorporated (ASI) to design an assessment center for evaluatingcandidates. At the time, the industry-leading firm Merrill Lynch had successfully


implemented such an approach for account executive screening.23 The Merrill Lynchprogram used a traditional assessment center approach, using experienced managersand account executives as assessors and bringing groups of candidates to a branchoffice during off-hours to conduct the assessment.

The new assessment center developed by ASI followed this established modelinitially, requiring candidates to come to a testing facility. Each candidate was assessedon their performance during six role-play exercises that were designed to represent therange of challenging, on-the-job situations that were identified during job analysis asbeing typical of those encountered by new account executives early in their careers.These situations reflected interactions with different types of prospects and customers.Four of these simulated interactions were conducted over the telephone by twoassessors who were situated remotely, and the other two simulations wereadministered on site and face to face by two assessors.

Even in this first iteration of an assessment solution, ASI’s design departed fromorthodox assessment center practice in two ways. Like the initial assessment centerused by AT&T in its famous Management Progress Study,24 but unlike virtually alloperational centers for the following 25 years, ASI used professional assessors whowere specially hired and trained to conduct role-plays and evaluate candidates usingassessment center methodology. Unlike the Management Progress Study assessmentprocess, though, the one developed by ASI used professional assessors—mostlymaster’s and doctoral level psychologists—exclusively. Second, the ASI assessmentprocess reflected emerging research findings that indicated the superiority of actuarial(arithmetical) calculation of overall assessment scores from individual ratings ratherthan the then-standard clinical ( judgmental) combination of scores throughdiscussions aimed at reaching a consensus evaluation.25

After assessing the first 100 account executive candidates, ASI examined theincremental variance in the overall assessment scores added by ratings from the twoon-site exercises over and above ratings from the four remotely delivered telephonerole-play exercises and found the value-added to be negligible. Taking seriously theimplications of this finding, the on-site, face-to-face role play exercises were eliminated,thereby creating the first TAP.

Overview of MethodTAPs are live simulations of the tasks performed for a specific target position. As high-fidelity simulations, TAPs provide candidates with experiential, realistic job previewsthat have been shown to reduce early turnover.26 TAPs are designed to measure, acrossmultiple exercises, a behaviorally defined set of target competency dimensions, witheach dimension (e.g., communications, social adeptness, problem solving) beingmeasured multiple times. Leadership TAPs tend to range from 90 minutes to 3 hours,and individual exercises can last as long as 30 minutes. TAPs have been used by close to100 organizations, and some 1.5 million candidates have been assessed through TAPsover the past 25 years.

A TAP can consist of as many as eight exercises, some of which can be one-on-oneinteractions with an assessor while others can involve simulated team meetings with as


many as three assessors. TAPs are often used for high-stakes selection and promotiondecisions.27 However, the competency profiles generated through a TAP are also oftenused as sound, behaviorally-detailed bases for developmental planning, coaching, oronboarding.

Advantages of TAP

Minimizing Bias

Telephone assessors focus exclusively on a candidate’s demonstrated behavior to arriveat competency evaluations. The assessors are not affected by a candidate’s physicalfeatures, education, experience, or race —because they have no way of knowing thesethings. Telephone assessors may, however, be able to determine a candidate’snationality if the candidate has an accent. The system used to remotely captureassessors’ ratings also ensures that when one assessor begins an exercise with acandidate, that assessor has no access to the ratings provided by other assessors whointeracted with the candidate during earlier exercises.

Quality Assurance

Operating from a central TAP call center, assessors draw on validated behavioralguidelines when making their ratings of each target competency dimension andevaluating a candidate. Because the simulation is being conducted remotely, theassessor can view role-play prompts and evaluation guidelines on a computer screen atthe same time as he or she is interacting with the candidate, something that cannot bedone when conducting exercises face to face. This standardizes the assessment processwithout detracting from the realism of the role-play.

The system produces Statistical Process Control reports that enable qualityassurance supervisors to identify average differences in ratings between assessors andfor the same assessor across time on the same exercises or the same dimensions. Out-of-limit means or variances prompt feedback to and coaching for the assessor(s) on thespecific exercise or competency dimension demonstrating the anomaly. Moreover,using digital recording technology, simulation calls are captured in a manner that, aftera general notification that the exercises may be recorded for quality assurance, is totallyunobtrusive to the candidate. Recorded calls are then randomly rerated by the same ora different assessor to assess reliability. Reliability coefficients are typically in the low.80s across TAPs.

Scheduling, Administration, and Reporting

Candidates for TAP can be scheduled or can self-schedule. Aon, the company thatacquired ASI in 2001, has administered as many as 800 TAPs in a single day. No oneneeds to travel. For some applications, TAPs are designed so that they can even beadministered under unproctored conditions, with the applicant on the phone fromhome. Background materials can be provided in hard copy or made available in


printable or view-only form online. Figure 1 presents one screen of online delivery of acandidate’s background materials.

By having assessors enter their ratings online and employing arithmeticalcalculation of composite scores, final evaluation reports are ready for electronictransmission back to the client organization within minutes of a TAP’s conclusion. TAPsthus meet the administrative, recruitment, and branding needs of organizations. TAPsprovide organizations that are increasingly concerned with time-to-hire cycle times avalid and sophisticated assessment methodology with an administratively flexible andcost-effective delivery.

Design

TAPs are closely modeled on the targeted jobs and are designed based on detailed jobanalysis information, including task and competency inventories, interviews withincumbents and managers, review of archival materials (e.g., training manuals,performance appraisal forms), and job observations. Consequently, in common withthe design of all sound selection processes and consistent with the theoretical trendsidentified in the introduction of this article, the job analysis must identify the criticalcompetencies required for effective performance.


Figure 1: Sample Screen of Online Candidate Materials for theTelephone Assessment Program

In addition, the design of a valid and credible (i.e., face valid) TAP requires theidentification of the critical situational challenges typically encountered by incumbentsin the target position. Moreover, the design of a TAP requires the identification ofobservable behaviors that are elicited by those situational challenges and the scaling ofthose behaviors in terms of the degree to which they reflect underlying strength orweakness in each competency. In developing a TAP, a panel of subject matter expertsprovides the scaling of these behaviors for each dimension on each exercise. On anongoing basis, when role-playing with candidates, assessors apply these evaluationguidelines systematically to assess candidates’ skills on each target dimension.

Validity

As simulations, TAPs can be validated using content-oriented strategies. The typicalprocedure for doing this is to work with a panel of between 8 and 12 subject matterexperts in a 1-day session. The panel is provided with candidate background materials andlistens to two or three recorded samples of each exercise (usually taped during piloting).After each exercise, the panel rates the degree to which the exercise reflects the activitiesand competency requirements that characterize the target position. The panel also ratesthe degree to which each exercise and the TAP as a whole reflect situations typical of theposition. Content validity ratios28 for TAPs almost always exceed .90.

In addition, Aon Consulting has conducted several criterion-oriented validationstudies using both concurrent and predictive designs. In one recent predictive,criterion oriented study, a pool of 1,200 internal managerial candidates were assessedthrough a TAP. A total of 224 were promoted to leadership positions without referenceto their TAP scores. The predictive validity for TAP correcting for criterion reliability andpredictor range restriction was .32. Comparisons of pass rates across differentdemographic groups on TAP have typically demonstrated no adverse impact for AfricanAmericans or women. Too little data existed for similar analyses for other protectedgroups.

Case Study: Promotional System for a Federal LawEnforcement AgencyA federal law enforcement agency created a new system for evaluating law officers forpromotion to positions at the middle management level. The new promotional processwas intended to evaluate candidates on target leadership competencies using methodsthat reduced subjectivity and increased the perceived fairness of the system.

A core element of the new system is the Leadership TAP that was developed,validated, and implemented by the agency in partnership with Aon Consulting toevaluate candidates’ possession of the target managerial competencies. To help ensurecredibility and cultural acceptance, the agency required that the TAP have face validity,meaning that it was fully customized to the specific demands of key middle-management positions. Agency executives and a project liaison from Aon Consultingwere actively involved in the development of simulation exercises, setting specificbehavioral standards for each competency and subcompetency on each simulation


exercise, piloting simulation exercises, and documenting evidence for the contentvalidity of the program.

