The Differentiated Workforce: Transforming Talent into Strategic Impact [Hardcover]

Brian Becker, Mark Huselid, and Richard Beatty shares their thoughts about how to solve the various strategic challenges that line managers now face. "Specifically, it is about making senior managers more successful at executing their strategy" by putting strategy, not people, first. "For most organizations, that success has an important talent dimension. When it comes to workforce strategy, our approach requires that line managers define success but that HR professionals deliver the solution. This requires a new perspective on workforce strategy for both." That said, the transformation they recommend requires thinking more broadly (perhaps even counter intuitively) about the respective roles of line managers, HR, and the workforce because all of them must be centrally in any change initiatives.

With regard to this book's title, Becker, Huselid, and Beatty explain that "there are four key domains that distinguish a differentiated approach from a more conventional (undifferentiated) approach to workforce management: a focus on equity instead of equality; a focus on engaging the right employees, not necessarily all employees; an emphasis on hiring choice employees, not becoming an employer of choice; and finally, a focus on earned increases (i.e. increased responsibilities and compensation." More specifically, strategic talent becomes a competitive advantage (equity), those with strategic talent fully understand how to acquire and retain customers as well as how to accelerate improvement of organizational performance (employee focus); strategic talent is retained and helps to attract and hire fewer but much better-qualified job candidates (employee of choice); and peak performers are generously (and appropriately) rewarded and remain whereas poor/mediocre performers are not rewarded and asked to vacate their strategic roles.

There at least two major reasons why workforce differentiation is so important to almost all organizations, whatever their size or nature may be. First, it can help them to achieve significant and verifiable strategic impact in their competitive marketplace. Also, it will address one of the greatest challenges now facing their senior-managers: How to get more workers positively and constructively engaged? Recent Gallup research indicates that only 29% of the U.S. workforce is positively engaged (i.e. loyal, enthusiastic, and productive) whereas 55% is passively disengaged. That is, they are going through the motions, doing only what they must, "mailing it in," coasting, etc. What about the other 16%? They are "actively disengaged" in that they are doing whatever they can to undermine their employer's efforts to succeed.

In their book, Becker, Huselid, and Beatty provide a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective program by which achieve these two very important objectives, achieving significant and verifiable strategic impact in the competitive marketplace, and increasing the positive and productive engagement of workers at all levels and in all areas of operations. More specifically, they explain

1. How to put strategy, not people, first

2. How to link strategic capabilities to workforce strategy

3. How to identify and evaluate strategic positions

4. How to establish leadership accountability for workforce success (e.g. the line manager's HR role)

5. How to design architecture for the differentiated workforce

6. How to develop and apply strategic workforce measures

My repetition of the word "how" is deliberate because Becker, Huselid, and Beatty devote most of their time and attention to explaining how to implement their various recommendations. They are diehard pragmatists, with an insatiable curiosity to know what works, what doesn't, and why. Their determination to focus on real-world issues, problems, and solutions is perhaps best illustrated by the detailed and surprisingly lively case study they provide in Chapter 7 (Pages 171-231) of how th4 American Hat Association created a differentiated workforce. Obviously, it would be a fool's errand to attempt to duplicate those initiatives without appropriate modification in another organization, even one in the healthcare field. It would also be a fool's mistake to ignore the lessons to be learned from this case study.

Those who share my high regard for this brilliant book are urged to check out Becker, Huselid, and Beatty's previously published The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance and The Workforce Scorecard: Managing Human Capital To Execute Strategy as well as Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution co-authored by Jeanne Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson, James O'Toole and Edward E. Lawler III's The New American Workplace, Dean Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, and Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value co-authored by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood.

Becker, Huselid and Beatty have come up with some really important challenges to existing practice in talent management. I'd suggest that all HR professionals should consider these challenges themselves, and then develop their own responses.

I don't personally agree with all the solutions that the authors themselves propose (http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.com/2009/04/10-reasons-not-to-implement.html), but I think they've done a great service for HR in proposing them as they're hopefully going to provoke some deeper thinking than we often see in this profession.

Brian Becker, Mark Huselid, and Richard Beatty, gave me a new idea to think of how to use new eyeside to organization talent. Ex, in organizational practice, sometimes it isn't easy to differentiate the equity and equality, especal on the sensetive compensation and benefit policy, so we often design the equality policy to satisfy each employee.
However, as authors reminds, for stategic execution purpose, we needs to optimize the bigest effective success, and that's why we should build up the environment, policy for talent working productively.
As a HR manager, i still believe it's a challendge to follow in practice. But this book it's still valuable for me to think more aspects for reference to design appropriate methods to attract talents.