Transforming HR: The Power of Talent Enablement

I've spent a significant part of my career in HR, helping organizations, teams, and individuals reach their strategic and career goals. In this journey, I’ve learned that any solution HR provides must be relevant, timely, simple to execute, and demonstrate clear value before anyone will adopt it. Despite wearing various HR hats, the solutions that resonated most boiled down to one thing: enablement. For HR to be effective, the fundamental question it must answer is: How can you enable your talent to achieve career and business goals?

What’s the Difference Between Human Resources and Talent Enablement?

So let’s talk about why we should stop trying to tweak HR and instead replace it with Talent Enablement. To kick this off, we need to define both Human Resources (HR) and Talent Enablement (TE). According to our trusty friend Google and a little help from AI, here’s what we got:

What is HR?

Human Resources (HR) is a business function that manages an organization’s employees, supports compliance efforts, and the business. HR is responsible for recruiting, onboarding, training, and managing an employee from their job application to transition out of the company. This end-to-end management includes strategies for payroll and benefits administration, upskilling, establishing positive workplace culture, optimizing employee productivity, handling employer-employee relationships, employee termination, and more.

What is TE?

Talent enablement (TE) is a modern approach to talent management that helps employees reach their potential by developing and applying their skills, interests, and strengths. It’s based on the idea that employees who do so will add value to their team and the company’s customers. TE helps companies use their resources more efficiently, which can lead to higher productivity and better conversion rates. It differentiates from traditional talent management by focusing on providing the business with talent intelligence that helps the organization optimize human performance.

The Reality Check

First off, I know many of you probably think this definition of HR is too limiting. And you might be right. But if you ask most employees, managers, or executives to define HR, they’d likely give you something close to this definition. Maybe that means HR needs a brand overhaul, or maybe we’ve moved past the notion of HR and need to embrace something new. For my HR friends, I bet your tongues are starting to burn with this definition.

As for TE, the definition focuses mostly on the employee versus the activities that a department needs to do on behalf of the organization. TE is employee-focused, believing that employees are ultimately responsible for delivering business results. I happen to think that TE is more expansive than this definition but want to give credit where it’s due. After some research, I suspect AI got its foundational definition from a 2019 LinkedIn article by Eric Wenzel . Shout out to Eric for his original work.

Why Focus on Talent Enablement?

You Can't Manage Talent, Especially Adults

Let’s get real: you can’t actually manage adults. Think about being a parent. We can’t manage our teenage or adult children, even when they have an emotional connection to us and believe we have their best interests at heart. So how can a stranger manage another adult, especially without an emotional attachment? Instead, organizations should enable, encourage, and motivate talent to perform at their highest potential, supporting the organization’s mission, vision, and strategy. Yes, this means helping employees discover their superpowers and develop a plan to leverage those to achieve their career ambitions.

Talent Enablement Is Bigger Than Learning & Development or Even HR

Sure, L&D and HR are part of the equation but not the whole solution. Talent Enablement is about providing the right environment, experiences, resources, and practices to enable employees to perform their jobs successfully, progress in their careers, and feel a sense of belonging. It provides “guided freedom,” allowing employees to design their careers while following guidance to optimize performance. Isn’t this the role of HR? Maybe it should be, sometimes it can be, but mostly not really.

AI Will Be the Catalyst for New Human Potential

AI will fundamentally change the way we work and operationalize the role of HR. AI will take some tasks from humans, allowing workers to be more productive, strategic, and creative. However, workers will need to learn how to collaborate with AI and navigate the new world of work. This requires significantly more enablement, helping workers change and expand their mindset, toolset, and skillset, and reimagine their professional identity and brand. Enablement goes beyond new processes and programs; it involves a different level of interaction, coordination, collaboration, and strategic planning.

Think Talent, Not Employees

HR has traditionally focused on managing the policies, processes, programs, and practices that impact employees and contractors. In the new world of work, work may be conducted by a combination of talent sources (e.g., employees, contractors, gig workers, apprentices, interns, bots, etc.). Each type of worker has unique needs and requirements. In Janice's world, TE focuses on all human talent that engages in work for an organization.

Talent Enablement Unleashes Talent Intelligence

Talent Enablement isn't about pushing processes and programs—it's about harnessing intelligence and insights. Done right, TE dives deep into understanding your talent. It knows their skills, the impact they make, what drives them, and what might trip them up. It’s about leveraging this knowledge to offer powerful insights, guiding the business to maximize performance and engagement. This isn't just talent management; it's talent mastery.

What Will It Take For TE to Succeed?

For Talent Enablement to succeed, five elements must be in place:

1. Work Environment: Safe, inclusive, fair, and equitable environments that create a sense of belonging and hope, prioritizing financial, physical, emotional, and social well-being.
2. Work Experiences: Purposeful and unique daily work experiences that feel orchestrated, providing opportunities to explore, practice, fail, learn, and engage.
3. Access to Resources: Beyond equipment and technology, access to peers, networks, institutional sages, mentors, coaches, and well-being professionals is crucial.
4. Equitable Practices and Policies: Policies should align with practices, ensuring a positive work environment that drives engagement, performance, and success. TE should monitor the environment to ensure that unspoken practices don't betray the intent of the policies.
5. Data & Analytics: Data is the lifeblood of Talent Enablement. It equips TE with crucial information to empower talent and guide the business on optimal talent utilization. But data alone won't cut it. TE needs sharp analytical skills to extract actionable insights, identifying trends and patterns that influence talent performance. It’s about having the foresight to anticipate challenges and the clarity to address immediate needs.

Conclusion

This brings us full circle to the title of this article: how do we transform HR by moving to TE? The future will see HR, Talent, L&D, Workforce Planning, and possibly other functions merge. TE will play a significant role in business strategy development and execution. For HR to survive and thrive over the next decade, it must offload the administrative and operational elements and expand its focus on the strategic, analytical, and experiential elements, running the function like a consumer business versus an operational cost center. This type of change requires a radical transformation of HR, not mere tweaking of HR practices. For me, Talent Enablement is not just about enabling people; it’s about positioning people to enable the business to thrive.

And that’s the tea, folks! Did it burn your tongue or go down smoothly?

Please comment and let's have a conversation.

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