Each TAP lasts 2.5 hours. The TAP is administered to the candidate from a securelocation, most typically an Aon office near the agency’s local office. A local agencyofficial registers each candidate, verifies the candidate’s identity, and assigns thecandidate a code number. Candidates receive background materials that explain themanagerial role they will play during the TAP. The background includes the agency’smission statement; an organizational chart complete with a roster and descriptions ofthe squad members they are supervising; basic rules and procedures; e-mails, reports,and telephone messages pertinent to the TAP exercises they will face; and thatmorning’s schedule (the TAP simulation starts at 9:00 a.m., no matter what the realtime). The schedule lists four calls to the candidate; two additional calls to the“manager” are unscheduled. As an example, one of the calls is to coach a subordinate.There is also an emergency and unscheduled contact with a subordinate out in thefield calling in for guidance. A team of three to five assessors has input into theevaluation of each candidate.

Once the TAP was developed and validated, the greatest challenge of projectrollout was delivering a rigorous assessment process in a relatively short time frame—initially 3 months of test administration—for a relatively large, decentralizedpopulation of more than 3,000 applicants spread across 50 locations in the UnitedStates and around the world.

After the initial pool of candidates was assessed, ongoing assessment activitieshave involved administering the TAP to about 1,000 candidates each year. Telephonedelivery of the assessment allows the agency to implement standardized assessment inthe face of these enormous logistical challenges and minimize the time thatparticipants are taken off their critical day-to-day responsibilities. Delivery of the TAPremotely also allows the agency to maintain complete security on the identities of allcandidates and to minimize any biases in the assessment process while maintainingstrong psychological fidelity. Assessors are unaware of the participant’s name, agencyidentification number, tenure, race, or current position. Several key factors need to be in place for a major undertaking of this scope andimportance to be successful. Buy-in to the use of an innovative assessment procedurefor high-stakes decisions has to be broad and at a high-level. In this case, senior leadersat the agency enthusiastically supported the TAP process, and legal, human resources,and employee association representatives were involved throughout. Second,consultants designing the process—whether internal or external to the organization—need access to knowledgeable job experts to ensure that the simulation scenarios arerealistic without being excessively technical. The exercises must reflect the agency’sculture, and the assessment guidelines must be in accord with the standards of theorganization. Here, too, internal experts were actively involved in program design andvalidation. These experts coached the assessment team on the context, culture, andlanguage of the agency, both initially and on an ongoing basis. Last, program design hasto reflect the exigencies of implementation. Here, close cooperation between thedesign and implementation teams within and across the agency and Aon Consulting


resulted in a tight partnership that enabled implementation against an imposing arrayof logistical challenges.

LEADeR: The Frontier of Virtual AssessmentThe fast pace of leadership in today’s world of work has been likened to onlinegaming.29 Organizational leadership increasingly reflects the quick and compresseddemands that are characteristic of virtual social worlds. In these virtual worlds, teams ofcharacters from around the globe must address challenges and focus on success incollaborative and nonhierarchical ways that require taking risks and making decisionsquickly while possessing incomplete information. The skills required in these virtualworlds are becoming critical to leaders’ success in an increasingly complex globaleconomy and a rapidly changing marketplace.

LEADeR takes the assessment center approach to evaluating leadership potentialinto this virtual world. LEADeR is a realistic, high-fidelity, Web-based simulation thatputs participants in situations that permit assessors to observe and evaluateparticipants’ behaviors that are indicative of success in managerial positions. Asmentioned above, LEADeR was developed by Dr. Rogg and the consulting team at AonConsulting in response to 21st century leadership needs and assessment challenges.

Overview of MethodBroadly speaking, LEADeR is a comprehensive package of leadership competencyassessment tools and development planning processes that can be delivered on aglobal basis using an intricately designed measurement and technology platform. Theheart of the program is a “day-in-the-life,” 3.5 hour-long Internet-based businesssimulation that challenges participants to assume roles within a fictitious, but realistic,global environment. Participants must face issues during the simulation that aredesigned to reflect the key business challenges that managers and executives in thespecific organization must meet to be successful and to help achieve the organization’sfundamental business goals and execute its business strategies. Relevant businesschallenges can include issues reconciling profit and loss statements, participating onand leading cross-functional teams, doing strategic planning and analysis, anddesigning improvements imperative to successful business operations.

At a more operational level, participants engaged in the day of the life of thefictional role/company are required to make decisions and interact with others duringthe simulated workday via role-playing exercises that involve telephone calls, e-mails,instant messages, voice mails, video mails and in person discussions. Participants’responses are recorded and assessed on the degree to which they reveal a range ofcompetencies, including the participant’s ability to relate to others, solve problems,and adapt to new information. At the conclusion of the simulation, the participant andthe participant’s manager typically receive a detailed assessment and feedback report,both in written and verbal form. When specific development needs are identified,participants may sometimes receive coaching from an assessor.

LEADeR allows organizations to schedule and process candidates quickly and,


when necessary, in high volume. Other assessments (e.g., cognitive ability tests,personality inventories, multirater surveys, accomplishment records) can beadministered over the Web as part of the evaluation process prior to the simulation.

During the LEADeR simulation, data gathering and scoring of the assessmentcomponents occur in real time, and performance ratings are quickly calculated toproduce detailed behavioral feedback simulation exercises. One of the fully automatedLEADeR exercises is the Quick Hit list, during which participants are asked to rate thepriority of a variety of actions, products and/or services. This is illustrated in Figure 2.As soon as a participant completes the exercise, feedback can be provided in a varietyof report formats. The Quick Hit list is scored mechanically, enhancing accuracy byeliminating rater variance across multiple exercises.

As a result of such efficiencies, costs to administer LEADeR are at least half of thosefor administering traditional assessment center simulations. Also, coaching is facilitatedusing LEADeR. The integrated reporting from multiple sources—psychometric tests,assessors’ evaluations of role-plays, automated scoring of key competencies fromsimulation exercises—creates a strong, holistic, and detailed behavioral basis fordevelopmental planning and coaching. The LEADeR output highlights both candidates’strength and areas where candidates can improve by receiving focused coaching andother managerial interventions. In selection contexts, LEADeR provides coaches andassessors an easily interpreted, data-driven guide for having fact-based discussions withhiring managers that will lead to better selection decisions.


Figure 2: Sample Screen of Online Candidate Materials for theTelephone Assessment Program

Case Study: Promotional System for a Global FinancialServices CompanyThe appeal of LEADeR lies in its scalability and its ability to be customized to match anorganization’s environmental context and competency structure. A global financialservices company sought an improved assessment process to augment its existingapproach to identifying and developing high-potential employees for team leader andmidlevel manager roles. The organization required that the new assessment process berealistic and challenging; reflect the core leadership and role-specific competenciesthat had been defined; be standard and objective across divisions around the globe,both in the way it was administered and how it was scored; and help to create a pool ofhundreds of future leaders positioned for success through the productivecommunication and use of constructive, actionable developmental feedback based onthe assessment process.

The assessment process designed by Aon Consulting for this client to meetprogram objectives included the LEADeR Internet-based simulation, as well as adebriefing interview, telephone-based developmental coaching by an assessor with theemployee and his/her manager, and an overall assessment reaction survey. In additionto the simulation–based feedback and coaching, assessment process participants weregiven access to online development resources to further their development.

While the general platform for LEADeR existed, it was critical to ensure that thesimulation was tailored to the organization’s leadership environment and competencyframework. The LEADeR customization process followed a number of defined steps.First, job analysis interviews were conducted with a group of subject matter experts inorder to gain an understanding of the business environment in which theorganization’s current leaders were operating. This was critical to identifying thechallenges associated with the target position and the competencies required forsuccess. Consultants also conducted a thorough review of the organization’sleadership competency model.

In the second phase of LEADeR customization, the information collected duringthe first phase was used to determine which of the key business challenges that werealready part of the core LEADeR platform were most relevant to this organization.Consultants worked closely with subject matter experts from the organization until allthe critical business challenges identified during the job analysis phase were reflectedin the simulation.

