The Talent Management Handbook

Edited by Lance A. Berger and Dorothy R. Berger McGraw Hill, 2004, 448 pages

List price: $49.95, ISBN: 0-07-141434-7

Petroleum and petrochemical products company Sunoco, Inc. found itself with half its top 200 managers eligible to retire within a five-year period. Senior vice president Rolf D. Naku says Sunoco faced management gaps because it wasn't prepared to replace the retirees.

How Sunoco assessed employees' potential and identified its own standout employees for potential advancement is the subject of his contribution to this collection of essays on finding and keeping the employees who matter most to an organization.

The Talent Management Handbook offers examples of best practices from employers as diverse as Major League Baseball, TV channel QVC and social services agencies. Editors Lance and Dorothy Berger promote "proactive talent management" in which employers have an integrated system in place to identify talent, assess its importance to the organization, develop it, and allocate training and other resources.

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The book covers performance management, compensation, diversity, and development and coaching issues.

Among the essays' topics:

* Assessing needed core competencies and ranking their importance to the organization, then developing training that emphasizes them.

* Dealing with forces that affect talent, such as demographics, the need for work/life balance, employees' desire to control their own futures and the changing nature of HR.

* Selecting the performance management system that best fits the workplace, including choosing the right appraisers and deciding whether skills, results or traits such as autonomy or judgment should be the basis of measurement.

* Using 360-degree feedback, including successfully communicating its purpose and use to employees.

* Casting a wider net by finding talent in unexpected places, such as the temporary employee whom a company hired and made a vice president within five months, and using informal evaluations to identify employees who might go further, like the clerk who spent 11 years typing letters until she was asked to become a customer service representative and excelled at it.

* Examining your return on investment in employees and determining their value to the organization.

* Creating compensation and long term incentive plans that reward top performers.

Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement by SHRM or HR Magazine.

COMPILED BY LEIGH RIVENBARK, A FREE-LANCE WRITER AND EDITOR BASED IN VIENNA, VA.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Society for Human Resource Management
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group