They are terms that sometimes get confused, yet they are very different. Managing people is always hard, but managing people’s talent is harder still. Combining good management of people and of talent brings the best results for a company, so it’s important to know how to tell the two apart: they can be handled separately or together.
Before going further, let’s define the terms. Talent is the knowledge of the people who run a process and add different innovations to improve it or speed it up. People are the human team: the members of a work group whose actions are aimed at making the business they belong to productive.
In the past, the Human Resources department stood on its own, and talent was one of those intangible components that team leaders discovered and then placed in the roles where it brought the most benefit to the company. Now there are talent management departments, and we mix up the question of talent with people’s employability.
Technology has advanced and improved companies’ output, their people have been able to adapt to the changes that came along, and human resources departments have had to assess their talent or employability to find them the best career options.
Here are three examples that contrast talent and people.
Repetitive tasks
| People | Talent |
|---|---|
| Here you only need people who can do a job and check that the machines endlessly repeating the same processes are working properly, since machines have been replacing people, with or without talent, for centuries. | To make photocopies, for example, all you need is to know how the machine works. There’s no talent to develop beyond placing the originals and entering the number of copies. |
Improvements and innovations in processes
| People | Talent |
|---|---|
| The person must know the production processes and can be a good worker, doing the job conscientiously and effectively. For example: receiving an endless stream of candidates’ CVs and filing them according to set criteria. | Talent is the extra in a person that lets them invent, innovate or improve the process to get more productivity out of the business. Applied to the example: building a database that searches by age and education, and even sends written messages to candidates, making searches more selective and giving prospective colleagues a better image of the company. |
The leader as strategist
| People | Talent |
|---|---|
| Someone able to take a short- and long-term view of the production processes involved in a job. For example, the stationery shop manager who knows when to run campaigns for reading books, textbooks or stationery. | Talent is the person able to plan and drive the changes and situations that bring the best results, in the short and long term, from the production processes. The example: having new, eye-catching campaigns planned in advance to boost sales, or simply getting orders in before anyone else to catch the first wave of sales. |
Featured image: AnalyticalHistoricalHobbyist, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