As an example of customization, subject matter experts determined that, for theirparticular organization, some of the scripted comments in the role-plays were statedtoo softly for their corporate culture. As a result, the instructions and dialogue given tothe simulation participants were modified to reflect a more direct, almost aggressivetone, for corporate communications.

Fundamental to any simulation design is ensuring that the competenciesmeasured through the assessment are those required for effective job performance. Toenable cost-effective and quick customization of LEADeR to the competency models ofdifferent organizations, Aon Consulting designed LEADeR around narrowly focused


competency enablers. Enablers are defined as specific skills that allow a person tosuccessfully handle different business challenges, and, as such, are the basiccomponents of competencies.30 A single competency will typically comprise severalenablers, which can be listed as a definition of the skills reflected by that competency.

In customizing LEADeR, the organization wished to map its competency modelback to the enablers being tapped by the simulation. This was done by having highlytrained industrial/organizational psychologists at Aon Consulting make judgmentsabout the linkages between the LEADeR enablers and the competency model used bythe organization. This allowed for the translation of LEADeR’s competency languageinto the language of that organization. The organization’s own competencies, then,were reflected in all rating scales, scoring, and feedback reports.

Ensuring that the client organization would have a content-valid assessment wasof paramount importance to the Aon Consulting team. In order to create buy-inthrough active participation by key stakeholders and to conform to professionalpsychological standards for content validity as well as government guidelinesembodied in the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures,31 astructured methodology was used to obtain content-oriented evidence. Thismethodology included gathering ratings from subject matter experts from theorganization. These ratings included judgments of the extent to which the businesschallenge scenarios were similar to what leaders in the target positions mightencounter on the job and the extent to which the difficulty and complexity of thescenarios were similar to those faced on the job.

Program evaluation is typically concerned with making a credible case that theassessment process is supporting an organization’s business priorities. The success ofdemonstrating impact for an assessment process is dependent on the researchmethodology and evaluation framework chosen. In this particular case, theorganization wanted to understand the impact the assessment process would have onbuilding its pool of qualified potential leaders. Secondarily, the organization wanted tounderstand participants’ reactions to the assessment process and their perceptions ofthe value the feedback would bring to growing their leadership capabilities.Promotability and actual promotion statistics for the participants were gathered overtime. With hundreds of participants being assessed every year, company researchindicated that 40% of participants in this process were deemed ready to advance, and30% of participants were subsequently promoted. In addition, more than 90% ofparticipants surveyed felt that the feedback and coaching that they received as part ofthe assessment process would help them improve their performance and leadershipabilities.

In another study, in addition to similar reactions and promotability statistics,adoption of LEADeR saved a telecommunications client more than 50% inadministration costs, compared with what the company had previously spent ontraditional bricks-and-mortar assessment centers.

Participants consistently report that LEADeR is more realistic and challengingthan they expected. The fact that the participant must balance responding to e-mails,creating presentations, drafting memos, and making decisions while being interrupted


by phone calls is a testimony to the realism of the simulation. More important than theassessment experience itself, especially in the developmental context, however, is theparticipants’ belief that the feedback and coaching they receive gives them a clearunderstanding of their strengths and development needs, will help them improve theirmanagerial and leadership capabilities, is valuable for professional development andperformance enhancement, and is constructive and has come from sincere andtrustworthy coaches.

Finally, from a management/corporate perspective, organizations using LEADeRbelieve that the factual information derived from the simulation has successfullyidentified high-potential employees and job candidates and also facilitated strategictalent management, succession planning, and individuals’ development.

LEADeR requires participants to use proprietary Web-based programs. In the early2000s, LEADeR’s computer software and hardware demands represented a problem forsome individuals and organizations. Some organizations were limited in theirtechnology resources, and participants were sometimes asked to complete thesimulation from home using dial-up Internet connections. In those cases, the LEADeRprograms would often run suboptimally and at a reduced speed. By mid-decade,virtually all organizations ran their computers on high-speed local or wide-areanetworks. Correspondingly, almost all participants had access to low-cost, high-speedInternet access options.

One issue that has arisen in the administration of the simulation at the workplacepertains to the checks put in place by employers to block or minimize employees’ability to stream nonwork-related audio and video. LEADeR configuration inorganizations now requires extra coordination with an organization’s informationtechnology department to ensure that firewall restrictions and bandwidth capabilitiesare appropriately accounted for when setting up computers to be LEADeR-enabled.

One of the choices an organization must consider when implementing LEADeR iswhether participants will be doing the assessment from their home or from theorganization’s offices. If it is the latter, it is critical that the organization be able toaccommodate participants with private rooms and machines that have been set upwith appropriate permissions and functionality. In either case, the Web-based preworkparticipants typically complete (e.g., personality assessments, career inventories) inadvance of the simulation, and the audio/video checks and LEADeR tutorials that theparticipant must go through before initiating the simulation allow the organization todiagnose and address potential technology issues.

Some of the early literature on computer-based professional skills assessmentindicated that participants’ lack of comfort with technology might be a barrier toadoption and could negatively impact participants’ performance. More recentliterature on gaming has documented individuals’ engagement and motivation whenparticipating in computer-based development and learning activities.32 The challengeand complexity of games stimulate curiosity and motivation to succeed.33This findingsuggests that any negative performance effects stemming from people’s reactions tohaving to use computerized selection and development tools will likely be canceledout by people’s desire to do well.34 Moreover, O’Neil and Fisher35 have noted that in


today’s work environment, leaders must make complex, multicomponent decisionsunder pressure and with little room for error. They added that the use of computergaming and simulations may drive new insights when it comes to making sense ofstrategies for ultimately solving problems.

LEADeR has been administered globally in the English language. The simulationhas not been administered in other languages because, to this point, non-U.S. clientshave wanted to ensure that their prospective or existing leaders can communicate inEnglish. In some cases, however, LEADeR feedback and coaching sessions have beenprovided in a participant’s native language. More pertinent than the language issuewhen LEADeR is used outside the United States, though, is the potential for culturaldifferences in the meaning, application, and demonstration of competencies. Suchdifferences could affect how behaviors are interpreted, rated, and scored. To minimizethe impact of cultural differences, Aon Consulting staff members have worked withsubject matter experts from each organization that has used LEADeR to adjustsimulation content and scoring processes accordingly.

Video-Based Assessment Centers: A StreamlinedApproachSelecting leaders for police and fire departments involves high-stakes decisionmaking.36 Members of the protective services are extremely vested in their profession,and promotions from within the ranks are seen as very important and treated veryseriously.

The principal concern is that promotion processes result in the selection ofcompetent leaders in a legally defensible manner, while simultaneously ensuringdiversity in the ranks of senior officers. The community is the ultimate benefactorwhen good leaders are selected for protective services because the quality of thoseleaders has been shown to be a significant factor in the quality of life in thecommunity.37

The personnel consulting firm, Morris & McDaniel, has more than 30 years ofexperience in assisting communities with protective service promotion processdevelopment and implementation. The firm was invited, without bid, to assist the Cityof Philadelphia, the Mississippi State Highway Patrol, and the City of Kansas City, Mo.,Fire Department (KCFD) in addressing concerns the organizations had aboutpersonnel promotions. In two of those cases, the clients were operating under consentdecrees that resulted from protracted litigation.

In each case, Morris & McDaniel tailored a program using proctored, innovativeassessment methodologies to successfully address the client’s needs in selectingpersonnel for leadership positions. The methodologies provided diversity thatexceeded legally mandated targets and helped the organizations identify higher-qualitycandidates, according to the annotated reports of the people responsible for trainingand development.


Case Study: Promotional Systems for the Kansas City FireDepartmentKCFD managers had a long history of strife with the firefighters’ labor union. Onesource of strong disagreement was how to select the next generation of leaders for thedepartment. There had been a number of equal employment opportunity complaints,and consent decrees were in place when KCFD contracted with Morris & McDaniel.The major problem was overcoming long-standing acrimonies and building a culture ofcollaborative problem solving for the benefit of the department and the community.

