What We’re Getting Wrong About Talent Management

Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.

  Leadership   Talent Management  

Talent management has become a thing. According to the experts, we need to actively build, sustain and retain talent if we want our projects and our organizations to be successful. And as long as we keep that notion at 30,000 feet and don’t examine it too, too closely, there is really nothing assailable about it. Projects are about people, they are delivered by people and their success depends upon the quality and quantity of effort put in by people to delivering results.

There is a challenge here, though. While it’s a simple challenge to define, it is also a more complex one to tackle. For all that we can say the development and retention of talent is important, for the vast majority of organizations it is not done well--or worse, not done at all.

The evidence of this comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. There are the organizations that presume that project management is a defined, shrink-wrapped commodity skill for hire. The presumption is that they as organizations aren’t responsible for talent management, but that other organizations elsewhere are; they look for project managers that already have developed capabilities and skills, and essentially set them loose to solve problems and deliver projects.

More common are the organizations who equate project management with simply getting things done, and identify the corner of someone’s desk …

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