what you’re getting, you’re getting different points of view that allow sharper decisions to be made. (Regional HR Manager, Infocomm, Singapore) A regional HR director in a TNC in China makes a similar point: The hierarchical structure will definitely change. No one will be looking at who’s the boss. People will be working in more like teams or groups, and really leveraging on each other’s expertise or strength. And then it will more be a team effort and not an individual effort. The way I look at it is [that the] possibility of having a single hero…being the hero of the organisation might have gone. [It] is more like how the entire team can collaborate and work together. (Regional HR Director, Infocomm, China) Despite the sense that it was necessary to move towards new ways of working that focus on the team, rather than individual talent, there was little evidence of significant shifts from the ‘War for Talent’ approach. On the contrary, the ongoing digital disruption has led to greater convergence in recruitment practices across key industries, as they tap from the same pool in the labour market. For instance, banks are now competing for the same pool of engineering talent as infocomm industries. Even the pharmaceutical sector, which has traditionally restricted hiring to fellow competitors, has begun to hire talent from nonpharmaceutical sectors, such as the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry. Notably, among nine local enterprises and start-ups that were interviewed, with the exception of one firm, the ‘War for Talent’ model is similarly entrenched through a buy strategy of hiring TNC talent. At its core, the ‘War for Talent’ view is a weak model for capability development in times of rapid change, given that it is based on the principle of a scarcity, assuming that companies can make predictions on a small group of talent to respond successfully to the disruptions they encounter at the expense of the broader workforce. 3.3.
Crisis in talent management II: misalignment between corporate talent management and individual talents The looming crisis in corporate talent management is made more profound because of evidence of significant misalignment between the purported objectives of corporate talent management, and the experience of those identified as corporate talent. Companies justify the ‘War for Talent’ model as giving protected space to a small pool of talent to lead the company in new innovative ways while demanding high performance from them. Based on our analysis of the experiences of high potential talent identified by the companies, these individuals see themselves as being embroiled in a complex process of “performing” rather than “performance”, where they are in a positional competition, and judged and ranked in relation to others. There is an almost unanimous consensus on the importance of “playing the game” to secure the confidence of senior colleagues, given the latter’s role to “decipher” the difference between high performance and high potential. Figure 2 highlights the misalignment between individual talent experiences and corporate expectations.
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