Working with a newly created labor–management committee, Morris & McDanielwas able to build unanimous support for a new approach to the identification ofpotential KCFD leaders. Specifically, the committee adopted the use of multiple-choiceindividual assessment instruments to measure leadership position candidates’knowledge of and aptitude for the effective performance of managerial duties and theuse of simulation exercises for the evaluation of candidates’ leadership skills.

Morris & McDaniel provided three performance-based exercises for the rank ofdeputy chief; a written test and three exercises for the rank of battalion chief; and awritten test and three exercises for the rank of fire captain. Work has been ongoingsince 2001.

The Morris & McDaniel consulting team held technical job analysis reviewconferences with high-performing subject matter experts for each rank to review jobanalysis results for currency and provide any needed updates; to determine what eachleadership candidate should know at a given rank and confirm the tasks and subtasksthat must be performed to meet the performance standards for the given rank; toconfirm the linkage of the tasks to the knowledge, skills, and abilities for the rank; andto confirm the weighted value of each of the performance dimensions for the givenrank. The performance domains later formed the basis for the written tests andsimulations. Typically, job analyses are reviewed every year, and new job analyses areconducted every three to five years, depending upon changes in job requirements,setting, equipment, and management philosophies (e.g., an emphasis on community-based policing).

The critical incident method was also used with subject matter experts to providecontent for the exercises. Observation of critical incidents helped capture thechallenges KCFD management officials face on the job, as well as the competenciesrequired to effectively deal with those challenges. Information from the technicalconferences and the critical incident observations provided the documentation for thecontent validity report.

Typical simulations include an in-basket exercise, a situational exercise, asubordinate problem, and an oral tactical exercise. These exercises primarily measurecandidates’ competencies in dealing with the administrative and supervisorycomponents of the job. The primary objective of the assessment exercises is to identifyand rank-order high-potential individuals for promotion to the targeted ranks. None ofour simulations has had adverse impacts on women or minorities.


Video-based assessment was used for the KCFD. Video-based assessment centersuse video cameras to capture the candidates’ performance during the simulationexercises. To protect against technical malfunctions, two video cameras are used, and aback-up audio recording is made for each candidate.

A large number of candidates are presented with the same exercise at the sametime. This results in a highly standardized procedure and ensures that each candidateparticipating in the high-stakes promotion process receives exactly the same treatmentand that the only thing allowed to vary is a candidate’s performance. Unlike in atraditional assessment center, assessors are not present while candidates arecompleting the video-based assessment process. Rather, the assessors arrive after theassessment has been completed, are trained on how to successfully complete theexercises, and immediately view and rate candidates’ videotapes. Candidates’competency ratings for a given exercise, as well as overall ratings, are determined byconsensus.

Since the video cameras make a near-perfect recording of a candidate’s behavior,assessors can spend more time noting which of the behaviors are more relevant.Further, videotapes enable the assessors to rewind and view a candidate’s performanceas many times as necessary to reach an accurate observation and categorization andevaluation of the behaviors.

In addition to increasing rating accuracy by reducing inattentiveness to finedetails due to assessor fatigue, the videotapes benefit candidates because they aremade available to the candidates for review. This enhances the value of assessors’feedback and allows candidates to request a second review by assessors if they feelthere appears to have been a significant error in the initial rating and evaluation. Beingable to request a second review gives candidates a sense of ownership in the rating andthe outcome that is not possible when ratings and evaluations are based on liveviewings.

By collaborating on the development and adoption of a new promotion process,KCFD labor and management have established a better working relationship. The newprocess has helped the department’s 34 fire stations meet their mission of “protectingand serving our community with commitment and dedication to excellence.”

Summary and ObservationsWe have presented three innovative alternatives for leadership assessment that involveprocesses similar to those used in traditional assessment centers while maximizing theuse of technology to increase efficiency and decrease costs. These processes attempt tofollow professional psychological standards and government guidelines for selectionprocedure development and validation—in part, to avoid costly litigation. As the casestudies demonstrate, each of the alternative assessment processes has a good trackrecord of meeting the program objectives of client organizations.

The design and customization of TAP, LEADeR, and video-based assessments aredriven by the target jobs. For each client organization, there was an attempt to capturethe personal leadership attributes required for success in that specific setting. Subject


matter experts were relied upon to help ensure the relevance of the simulatedsituations and the assessed competencies to the particular organization’s culture.

Simulations provide an opportunity to manipulate variables to assess the impacton leader behavior and to test some of the leadership theories. Bemis suggested that“to this day, psychologists have not sorted out which traits define leaders or whetherleadership exists outside of specific situations.”38 Simulations may finally enable us toanswer these theoretical questions.

Notes1 Bennis, W. (2007). The challenge of leadership in the modern world: Introduction to the special

issue. American Psychologist, 62, 2–5; Sternberg, R. J. (2007). Forward to the Special Issue onLeadership. American Psychologist, 62, 1; Vroom, V. H., & Jago, A. G. (2007). The role of thesituation in leadership. American Psychologist, 62, 17–23; Zaccaro, S. J. (2007). Trait-basedperspectives of leadership. American Psychologist, 62, 6–16.

2 Sternberg, R. J. (2007), op cit.

3 Zaccaro, S.J. (2007), op cit.

4 Galton, F. (1869). Hereditary genius. New York: Appleton.

5 Stogdill, R. M. (1948). Personal factors associated with leadership: A survey of the literature.Journal of Psychology, 25, 35–71.

6 Zaccaro, S. J. (2007), op cit.

7 Zaccaro, S. J., Kemp, C., & Bader, P. (2004). Leader traits and attributes. In J. Antonakis, A. T.Cianciolo, & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The nature of leadership (pp. 101–124). Thousand Oaks,CA: Sage.

8 Bennis W., (2007), op cit.; Boyatzis, R. R. (1982). The competent manager: A model for effectiveperformance. New York: Wiley; Bray, D. W., Campbell, R. J., & Grant, D. L. (1974). Formativeyears in business: A long term AT&T study of managerial lives. New York: Wiley; Fleishman, E.A., Mumford, M. D., Zaccaro, S. J., Levin, K. Y., Korotkin, A. L., & Hein, M. B. (1991). Taxonomicefforts in the description of leader behavior: A synthesis and functional interpretation.Leadership Quarterly, 2, 245–287; Lominger International. (2008). Leadership Architect suite.Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://www.lominger.com/products.php; Thornton, G. C.,III, & Byham, W. C. (1982). Assessment centers and managerial performance. New York:Academic Press.

9 Vroom, V. H., & Jago, A. G. (2007), op cit.

10 Stogdill, R. M. (1948), op cit.


12 Perrow, C. (1970). Organization analysis: A sociological view. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth;Pfeffer, J. (1977). The ambiguity of leadership. Academy of Management Review, 2, 104–112.


14 Fiedler, F. (1967). A theory of leadership effectiveness. New York: McGraw-Hill; House andMitchell 1974; House, R. J., & Mitchell, T. R. (1974). Path–goal theory of leadership. Journal ofContemporary Business, 3, 81–97; Vroom, V. H. (2000). Leadership and the decision-makingprocess. Organizational Dynamics, 28, 82–94.

15 Arthur, W., Day, E. A., McNelly, T. L., & Edens, P. S. (2003). A meta-analysis of the criterion-related validity of assessment center dimensions. Personnel Psychology, 56, 125–154; Gaugler,B. B., Rosenthal, D. B., & Thornton, G. C. (1987). Meta-analysis of assessment center validity.Journal of Applied Psychology, 72, 493–511.


16 Moses, J. L., & Byham, W. C. (1977). Applying the assessment center method. New York:Pergamon Press.

17 Lance, C. E. (2008). Why assessments do not work the way they are supposed to. Industrialand Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 1, 84–97.

18 Thornton, G. C., III, & Rupp, D. E. (2006). Assessment centers in human resource management:Strategies for prediction, diagnosis, and development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence ErlbaumAssociates.

19 Nickels, B. J., Sharpe, J. P., Bauhs, K., & Holloway-Lundy, A. (2006). The PresidentialManagement Fellows Program: Lessons learned during 27 years of program success. HumanResource Management Review, 16, 324–339.

