As a talent / human capital management blogger I get invited to lots of different conferences. However, given the quality of the agenda, experience of speakers and seniority of attendees, Economist Conferences' Talent Management Summit is definitely one of my favourites.
This summer’s Summit, focusing on developing the next generation of leaders, was another excellent event (follow the links below to see some of my blog posts from the day).
Topped and tailed by inputs on the role of top executives from senior business and HR leaders at Unilever, PepsiCo and Google, the Summit dealt with new times, new markets and new sources of business leaders. This included the need to increase the proportion of women in senior and top management roles, and to engage and retain members of the millennial, net, generation– including through the use of blogs and other social media.
We also took a look at the role of workforce planning in supporting the development of leadership talent pipelines and heard about how HR needs to be repositioned to enable all of this to take place.
One of the final sessions which was probably my favourite, integrated—fairly successfully—some inputs from Cranfield’s Andrew Kakabadse with a couple of group activities. In this session, Kakabadse stressed the need to include HR’s perspectives within senior executive deliberations, balancing Finance’s focus on efficiency with HR’s advocacy of alignment and engagement.
This, to me, was one of the two main take-aways from the conference. We hear an awful lot these days about HR professionals needing to be business people first, HR people second (indeed this came up earlier on in the Summit too). But Kakabadse’s analysis would suggest that we create more value by being different rather than being the same as other executives in our businesses—at least we do if we want to see our next generation leaders engaged and retained.
The second major point I’d like to refer to, hoping it won’t be seen as self-promotion given that it was me who made it during the panel on the net gen, is about talent management professionals’ own use of social media. If social media is as important as various people throughout the Summit suggested that it is (being one of the key trends shaping Unilever’s future for example) then talent management people need to get on the programme. I therefore found it disappointing that there were still so few attendees tweeting during the day. Hopefully we’ll see more of us using Twitter and attendees using the #ECTalent hash tag by the time the next Summit takes place? Or the #ECDiversity hashtag for the Diversity Summit taking place on December 6th.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited (EIU) or any other member of The Economist Group. The Economist Group (including the EIU) cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this article or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in the article.
