Business has changed ever since the pandemic. In this environment, people have to be agile. Agile teams can only be created if there is a culture driven by leadership that’s aligned with your talent management system. To learn more about agile talent management, join your hosts Sam Reeve and Char Miller as they talk to André Blom, the CEO of TMA International. André believes in sustainable adaptability by utilizing talent potential. Everyone has natural talent. They just need the right environment and culture to sustain it.

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Agile Talent Management In An Ever-Changing World With André Blom

Welcome to the show. We’re a mastermind of leaders that are striving to make workplaces better, making them happier workplaces and trying to develop them to be agile to the environments that are changing, which brings us to a very important topic that we have with our special guest. First, I want to introduce our hosts. Those that are long-time audience knows Char Miller.

She is the owner of Rocky Mountain Health Advocates, also a long-term HR practitioner and talent specialist. She comes with a great deal of knowledge and expertise. We’re so happy to have her here. Sumit Singla is not able to join us but he is an HR specialist out of India and has a long pedigree of expertise from companies such as Accenture and so forth.

I’m the owner of CompTeam, a talent and compensation expert. I’m glad to bring these forms, great discussions and speakers to you. Our special guest is André Blom. He is the Head of TMA International. The TMA method is a psychometric tool that is used globally. It’s a full talent suite and we’re going to talk about those different elements of where it supports and the importance of agile talent management in the world. That’s going to be the key topic. Welcome back, André. It’s so great to have you once again.

We’ve talked about this topic before, agile talent management, but it’s important in this context of where we are as far as what’s going on with the great resignation across the globe and what’s that doing to the different practices. How should we think about agility in that perspective? I’d love to hear your view on this. For those that don’t know you, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and how you came to be a practitioner of TMA?

I’d like to thank you, Sam. It’s a little bit of bitty because we planned that I will be live with you but we are all constrained by COVID. Nonetheless, how did I end up in talent management? Without going into a spiritual context, I’ve always been working with talent management. The means that I always had the idea like if we could have the potential of people, how to unite talents with each other and create an environment where people can blossom instead of restricting them from your own mindset or process technology, I have done this all my life.

I started my career in the Army and that’s where I got my first connection with talent management by my instructors because they are probably capable of identifying, “This is where you are good at and where you get your energy from. Let’s put you in this role in this team and this way.” Later on, I did all kinds of instructions from diving instructor, ski instructor to firearms instructor. I was always busy and that started to become my red line. After I left the Army, I joined the corporate world. I was working for a temporary staffing company. Maybe you know about Randstad.

As I was identified as a talent, I was in such a high potential program. I got acquainted with the Founder of Randstad, Mr. Frits Goldschmeding. I thought that it was a privilege to meet him. He said a thing to me that caused a big impact on my life. He said, “If we were only able to tap into the real potential of people and bring them in the right context, what can we accomplish?” Not only on an economic level but also on a level of social innovation. That kept in the back of my head and became a standard of my approach.

When I met my two partners who founded the company, a psychologist and business administrator who also studied a lot about laws, that was the momentum for me to say, “I can focus on this field, the talent management.” This is where I am after years. What I also appreciate quite a lot in my work is I am what you can call a digital native or maybe you could even say a digital nomad.

I adapted to the digital world because I’m going around the world. I have always been in Zoom meetings, on and offline. I visited all my partners around the world. That gave me such a great insight on my observation, listening to people and trying to tap in and help them with talent management that I got a very broad perspective. I’m not saying that I’m the Google of talent management. I’m far from that because I still have a lot to learn but that is how I build up my expertise around this. That’s the story.

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You’re being modest. The experience of seeing different talent processes and practices across the globe is a huge value in what’s going on because as we’ve noticed, a lot of businesses have come back online after having a slow down of the pandemic. They’ve found that the world has opened up quite a bit through the digital nature of work. A lot of companies in the United States, such as Google, Apple and many others, have decided that they’re going not just to hire locally, but they’re going to expand their efforts to hire up more of the global level or wherever people want to work. They’re going to go after the best talent in those different locations.