20 Joiner, D. A. (2002). Assessment centers: What’s new? Public Personnel Management,Summer 2002.

21 Lievens, F., & Thornton, G. C. (2005). Assessment centers: Recent developments in practice andresearch. In A. Evers, O. O. Smit-Vaskujl, & N. Anderson (Eds.), The Blackwell handbook ofpersonnel selection (pp. 243–264). Boston: Blackwell.

22 Kluger, A. N., & Rothstein, H. R. (1993). The influence of selection test type on applicantreactions to employment testing. Journal of Business and Psychology, 8, 3–25.

23 Marshall, S., & Hollenbeck, G. (1981). Using simulation in selecting a sales force. Training andDevelopment Journal, 35, 42–46.

24 Bray, D. W., Campbell, R. J., & Grant, D. L. (1974), op cit.

25 Dawes, R. M., Faust, D., Meehl, P. E. (1989, March 31). Clinical versus actuarial judgment.Science, 243, 1668–1674.

26 Hom, P. W., Griffeth, R. W., Pallich, L. E., & Bracker, J. S. (1998). An exploratory investigation intotheoretical mechanisms underlying realistic job previews. Personnel Psychology, 51, 421–451.

27 Sackett, P. R., Borneman, M. J., & Connelly, B. S. (2008). High-stakes testing in higher educationand employment. American Psychologist, 63, 215–227.

28 Lawshe, C. H. (1975). A quantitative approach to content validity. Personnel Psychology, 28,563–575.

29 Reeves, B., Malone, E., & O’Driscoll, T. (2008, May 1). Leadership’s online labs. HarvardBusiness Review, online, 11 pages.

30 Aon Consulting. (2007). LEADeR Technical Report: The Design, Development and Validationof the Measurement Components. Chicago, IL.: Aon Consulting.

31 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, U. S. Office of Personnel Management, U. S.Department of Labor, U. S. Department of Justice. (1978). Uniform Guidelines on EmployeeSelection Procedures. Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office.

32 Thomas, P., & Macredie, R. (1994). Games and the design of human–computer interfaces.Educational Technology, 31, 134–142.

33 Malone, T. W., & Lepper, M. R. (1987). Aptitude, learning and instruction III: Cognitive andaffective process analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

34 Wiechmann, D., & Ryan, A. M. (2003). Reactions to computerized testing in selection contexts.International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 11, 215–229.

35 O’Neil, H., & Fisher, Y. C. (2004). A technology to support leader development: Computergames. In D. V. Day, S. J. Zaccaro, & S. M. Halpin (Eds.), Leader development for transformingorganizations. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

36 Sackett, P. R., Borneman, M. J., & Connelly, B. S. (2008), op cit.


37 Goldstein, I. L. (1993). Training in organizations (3rd ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Coles.

38 Bennis, W. (2007), op cit.

AuthorsMarilyn K. Gowing, PhD

3004 P Street, N.W.Washington, DC 20007(202) 337-4443(202) [email protected]

Dr. Seymour Adler, PhD

Aon Talent Solutions199 Water Street11th FloorNew York, NY 10038(212) 441-2065(201) 681-8623 [email protected]

Dr. Mitchell Gold, PhD

Aon Human Capital-Talent Solutions8612 West 127th PlaceOverland Park, KS 66213(913) 499-0684(913) [email protected]

Dr. David Morris, PhD, JD

117 South Saint Asaph StreetAlexandria, VA 22314(703) 836-3600(703) [email protected]

Dr. Seymour Adler received his doctorate in industrial/organizational psychology fromNew York University. He is a senior vice president for and the co-leader of the talentsolutions consulting practice at Aon Consulting. For close to 30 years, Adler has directedthe development and implementation of assessment and talent management programsfor major private and public sector organizations.

Dr. Mitchell Gold received his doctorate in industrial/organizational psychology fromthe Illinois Institute of Technology. He is an assistant vice president at Aon Talent Solu-


tions Consulting, where he works with organizations in selection system design anddevelopment, leadership assessment and development, and talent and performancemanagement. Gold has also managed the development and implementation of enter-prisewide talent management solutions.

Dr. Marilyn Gowing received her doctorate in industrial/organizational psychologyfrom George Washington University. She has been a senior vice president with bothMorris & McDaniel and Aon Consulting, where she headed the federal practice. Gowingis a former senior executive at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, where she ledan innovative research center.

Dr. David Morris is a licensed industrial/organizational psychologist and a licensedattorney. He is the president of Morris & McDaniel, a firm he founded more than aquarter century ago. The firm specializes in all aspects of human resources manage-ment, working with public and private sector clients nationally and internationally.


Managing Talent in theSouth African PublicServiceBy Ruwayne Kock and Mark Burke

Given South Africa’s social and economic development challenges, general humanresources management (HRM) practices may not be adequate to address thechallenges of transformation and executing the expected developmental role. Areview of the literature and practices regarding the envisaged role of the PublicService in what is characterized as a developmental state is undertaken here, andthe existing inadequacies with respect of attracting and retaining skilledemployees are highlighted. The argument is offered that talent managementshould be adopted as a complementary HRM practice to achieve Public Serviceobjectives. This is necessary in the context of a shortage of skills and the need toredress past racial biases in the Public Service.

South Africa is in the midst of a skills crisis, with the former deputy presidentPhumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka acknowledging that “nothing short of a skills revo-lution by a nation united will extricate us from the crisis we face.”1 The skills

crisis is particularly disconcerting given the mammoth challenges of dealing with thelegacies of unemployment, poverty and inequality left by apartheid. The role of thePublic Service in addressing these challenges is brought into sharp focus under theauspices of a developmental state (a term defined below), given the Department ofPublic Service and Administration’s (DPSA) twin responsibilities of improving servicedelivery and making and implementing employment policy.

The shortage of skills has been identified as a major hindrance to economicgrowth and creating jobs as means for alleviating the poverty of millions of SouthAfricans. A recent review by the Organization for Economic Development andCooperation noted that the emergence and persistence of extreme levels ofunemployment, particularly for less-skilled and younger blacks in south Africa is one ofthe most disappointing aspects of the country’s postapartheid economicperformance.2 The South African government has recognized the skills shortage as abinding constraint on economic growth. In its economic policy, the government statesthat the most difficult aspects of the legacy of apartheid to undo arise from the policy’sdeliberately segregated and unequal system of education and its irrational patterns ofpopulation settlement. Even though South Africa’s gross domestic product is growing,it is evident that the country lacks sufficient numbers of skilled professionals,managers, and artisans and that the uneven quality of education for previouslydisadvantaged individuals remains.3 There is a misalignment between the needs of a


growing economy and the ability of the education and training system to provide thenecessary quantity and quality of skilled workers.4

These unsympathetic labour market conditions of high unemployment and skillsshortages provide the context for attracting skills to the South African Public Serviceand retaining them. This article provides an assessment of the capacity and skillsrequirements of the South African Public Service from the perspective of adevelopmental state, highlights some of the constraints on existing human resourcemanagement (HRM) practices, and emphasizes the importance of talent managementas a complementary approach for practically finding workable solutions to managingthe skills shortages in the Public Service. The article also presents an analysis of thecurrent trends based on the authors’ interactions and involvement in a number of HRMprojects in the public sector. Due to relatively recent emergence of talent management,there are too few empirical HRM studies to draw conclusions and to identify areas forfurther research.

The Developmental State and the Transformation ofthe South African Public ServiceThe South African government has set a target of halving poverty and unemploymentby the year 2014.5 This is an ambitious goal given the country’s legacies of economicstagnation and racially based poverty, inequality, and social exclusion. Until the mid-1990s, apartheid policies sought to exclude the black majority in South Africa fromparticipating equally in all areas of society while perpetuating a strict racial hierarchy,with the greatest allocation of resources going to people of European descent andAfricans receiving the least.6

Since 1994, when a democratically elected government came into power, a rangeof policies have been introduced to transform South African society by reorganizingpolitics, the economy, and society through democratic and highly participatory modesof governance. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was adoptedin 1994 as the basis for bringing about this transformation through government-fundedinfrastructure development.7 Government, through the implementation of the RDP, seta number of goals to develop strong and stable democratic institutions and practicescharacterized by representativeness and participation; to become a fully democraticand nonracial society; to embark on a sustainable and environmentally friendly growthand development path; and to address the moral and ethical development of society.The implementation of the RDP brought about stability and moderate annualeconomic growth of about 3% during the period between 1994 and 1996.

