Demystifying Talent Management

No matter where we look in our society, we talk about talent, we see talents in the media and in talent shows, and we hear about them in school, at our workplaces, and at sports games. It seems clear that talent has become integral to contemporary culture, and to our modern way of understanding what it is that generates social success and prosperity.

Christianity has had an influence on Western culture for centuries, even after the separation of religion from democratic, secularized mainstream cultural change. So, too, Christianity has influenced management culture and thinking. Within contemporary talent management, the adagium of talent derived from the Gospel of Matthew is still very much present, and has achieved widespread acceptance as an explanation of what it means to have or become a talent. The same notion is widely used to explain a social phenomenon that has accordingly been dubbed ‘the Matthew effect’, in which talented people receive an abundance of possibilities for advancement and recognition. In this chapter we take a closer-than-usual look at the Gospel of Matthew, and especially how the Parable of the Talents has been used and interpreted by sociologists. Based on a re-interpretation of the Parable of the Talents, the theory of the Matthew effect is subjected to critical analysis and revised, and at the same time the existence of an implicit view of talent and talent management in the Gospel of Matthew is revealed.

In the Gospel of Matthew, it is stated that we should “Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents. For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.” And, complementary to this, it is said that from him who has no talents “shall be taken away, even that which he hath. And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness.” In the Gospel of Matthew, those who are considered ‘have nots’, like the third servant, are worthy only to be cast into ‘the darkness’, away from civilization and reward. In a more contemporary context, to whom does the Biblical third servant correspond? Or, in other words, what would a modern third servant look like? In talent management, who are the employees and recruits whom we ought to identify as ‘have nots’, as un-talented? In this chapter, I will tell the stories of six individuals from the worlds of sports and business who were recognized and treated as un-talented ‘have nots’. They were clearly in the allegorical darkness, did not receive much, and were certainly not considered to be talented individuals. Despite their circumstances, each of the six made it into the limelight and became successful in fields ranging from athletics to law, entrepreneurship, and management, and today — with the benefit of hindsight — are recognized as deserving reward and recognition.

Talent management as a scientific discipline and consultant practice within business and sports has existed for more than 15 years, but there still seems to be some confusion about what the meaning of ‘talent management’ really is. Despite several attempts to clarify the meaning of talent management, a rigid definition has not yet been reached. Instead of this search for a rigid definition, it would be more beneficial for our understanding of talent management if we first understood the rationale and principles behind it. In this chapter, I will historically describe how the rationale and principles for management within business and sports, from industrialism, through modernity, to late modernity, have changed and led to this new management discipline, talent management. With this historical understanding of the rationale and principles of talent management, we will not only be able to gain a better understanding of the intention of talent management, and maybe get closer to its real meaning, but will also be able to compare the rationale and principles with those of the talent management we found in the Gospel of Matthew. This comparison will enable us to determine whether there is any resemblance between modern talent management and the talent management conducted in the Parable of Talent as described in the Gospel of Matthew.

In the late 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s, ‘talent management’ became a widespread term referring to an emerging discipline in management and social science. At the same time, the term ‘talent’ enjoyed a considerable revival in everyday language, and became frequently used to describe high performers or high-potential individuals, or people who are somehow even more capable than those terms suggest. Even among researchers in scientific disciplines, the terms ‘talent’ and ‘talent management’ became frequently used to describe the ‘core assets’ of organizations and teams, and to refer to a new (sub)discipline of human resource management. For some time, I have been looking for a way to provide empirical evidence for the extent of this development in the usage of ‘talent’ and ‘talent management’ in everyday language, and in this chapter I present the results of my own recent investigation. I analysed commercially popular Danish newspapers in terms of the frequency and nature of their uses of both terms in business and non-business-specific articles — that is, in regular, everyday contexts. I also used Google Scholar to give an empirically grounded picture of how often the terms are used in scientific discourse. In both cases, we see clear evidence of the trend I have just described.

While it is widely taken for granted that talent — the thing itself — is a ‘core competitive asset’ for companies and teams, ‘talent’ — as a word — has no clear meaning, no stable semantic value. However, this has not kept talent management from applying the term with great frequency and enthusiasm. Quite the contrary: models have been developed and methods implemented in order to detect (and recruit) talents, and to maximize the performance potential of people who possess them. In this chapter, I will demonstrate how talent management is guilty of maintaining this semantic ambiguity by unintentionally switching its focus from talent as a concrete, observable entity to talent as defined in a certain managerial view, in a modern interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew. I will then show how this switch has affected various approaches to talent management.

The meanings of ‘talent’ and ‘talent management’ have been vague and ambiguous since the terms entered common usage with the emergence of talent management as a field. This lack of semantic clarity, and the lack of operational clarity it sometimes gives rise to, has been a concern for talent management researchers, and has recently led to several attempts to shed light on the meaning of both terms in order to gain a more rigorous understanding of the nature of the field. In this chapter, I present an etymological analysis of the historical changes in the way the words are used, finding that the word ‘talent’ has shifted from a single denotative, referential meaning concerned with money and units of measure to a multitude of poorly defined meanings with undefined properties, having to do with abilities and aptitudes, mental endowments, and mental powers. These meanings are typically presented in the field as denotations — as real, objective properties of individuals that are picked out by ‘talent’ and by researchers making use of the word — although there is some doubt as to whether they ever succeed in referring, as opposed to simply displaying a belief on the part of the speaker or serving some social function, for instance, designating someone as the centre of a certain kind of attention. Today, this multiplicity of meanings is typically seen as a terminological strength in talent management research and practice.

