Developing Future Leaders: Evidence of Talent Management Planning

Introduction

Today, more than ever, it is necessary for organizations to manage their workforce strategically and wisely in order to keep up with current needs and to predict the impact of future developments and to experience growth in a competitive marketplace (Brathwaite, 2012; Drucker, 1999). One of the key and critical HR function is the development and implementation of strategic responses to environmental changes (Jaoua, 2020). With proper planning and evaluation, an organization can acquire, retain, develop, and employ talent to meet its goals and needs. A high-performance organization acquires and retains competent employees to accomplish its mission (GAO, 2000). Therefore, organizations should be prepared to anticipate and overcome future challenges resulting from technology advancements and increased global competition, and pursue strategies to achieve their desired results. Thus, in order to overcome these challenges, organizations need to be equipped with a skilled and talented workforce.

“Workforce planning is based on the belief that people are an organization’s most important strategic resource” (Armstrong, 2011, p. 223). Hence, organizational leaders should focus on the short-term as well as long-term needs of the whole organization and develop a talent management plan that supports their organization’s mission and vision and help them to gain a competitive advantage through its members. Organizations must not only attract and retain a skilled workforce to fulfill strategic goals, but also continue investing in them through education, training, and opportunities for continued growth. Moreover, it is of great importance to match the right people to the right jobs and to stay alert and proactive to the changing characteristics of the surrounding environment (Armstrong, 2006). The processes of acquiring and managing human capital are critical to achieving strategic success and to gaining and sustaining a competitive advantage (Boudreau & Ramstad, 2007).

Talent management planning has risen in popularity as the means to manage changes in workforce supply and demand and to implement strategies to recruit and retain talented individuals (Colley, 2006). Therefore, talent management planning is becoming a key priority and core management practice for many organizations. Young (2006) stated that organizations are urged to initiate or improve their talent management planning for a variety of reasons including an ‘aging workforce and approaching retirement wave, current and projected labor shortages, globalization, growing use of contingent, flexible workforce, need to leverage human capital to enhance return, mergers and acquisitions, or evolution of technology and tools’ (Young, 2006, pp. 9–10). However, the process of preparing and implementing long-term workforce plans is made more difficult by a variable global environment and a changing workforce. As a result, competitiveness in the marketplace has compelled organizations to rethink their operational practices and strategies on talent management.

Although the topics on talent management planning has been researched extensively, the research sampling data has mostly been collected in the Western or developed country context. There still is need for research on talent management planning in the Middle-Eastern countries in general and the UAE in particular, where barriers to access random samples and low respondent participation rates exists (AlMazrouei et al., 2016). Thus, this study seeks to fill a gap in the extent literature by investigating how managers at Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and its Group of Companies located in UAE perceive and develop talent management in their organization. The study utilized an exploratory non-probability purposive sampling method to focus on individual managers within ADNOC and its Group of Companies with particular characteristics that best represent the population within the organization that would enable the answering of the main research question and whose information were anticipated to add to the extent literature and existing theory. While these cases do not allow for statistical generalizations, they provide help in reaching logical generalities on the research topic (AlMazrouei et al., 2016).