The RDP was replaced by the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR)Macroeconomic Strategy in 1996. The strategy had a much greater focus on achievingmacroeconomic stabilization and economic growth by lowering the country’s budgetdeficit and reducing inflation and redistributing economic resources by creatingemployment opportunities. GEAR aimed at achieving annual economic growth rate of6% by 2000. A more central role for the private sector was envisaged in GEAR throughincreased investment and manufacturing-led export growth. The predicted rate of


economic growth and job creation per annum never materialized, although theeconomy performed reasonably well in an unstable international environment,averaging about 2.8% per year from 1996 to 2000, while employment continued to fallor stagnate in the latter half of the 1990s.8

According to Bhorat, “A shift in the policy stance towards government having amore direct role in promoting economic expansion” has taken place in South Africa inthe post-GEAR period.9 This shift is evident in the implementation of a host ofmicroeconomic strategies aimed at improving people’s skills, increasing public sectorefficiency, and removing constraints to business development. These efforts arise fromthe theory that increased government expenditures on social and economicinfrastructures will encourage private economic investments. The Accelerated andShared Growth Initiative for South Africa launched in 2006 as the latest policyframework for pursuing economic growth and development, emphasizes theimportance of publicly funded infrastructure projects as a key to improving theproductive capacity and the future growth potential of the economy.

The increasing role of the state in addressing the challenges of poverty andinequality in South Africa should be viewed in the context of government’s conceptionof the role of the state as developmental. A developmental state, according to then-minister of finance Trevor Manua in 2004, is one “that was determined to influence thedirection and pace of economic development by directly intervening in thedevelopment process, rather than relying on the uncoordinated influence of marketforces to allocate resources.” The developmental state of South Africa, then, took itupon itself the task of establishing substantive social and economic goals to guide theprocess of development and social mobilization.10 This conception of the state asdevelopmental locates the national government at the forefront of directing social andeconomic development policy and implementation. Former President Thabo Mbekirecognized as early as 2005 that there was a need to “massively improve themanagement, organizational, technical and other capacities of government” so that itmeets its objectives. At that time, Mbeki called for “a thorough review of thefunctioning of the government system as a whole,” to develop proposals on “improvingthe skills and competence within the Public Service, alignment of planning andimplementation, and issues pertaining to the mobilization of the Public Service tospeed up social transformation.” 11

Fulfilment of its envisaged role places enormous pressure on the Public Service, akey component of the state machinery in South Africa. It assumes that the PublicService has the capacity to meet this obligation, both in terms of effective strategicpolicymaking and delivering and expanding essential and basic services. However, theshortages of appropriately skilled people at all levels of the Public Service inevitablynegatively impact the effectiveness and efficiency with which the national governmentsupports and enables social and economic development.

Concerted efforts have been underway to transform the Public Service and buildits capacity to deliver in accordance with the expectations of a developmental state.Three phases characterize this process of transformation: rationalization and policydevelopment; modernization and implementation; and accelerated delivery.12 These


phases have not been sequential, as activities have often moved back and forth throughthe phases at different times, with government engaging simultaneously in policyformation, elaboration of legislation, and implementation. In the first phase, the legalapparatus of the apartheid state was replaced by policies and laws that are consistentwith the values, rights, and obligations enshrined in the 1996 Constitution of theRepublic of South Africa. In this phase, key undertakings in the Public Service were toamalgamate previous homeland administrations and racially segregated departmentsand to start addressing the inherited and profound racial and gender biases andimbalances, particularly at the management level of the DPSA.

In the second phase, the benefits of fiscal discipline were starting to bear fruit, asthe government sought to foster the conditions for sustainable economic growth andcreate more opportunities for employment while competing in global markets andintensifying the fight against poverty by improving the social security net andexpanding the social wage. In the third phase the emphasis has been on acceleratingservice delivery. A cornerstone of the transformation processes has been a focus onimproving the conditions and practices for HRM as a vehicle for developing PublicService capacity.

Skills Shortages and Human ResourceManagement in the Public ServiceThe emphasis on HRM has taken place in the context of broader reforms aimed atcontinuously deepening public accountability and performance in the Public Service.These reforms have been premised on a shift away from traditional publicadministration and toward public management. Public administration is characterisedby a focus on rules, control, and strict procedures and inputs instead of results, whilethe features of public management are innovation in service delivery, flexibility, andaccountability. HRM, in particular, has been recognized as critical for improvingperformance in the Public Service. The Human Resource Development (HRD) Strategyfor the Public Service is grounded on the knowledge that “people are the commondenominator of success.”13 The HRD Strategy seeks to create among Public Serviceemployees the base of skills and competencies necessary for realizing effective, high-performing, and results-oriented civil servants by moving away from the transactionalmanagement of human resources and toward the measurement of key performanceindicators of the successful implementation of programs. HRM in the public sector iscentral to enhancing service delivery. The initial HRD Strategy was published in April2002 with an implementation period running until 2006. A new strategic framework for2007 to 2010 was formulated to continue the transformation process of the PublicService by developing the capacity of people to perform.

A particular aspect of the transformation process has been the need to addressracial and gender biases in line with the Employment Equity Act that provides for theimplementation of affirmative action measures to ensure the equitable representationof black people, women, and people with disabilities.14 According to the Public ServiceCommission, good progress has been made in increasing the number of women in


management positions with the DPSA and in providing programs to fast-track thedevelopment of middle managers15 . However, much more needs to be done to complywith the employment equity target of 50% women at all levels of the Public Service byMarch 2009.

A recent review by the DPSA of the extent to which the HRD Strategy has made animpact on the base conditions provides a useful indication of the progress made on keyHRM elements. The review found that poor career planning and low levels ofintegration with life goals and the personal and professional aspirations of employeescontinue to persist for a variety of reasons, including the lack of succession planningand the tendency to ignore the future and focus on the present.16 The Public Servicecontinues to struggle with retaining effective managers and employees with scarceskills, and these retention problems are perceived to be worsening, according to thereview.17 Most worrying is that many departments still do not have effective HRMsystems.18

Towards Talent Management in the Public ServiceThe 1997 McKinsey study coined the term the war for talent as a way to describe afundamental strategic business challenge and a critical driver of organizationalperformance.19 The universal response to this war for talent was talent management.Here the term talent describes individuals who hold or are needed to fill key ormission-critical positions and individuals who possess leadership potential. The realityin South Africa is that the term talent management is often used interchangeably withthe term strategic HRM. However, the focus of talent management is different from thefocus of strategic HRM. Talent management represents a more focused and segmentedapproach to managing people in strategic roles in the organization. Talent managementis the integrated and systematic processes of attracting, engaging and retaining keyemployees and potential organizational leaders.

South Africa’s Public Service is not exempt from the raging war for talent, which isa global phenomenon. In fact, the war for talent is particularly fierce in South Africa,which is in the midst of a skills crisis. Public Service departments operate in anincreasingly competitive environment when it comes to acquiring talent in a range ofscarce-skills categories. Senior managers and high-level professional positions havebeen identified as pivotal in the delivery of public services.20 To professionalize thisimportant layer of national civil servants, a distinct Senior Management Service (SMS)was established within the Public Service to ensure the uniform application HRMnorms and standards.21 In spite of such determined efforts, however, an analysis of thevacancy rates (skills demands) in 2006 showed that the highest vacancy rate is withinthe SMS band (see Table 1).

Thirty-five percent of all unfilled Public Service posts are between levels 13 and16, which is the highly skilled and senior management band. The 59% vacancy rate atdeputy director-general level is particularly disturbing, as is the 42% vacancy rate inmiddle management. Six out of every 10 deputy director-general positions remainvacant. These statistics are very worrying since senior managers provide strategic


direction and are directly accountable for service delivery. Public Service departmentsneed to find innovative ways to feed their technical and leadership talent pipelines.