So far our philological analysis of the term ‘talent’ has revealed a fundamental change in the semantics of the term, and later, a profound effect on the developing semantics of ‘talent management’. This has primarily been a change from a limited denotative meaning, by means of which ‘talent’ referred to a coin in actual everyday usage, to multiple connotative meanings picking out abilities and mental endowments, or some related but poorly defined phenomenon. Now, in analytic philosophy, this transformation in the word’s meaning is not just a semantic issue; or, rather, semantic issues sometimes have non-trivial significance. Here, they pertain to issues around how the word relates to, and is a useful (or non-useful) part of, our concrete, goal-oriented daily activities. In this chapter, I pursue that line of thinking, exploring the historical developments in the use and meanings of ‘talent’ from a philosophical perspective based on the work of Saul Kripke, in order to give a clearer sense of how the basic nature of the term has shifted and how this can, in theory, have significant consequences for how the term can be used to causally interact with the world.

We have just seen that from the perspective of analytic philosophy, the transformation of ‘talent’ from a rigid designator to an accidental one had serious implications for the causal relations that obtain between the term and its referents in the actual world. In this chapter, we approach the same shift from the perspective of anthropological semiotics, concerning ourselves with practical, observable changes rather than their logical and philosophical implications. The tradition of anthropological semiotics is one in which words are analysed in terms of their usefulness (and particular uses) within a given cultural setting, especially settings unfamiliar to the analyst. I will show that what we can describe philosophically as an accidental designator can also be described linguistically and semiotically as an ‘empty signifier’, an expression that is used as if it referred concretely when in fact it does not. Terms of this kind often have important cultural uses even where they lack everyday referential uses, and especially interesting here is the fact that these cultural uses are often a matter of a word having magical or religious significance, of the sort that might be described in terms of reference to explicitly non-actual possible worlds. The semiotic analysis I present here suggests that ‘talent’, as it is used in the culture of contemporary management and management research, is an empty signifier of this magical or religious kind.

So far, we have employed analytic philosophy and anthropological semiotics to analyse the fundamental changes in the semantics of ‘talent’, in order to establish what sort of term it is, and how it is currently used. In this way, we have been able to determine that ‘talent’ has become an accidental designator and an empty signifier, and, as such, is no longer causally linked to the actual world. In this chapter, I go into more detail, providing a linguistic analysis of what it is that changes, in the semantics themselves, as a term is transformed from a standard signifier to an empty one. I provide a general framework for this kind of thinking, and then elucidate the details of the transformation in the case of ‘talent’, which, as I discuss below, primarily involves the gradual weakening of the word’s connections to its original denotative meaning, concurrent with the slow accumulation and strengthening of multiple competing, subjective, and equally vacuous connotative meanings.

We are finally ready to return to my main concern and address the problems arising from the emptiness of ‘talent’ as a central signifier in talent management and its various managerial strategies and perspectives.

In order for any company or team to be capable of achieving their performance goals and of strengthening their competitiveness, they have to be aware of what qualifications and competencies they need at any given time, and know how to identify the individuals who possess them, as well as how to ensure their development and positive performance within the organization or on the team. These basic operational requirements cannot be met by searching for talent, and are not implemented in talent management and the accidental language of talent. Doing so would only be possible if ‘talent’ and ‘talent management’ were immediately replaced by rigid signifiers, or, alternatively, by a set of equivalent rigid signifiers that could be accurately described as the basic or fundamental language of an investigative discipline, whose terms are influenced by and causally related to the actual world, and whose actions and outcomes are concerned with observable events rather than our belief in flexibly specified possible worlds. Any set of commonly used and well-understood rigid designators would do, at least in principle, and they need not be adopted by non-researchers in everyday use — there is no reason why we cannot use empty signifiers in casual conversation, after all. Consider the analogy with evolutionary biology, for which in the 1970s the term ‘adaptation’ had become problematically ambiguous (although not entirely empty), and was taken to denote both parts of an organism that had evolved for some specific purpose and parts of an organism that served some specific purpose currently, but had not specifically evolved to do so.

Over the last several years, I have participated in various research seminars and conferences where I have had the chance to talk about talent management, and especially about the lack of semantic clarity in the terms ‘talent’ and ‘talent management’. Everywhere I have been, my talks have been followed by intense discussion, and very often I have been criticized for blowing what my listeners see as a tiny problem way out of proportion. The basic argument in these critiques has been that language is socially constructed, and that the semantic differences we have observed in the use of ‘talent’ and ‘talent management’ are caused by cultural differences, and that this is nothing more than a run-of-the mill manifestation of the normal arbitrariness of language. This sort of reasoning is motivated by the idea that despite these semantic differences, there is an underlying common understanding of the meaning of both terms, in which they denote something like ‘the one who has more’ of a natural capacity, an innate ability, a mental endowment, or something similar. Those with these properties are talents, those without are not. This seems clear enough to my listeners that my objections strike them as odd and unfounded, or, at least, as making a mountain out of a molehill. Of course, that sort of thinking is the result of our cultural settings — but not the secular, scientific, empirically minded side of it; rather, the Christian mindset that leads us to believe in things rather than question them freely. As a result, I am often told that, contrary to my assertions, there is more than enough coherence in our various uses of ‘talent’ and ‘talent management’ for them to qualify as non-empty signifiers, and for talent managers and researchers to be able to detect and identify talented individuals. And because this is so, there is no need for further research along that path.