Delimitar el contexto de negocios y sus necesidades

The inclusive talent approach was incorporated by PHServ (on its national framework) and by Retco. Definitions of TM in PHServ talent conversations booklet describe TM as an ‘inclusive’ practice and overtly it would appear so from the organisational intentions depicted towards development of all employees and interviewees’ statements about talent being everyone in the organisation. However further examination of the training and development schemes revealed that only one (The Edward Jenner program) out of the eleven programs was open to every level of staff. All the others were mostly biased towards senior staff and the executive board. Interviewees clarified this from their statements such that even when they presented an inclusive practice initially while talking about the national talent program, they progressively described an exclusive talent approach either knowingly or unknowingly when they discussed the practice and targeted job groups for TM programs. The exclusive practice was also confirmed by PHServ regional local development partner who explained that funding was only available for senior management grades 8a and above in the following extract.

“‘Regionally, TM is more ‘elitist’ but we have tried to look at band 5 and above in our region” (LDP, PHServ).

197 It appeared that there was confusion in differentiating between inclusive TM and an

organisational policy of inclusion as company documents on TM depicted wide publicity about having an inclusive practice as it relates to diversity with programs targeted at

underrepresented minorities at leadership level but again this was for those in bands 8a and above, confirming the statement about an elitist TM practice not just regionally but nationally. Interviewees sounded very careful about not talking contrarily as reflected in this statement by the HR specialist:

“We are not excluding people from the process so I suppose talent is everyone but going back to what we are trying achieve it is really trying to see where our potential lies and also where our gaps are because some of our senior posts are very difficult to recruit to you know the nature of the business”. How we’ve approached it is to be an inclusive process and the nature of I suppose doesn’t make it that inclusive as it could be but |I wouldn’t want you to get the idea that we don’t see everybody as having talent but it’s just the high potential that would probably have a fast track”...

This confusion brings to the forefront again, the need for clarifying further the boundaries of an exclusive and inclusive talent approach to minimise these ambiguities and to prevent TM being labelled alongside discriminatory practices. The conflicts between a national and regional talent approach are symbolic of coercive institutional pressures from a central team to regional organisations to conform to their stipulated TM practices which was still at its infancy nationally in comparison to the regional programs which had been running for several years. It was therefore a challenge regionally, to conform to a national central program as this coercion for change takes time regardless of the institutional pressures. Further issues are addressed in the section on the challenges and management of talent identification (see sections 9.4 and 9.5).

Retco on the other hand, demonstrated its inclusive talent approach by seeking high performance and potential in all employee cadres including seasonal temporary and hourly paid workers. This was evidenced in their use of the 9 box grid for assessing all salaried employees in addition to building talent pipelines from amongst the hourly paid employees such that at every level of the workforce talented employees were found for development and promotion to the next level. Retco’s approach was different from top grading (Smart, 2005) where assessment of high performance is sought from all levels and functions in organisations because while ‘top grading’ only focused on developing the top performers to the exclusion of all other employees, Retco’s practice included optimum development of not only the top performers in all levels and functions but also every other employee according to their strengths and aspirations. Therefore in comparison to Civico, Locgov and PHServ whose talent focus was on targeted job grades, Retco operated a more inclusive approach

198 to talent identification which was clearly articulated by interviewees and also in company documentation as presented below:

‘So we would be looking at talent from colleague level up… So our role as talent spotters is to look for people coming through at all levels…. we do have a robust development program at all of those levels’. (People manager stores).

“The company plays to individuals’ strengths and offers various channels through which you can develop …There's no pressure to get promoted if you're happy where you are and just doing a great job. But there is every opportunity to progress very quickly if you're right for it and up for it. Training means a lot to us at Retco. No matter what you do, we'll make sure you're trained to do it really well. Then we'll give you all the coaching you need to keep developing new skills (employee

communications on intranet)”

“Remember, some of the senior people in our business started out stacking shelves, so anything is possible! Set yourself some goals and we'll do everything we can to help you achieve them” (Retco employee induction document).

Discussing these extracts within ‘the inclusive/developable talent philosophy’ framework of Meyers & Woerkom (2014, p.198) which closest to the talent philosophy guiding Retco’s inclusive practice, it is apparent that Retco’s TM practice ‘‘aspires to yield enhanced performance among all levels in the workforce, thus allowing everyone to reach his/her potential, no matter what that might be’’ (Ashton & Morton, 2005, p. 30) and with the

recognition that individual performance is an outcome of accumulated access to training and development opportunities (Gladwell, 2008). Meyers and Woerkom assert also that since TM practices under this developable talent philosophy emphasize development of all employees as opposed to a selected few, the operation of a transparent policy for creating awareness of this talent approach for promoting an organisational mind-set for development through strategies that portray desired behaviours (Ruvolo et al., 2004) is essential. These concepts are reflected in Retco’s transparency approach in engaging with employees about

organisational changes and also in their implementation of a generic leadership framework that was customised to each staff grade for informing and motivating expected

organisational behaviours, as well as a transparent process for monitoring performance and promotion through bi-annual assessments and conversations.

Since Retco uses the 9 box grid which differentiates high performance and high potential employees from others and is mostly associated with concepts of work force differentiation which are synonymous with the exclusive talent approaches, possible doubts may arise against Retco’s practice being inclusive. However, Retco’s use of a 9 box grid depicts firstly the versatility of the system for use according to individual organisational achievement of their goals and it also shows or suggests innovation and flexibility required for success of TM practices as opposed to a ‘one size fits all’ approach (Stahl et al., 2012) and as Al Ariss