Recently, South Africa’s Public Service departments have been looking towardretention strategies to hold on to talented individuals in scarce-skills categories. Theloss of experienced employees has a severe impact on remaining employees in terms ofincreased workload and reduced efficiency and morale, as well as on the organizationin terms of interruptions of service provision and development, difficulties in findingqualified staff, and disrupted organizational relations. It is important, therefore, toincorporate retention efforts into an integrated, holistic talent management programto ensure that the right caliber of people are available at the right time and that thosepeople are able to achieve Public Service strategic objectives.

The Talent Wheel shown in Figure 1 was developed based on research and thepractical consulting experience of the authors of this article. It depicts the key talentmanagement processes, with employee engagement at the core. The value chainconsists of talent planning, identification, categorization, career management,employee engagement, and balance sheet processes. The value chain will serve as abasis for the following discussion of how talent management is being implemented inSouth Africa’s Public Service.


Table 1: Vacancy Rates by Salary Band in South Africa’s PublicService, January – December 2006

Salary band Vacant Total posts Vacancy rate

1 18,412 50,103 37%

2 45,319 154,685 29%

3 33,325 136,231 24%

4 25,690 93,042 28%

5 22,948 105,980 22%

6 46,152 205,957 22%

7 44,858 270,532 17%

8 43,749 227,573 19%

9 25,621 86,976 29%

10 19,597 46,821 42%

11 3,537 19,859 18%

12 2,443 12,856 19%

13 2,478 7,756 32%

14 792 2,248 32%

15 958 1,621 59%

16 26 148 18%

Total 336,024 1,423,992 24%

From “The Skills Revolution: Are We Making Progress? Proceedings of a Workshop onAddressing Skills Shortages in the South African Economy,” by the Centre for Development andEnterprise, 2007, CDE In Depth No. 6. Retrieved July 14, 2008, from http://www.cde.org.za

Talent PlanningTalent planning is the first step in the talent management approach. This type ofplanning is no different from manpower planning or workforce planning, which involveskills demand and supply forecasting. However, the ultimate objective of the talentplanning process is to describe the gap between demand for and supply of key andleadership talent. On the skills supply side, the talent pools at which the entry-levelprofessional recruitment efforts of the Public Services are directed consist of studentswho have passed the Senior Certificate Examination (SCE) and of university graduates.To put the competition for these job entrants into perspective, it should be consideredthat of on average 471,000 candidates who sat for the SCE each between 2002 and2004, of which 320,000 passed the examination, and a further 81,000 attained anendorsement. Of these, 65,000 entered higher education for the first time. On average,the enrolment figure for the period 2002 to 2004 stands at 709,000, of which only109,000, or 15%, attained their qualifications. In 2004, 29,002 of these successfulgraduates were in the business, commerce and management field—the field fromwhich candidates for management positions are likely to be recruited. Some of thesegraduates may opt to study further, so that an even smaller number enter the labourmarket. Figure 2 presents a broad overview of the flows into and out of the highereducation system in South Africa.


Figure 1: Talent Wheel

Talent Identification

EmployeeEngagement

Talent Planning

Talent Balance Sheet

CareerManagement

Talent Categorization

Competing for talent in such a competitive market is not a sustainable option forPublic Service departments. Private sector organizations are able to offer higher salariesand are thus able to compete more effectively. This means that developing talent at alllevels of the existing Public services workforce is essential to ensuring the filling oftechnical positions and smooth transitions of promoted employees between thedifferent levels of leadership.

Talent acquisition as a primary resourcing strategy in the Public Service, with itsregulated recruitment, selection and retention practices, is unsustainable in the longterm. Developing and growing the talent from within the public sector in the context ofan increasing war for talented university graduates in South Africa is a strategicimperative for the Public Service.

Talent IdentificationTalent identification involves assessing employees’ performance, potential, andreadiness to advance vertically and horizontally in the Public Services. As part of theemployment equity commitments, black representation in the top managementpositions has grown, and the public sector has largely become representative of theSouth African population. However, the leadership pipeline crisis in Public Service


Figure 2: Flow Into and Out From Higher Education in South Africa,2002–2004

77,000 Enter LaborMarket (71%)

32,000 Registerfor Further Study

(29%)

529,500 ReturnAfter First Year

(88%)

42,300 Do Not Return After

First Year (30%)

Attain Qualification109,000 (15%)

First Time EnteringUndergraduates

(141,000)

81,000 Pass Matricwith Endorsement

Do Not AttainQualification

600,000 (85%)

Headcount Enrollment (709,000)

65,000 Enter HigherEducation

After Matric

Adapted from Human Resource Development Review 2008, by A. Kraak and K. Press, eds.,2008, HSRC Press. Cape Town.

departments is compounded by the Cabinet’s challenge to ensure that 50% of the SMSpositions be occupied by women by 2009. This means that Public Service departmentsneed to identify more female with technical abilities and leadership potential toaccelerate their development. Psychometric assessments and leadership pipelineprinciples22 are often used by the private sector to identity individuals’ potential, abilityto handle complexity and decision making at different levels of the organization. Thepublic sector has largely abandoned psychometric testing because of the perceivedracial biases embedded in the tests.

Competency definition and assessment is another powerful talent managementassessment tool. Recent attempts by Public Service departments to conductcompetency assessments were received with mixed results. Another importantconsideration is performance as part of the talent evaluation criteria. Although aperformance management system is in place for the Public Service, the practicalapplication is lacking, and the system appears to be mainly used for determiningcompensation.23 The basic building blocks to identify talent is not in place in the PublicService.

Talent ClassificationThe composite results from the talent identification processes are used to plotindividuals on a nine-box talent classification matrix that graphically representsemployees’ potential and performance. Such mapping is a well-used method to placeindividuals into categories such as high potential, solid performers, and poorperformers. Talent forums are used in private sector organizations to calibrate thesetalent classifications. Workplace skills forums were established in the Public Service toinform skills planning. These forums should be extended to verify, approve, and trackthe progress of talent and need to include senior managers.

Career ManagementThe different talent classifications have to be approved by managers, and discussionsneed to be held with the relevant employees. Line managers often lack the criticalconversational skills to discuss employees’ strengths and weaknesses with them, andmanagers may require training and coaching to conduct such discussions effectively.Career planning is generally not practiced in the Public Services due to theorganization’s greater focus on developing employees’ immediate job skills and atendency to focus on the present.24 Integrating HR development efforts and careerpathing is critical to ensure that employees’ individual development plans reflect theirdepartment’s future development needs.

The important question in the private sector is whether organizations shouldcommunicate the status of talent categories. There is no right answer to this question,and the organizational culture will dictate the appropriate response. However,openness and transparency in talent management programs are critical to avoidingunintended consequences such as divisiveness and mistrust.


Talent Balance SheetThe Talent Balance Sheet consolidates the data collected on about an employee. ABalance Sheet indicates a department’s “bench strength” by listing employees whoshow potential and highlighting the qualities of the potential holders of key, mission-critical, and leadership positions. The talent management forum needs to approve thelist of employees on a Talent Balance Sheet, which then becomes the basis of employeesegmentation and engaging talent categories. Most Public Service departments lacksuccession planning and, consequently, succession management plans.25

Employee EngagementEmployee engagement is the extent to which employees commit to something orsomeone in the organization and of how hard they work and how long they stay as aresult of that commitment.26 The distinction between employee engagement and otherrelated constructs is the predictive nature of engagement. Research by the CorporateLeadership Council shows a strong relationship between employee engagement andemployee performance and retention. 27 This research also confirms the importance ofline management in employee engagement. Management characteristics are heavilyrepresented among the top drivers of both improved performance and intent to stay.Public service senior managers, therefore, play a pivotal role in reviewing how well thePublic Service is positioned to meet talent and organizational strategic objectives.

Implications for the South African Public SectorTalent management has a number of implications for the Public Service. The firstimplication deals with how the new world of work has brought about new psycho-social contracts of employability, as opposed to employment. The new generation ofprofessional employees have different attitudes toward and expectations about workand must be managed differently from previous generations of employees. Theevolution of the employee engagement concept provides the opportunity formanagers to understand and connect with today’s employees. The Public Service’sadoption of an integrated talent management approach will help managers betterconnect with employees by having the managers take an interest in the employees’career development.