As we all know, the way that we think about talent and the way we operate in HR is different in those different regions across the globe. As we think about agile talent management and the integral talent management such as recruiting, sourcing, onboarding, teaming, development, succession and right placement, when we’re thinking about the total talent management journey, how has this evolved given the situation that we’re in?

It will be exponential. That has to do with how to work in an agile way. One of the things is to reimagine your business because we are living in a VUCA world, Volatile, Uncertainty, Complexity, even Ambiguity. This uncertainty pushes. It’s a driver for companies who want to survive, not only survive but want to thrive in this new environment. They have to reimagine their own business model and capacity constantly. People came to a realization from a managerial perspective that the two resources is human capital. The true value is social capital. That is the combination of human capital and collaboration. This is the big challenge that I see around the world as people cannot be face-to-face together anymore.

How does your team tick? Do you know how they take? If you take it back a little bit, Sam and Char, what makes people feel good when they get sincere attention based on their contribution? If you all are working together, people can see and also a manager has his normal observation skills. He can see and witness. He is there to see like, “Do I need to give a stimulator? Do I need to include you? Are you with me?” If you’re working at home and people are not capable of doing the integration of private life and personal life, then they feel like a little bit outcast. How do you get around with that? In order to work on talent management in an agile way, that is the big challenge that companies are facing.

The whole structure in how to configure a good organization with on and offline, being on the office, not on the office is a challenge. Make sure that you have the right business capacity, that the processes and systems are working but also how do you have the right culture and leadership for that because it is a challenge. As a manager, how do you make the observation if your staff is engaged and on board to contribute in the team performance?

I love the way you say this because, in my former corporate experience, we had massive talent management, change management types of teams. With all the change management tools, I’m sure we could rattle off a good seven models. When you truly become a business leader and you are faced with a real challenge of change management, agility in the workforce, managing your employees in a VUCA environment, capitalizing on the talent of the expertise in your employees around innovation, change agility and the strength of knowing that we can conquer through the unknown is a very interesting phenomenon.

As a former corporate HR leader and as a true executive leader of a company that’s been thriving through the epidemic, having the conversation with your employees saying, “You are vital. Your talent, drive, passion, ambition and what you bring to the table is going to help us conquer through this at this time period.”

The conversation I had with my employees is like, “We need you. We need your talent, expertise and mindset. The company is relying on each and every one of you no matter what your title is because you are going to help us succeed and thrive through this period.” It was fascinating that I have the TMA for most of my employees on the back burner. My employees are being able to talk about fact. I’m an innovator, problem solver, detail-oriented, good at delegation and good researcher. Being able to have that conversation with your employees at all levels of the organization is the reason why we’re doing fine during this period, even though it’s scary.

You said an essential thing in talent management. Your contribution and talent are needed for our business objectives. Maybe I should frame a little bit. I don’t want to fall down into a semantic discussion but what is talent management? There are different perspectives on it. I have an opinion about it. I want to voice how we think about talent management and how it’s not only for the individual but it’s for the individual to align with the business objectives and team.

 

You can also state that performance is not a result of an individual but it is the impact of a joint effort. That is the mindset that a lot of times failing. You can see that talent management is often broad as like we do something for the people. It’s like an employee value proposition. We do talent management but that should be a balance. Let me try to explain this.

With the perspective of talent management, we can say that there are people that have some stars. “With one person, is that a talent or are there several talents within?” That is the one thing. A lot of people have to do with input or output. We believe in our philosophy that people have a natural talent. It’s not nurtured. It’s where their potential is. To measure a talent, you cannot do that by their performance per se because if you don’t provide the right tools and environment, people will not blossom and the talents are not coming to their full potential.

As an example, I’ve used that before. Messi and Ronaldo are outstanding players. They are talented. They have different talents, physically, strategically on playing in the fields and knowing their position. They have the skills. Put them in a thirdly team. They will not blossom like they do. They need an environment. It is not universal. It is contextual. Talent management is contextual. That is what I was trying to emphasize on, Char. We need your talents for our business.