The second implication for the Public Service deals with the sponsorship of talentmanagement. Chief executives officers of private sector companies are increasinglytaking responsibility for and getting actively involved in talent management, with thehead of HRM playing a supportive role.28 To win the war for talent in South Africa, theDPSA needs to develop an integrated talent management approach. Sponsorship at thehighest level of the Public Service, even the Office of the Presidency, is required to drivethis strategic priority. Such sponsorship will create a shared talent mind-set andimprove the level of dialog between HRM professionals and line managers. The mostsignificant benefit of an integrated talent management approach is the improvement ofthe level of dialog among line managers and HRM professionals about talent. The mainobjective is to get line managers to talk as passionately about talent as they do about


organizational results. Involving senior managers throughout the talent managementvalue chain allows greater line management responsibility for HRM professionals. Thisprovides a solid platform to transition from transactional to transformational HRM.

The third implication for the Public Service is that professional development forcurrent employees will be encouraged as a way to overcome the skills shortage in theSouth African labor market. Needed professional skills must be identified, developed,and rewarded. The recently established Public Administration Leadership andManagement Academy provides an in-house answer to the training and educationrequirements of the Public Services. Corporate universities of this nature differ from atraditional HRD department mainly in two ways. An HRD department tends to bereactive; it provides training when gaps are identified in the day-to-day running of theorganization. A corporate university, in contrast, focuses proactively on real-time needsfor professional development.

The academy will be a strategic learning entity to establish, enhance, and renewand Public Service employees’ core competencies, thereby allowing the organizationsto respond successfully to changing service delivery challenges. The academy needs tofocus predominantly on strategic HRD interventions for employees ranging from theentry level to the SMS. Training and other services provided through the academy needto be closely linked to job requirements and need to be developed in closecollaboration with relevant local and international academic universities.

The fourth implication for the Public Service deals with the use of informationtechnology to support the talent management value chain. Employee professionaldevelopment data management can be tedious, but data from sources such aspsychometric reports, performance evaluations, and career pathing are needed togenerate the Talent Balance Sheet. This talent management data also need to be keptrelevant and up to date to ensure the reliability of management decisions.

The fifth implication for the Public Service deals with successful talentmanagement implementation. The key lesson learned from private sector talentmanagement efforts was the need for integrative and incremental implementation. Therollout of talent management should start at the senior management level to ensurebuy-in. The talent management program can then be systematically deployedthroughout the rest of the organization. Change management is essential to ensure theeffective internalization of the talent management processes, practices, and systems inPublic Service departments. The change management approach requires building acase, communicating with relevant stakeholders, training relevant stakeholders, andintegrating talent management approaches and processes into other related HRpractices.

ConclusionTalent management is essential to Public Service departments that need to proactivelybuild their bench strength to meet current and future requirements. As the custodianof employment equity, the Public Service is required to develop black and femaletalent. However, it also makes business sense to improve the quality and quantity of



previously disadvantaged groups who make up the majority of South Africans. Theformal talent identification process, classification, career management. and TalentBalance Sheet reporting need be internalized and become part of Public Serviceculture. The private sector ethos used may not find a ready home in the PublicServices, but the underlying principles remain valid. The Public Service’s HRM needs toget the basics right, but the contextualization and adoption of an integrated talentmanagement approach will allow the organization’s leaders to start managing thefuture now.

Talent management is not the next HR fad. It is a complementary practice tostrategic HRM for attracting, engaging, and retaining key and leadership talent. Thesuccessful implementation of the talent management approach will assist inrepositioning the Public Service as a good place to work with a higher service valueproposition that will create an environment for talent to thrive.

Notes1 Mlambo-Ngcuka, P. (2006, March 27). Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka’s address at

the launch of the Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition. Pretoria, South Africa.

2 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2008). South Africa: Economicassessment (OECD Economic Surveys). Paris: OECD Publishing.

3 The Presidency, Republic of South Africa. (2006). Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative—South Africa (ASGISA): A Summary. Retrieved September 22, 2008, fromhttp://www.nda.agric.za/docs/asgisa.pdf

4 Kraak, A. (2008). The education-economy relationship in South Africa, 2001–2005. In A. Kraak,& K. Press (Eds.), Human resource development review in South Africa: Education,employment and skills in South Africa. Cape Town: HSRC Press.

5 The Presidency, Republic of South Africa. (2006), op cit.

6 Republic of South Africa. (2003). Towards a ten year review: Synthesis report on theimplementation of Government Programmes, PCAS. Pretoria: Government Printers.

7 Republic of South Africa. (1994). White paper on the Reconstruction and DevelopmentProgramme. Pretoria: Government Printers.

8 Pauw, K., & Ncube, L. (2007). The impact of growth and redistribution on poverty andinequality in South Africa (Working Paper 07/126). Cape Town: Development Policy ResearchUnit, University of Cape Town. Retrieved July 14, 2008, fromhttp://www.commerce.uct.ac.za/Research_Units/DPRU/WorkingPapers/wp.asp?WP_ID=2007/126

9 Ibid.

10 Manual, T. (2004, September 21). Budgeting challenges in the developmental state. Speechpresented at the Senior Management Service Conference, Cape Town, South Africa.

11 Mbeki, T. (2005). State of the Nation address. Retrieved July 14, 2008, fromhttp://www.info.gov.za/speeches/son/index.html#2005

12 Mbeki, T. (2008, August 1). Address of the President of South Africa Thabo Mbeki, at thelaunch of the Public Administration Leadership and Management Academy (PALAMA).Retrieved September 22, 2008, from http://www.info.gov.za/speeches/2008/08080116151001.htm

13 Republic of South Africa Department of Public Service and Administration (2007). HRD Strategyfor the Public Service 2007–2010: Preliminary Framework for Consideration and Discussion.Pretoria: DPSA.

469Public Personnel Management Volume 37 No. 4 Winter 2008

14 Republic of South Africa. (1998). Employment Equity Act, No 55. Retrieved August 24, 2008,from http://www.labour.gov.za/legislation/acts/employment-equity/employment-equity-act

15 Republic of South Africa Public Service Commission. (2007). State of Public Service Report 2007.Pretoria: PSC.

16 Republic of South Africa Department of Public Service and Administration, (2008). HumanResource Development for the Public Service: Review Report (HRD Resource Pack, Part 2).Pretoria: DPSA.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Michaels, E, Handfield-Jones, H., & Axelrod, B. (2001). The war for talent. Boston: HarvardBusiness School Press.

20 Republic of South Africa Department of Public Service and Administration. (2003). SeniorManagement Service: Public Services Handbook. Retrieved July 14, 2008, fromhttp://www.dpsa.gov.za/documents/sms/publications/smshb2003.pdf

21 Ibid.

22 Charan, R., Drotter, S., & Noel, J. (2001). The leadership pipeline: How to build the leadershippowered company. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

23 Republic of South Africa Department of Public Service and Administration. (2008), op cit.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Corporate Leadership Council. (2004). Driving performance and retention through employeeengagement. Washington, DC: Corporate Executive Board.

27 Ibid.

28 Economist Intelligence Unit, with Development Dimensions International. (2006). The CEO’srole in talent management: How top executives from 10 countries are nurturing the leadersof tomorrow. Retrieved September 22, 2008, from http://www.ddiworld.com/pdf/eiu_ddi_talentmanagement_fullreport.pdf

AuthorsRuwayne Kock

PartnerHuman Resource PracticeP.O. Box 4654Orange Grove, JohannesburgSouth Africa, [email protected]


Mark Burke

[email protected]. Box 2780Houghton, JohannesburgSouth Africa, [email protected]

Ruwayne Kock is a registered industrial psychologist with a wealth of people manage-ment consulting experience across numerous industries. His consulting experienceincludes strategic HR management, leadership, talent management, organizationaldesign, organizational development, and change management.

Mark Burke is an organizational development specialist with more than 10 years ofexperience in the public sector. His main areas of work re strategy formulation andimplementation, organization design, and process improvement.

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