There’s something else. Sometimes, companies have this strategy. They have a lot of resources. They say, “We put the lights on you. We call this exclusive talent management. We don’t think that everybody has talents.” That is a difference with TMA. We say, “Everybody has talents.” We call it inclusive talent management. That doesn’t mean you cannot have a special program for your critical positions, leadership or technical people no matter what kind of skills they have but we believe everybody has talents.

The big question is for what? What kind of context? The context is not only the assignment but also the team. When we talk about the true talent management, it needs to balance between the potential of your organization and the business objectives. The business objectives are changing every year. How do you make sure that your business capacity in terms of human capital is aligned with your strategy?

We believe in inclusive talent management that a person is not a talent but has exceptional qualities that differentiate him from the others. This is another thing that you said, Char. We try to have a rights spectrum of diversity and that diversity should be identified by the exceptional qualities. That is also doing something with people. When you feel that you are having an exceptional contribution to the team, you feel in place, engaged and motivated because you can make a difference. If you have a team that can help each other out with their exceptional talents and qualities, then you have the right diversity.

I identified that some of my employees were good at delegating or problem-solving. Other employees were not very assertive but they were more tolerant. Analyzing the fact that tolerance in our organization was such a benefit. Other employees were good at compliance and rule-following, whereas other employees were good at creativity or strategic initiatives. It opened up our world to be able to talk about things not in a negative way.

It’s like, “It’s okay if you’re not exactly a great assertive person but your tolerance is going to help our organization thrive through this change.” Employees and leaders were like, “I feel more engaged because I have a contribution to this team and I’m going to help this team in my own talents and little star on what I can bring to this team.”

It’s been fascinating to apply it because it’s good from a practitioner standpoint and solid in the talent management textbooks back when we were taking our Master’s degrees about what talent management was all about. I feel that it’s very different when you apply it in the real work setting. When you apply it in an operational setting where you’re seeing the talents are driving the organization forward, that has been so rewarding.

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Char, maybe you should be on the stage because you mentioned a very important topic. Talent management is only working with positive psychology. It doesn’t matter that you don’t have these talents. You have other talents to contribute. Let’s focus on what you’re good at, where you’re getting energy from and where you can contribute because that will thrive us all. If you would say to a person, “You’re good but you’re lacking these talents,” then you got to tell him because what does the person say, “What can I do to develop my talents,” is a negative connotation.

I don’t know if you remember this but what did you say about Char when you were doing my interview? You said, “We identified in the report that I like to be the center of attention.” That’s when you’re like, “Char, you should be on the stage. You like to be the center of attention.” I took that to heart because I realized that I don’t want to be the center of attention in my company. I want my directors, managers, frontline leaders and employees to be the center of attention.

You’re on the third level of personal development. You don’t mind to be in the center as long as you can learn, teach and others are learning from you.

I took that to heart, André. In TMA analysis, with every single one of my employees, I’m certified and I do this with everybody. Everybody says, “I don’t agree with this.” In the end, that is insightful, even though I might not like the actual wording but it’s been exciting. Majority of my employees appreciated these discussions and said, “We’re not hammering people about numbers, this and that. We’re talking a lot deeper about themselves, their life and career and what they want out of the world.”

I call it Vieta vision because it’s called life vision. That’s one of my emails if you’ve noticed about Vieta vision. I’m always coaching my employees to have that life vision about what they want with us, with their own personal talents and out of this whole experience with our company. This has been a great tool to do that with.

It is very important. You have to have this mindset. Having this positive approach and the willingness to learn from mistakes to say, “We go for it. We experiment. When we make a mistake, we don’t blame. There is a no-blame policy but we learn from it.” It is not fluffy. It doesn’t mean that you cannot have your KPIs, thrive and go ahead to accomplish your goals and dreams. That should also be a very rational part of that. This is how companies make money, survive and organize their existence but it doesn’t mean you cannot have a very positive approach and create a team.

That is something that’s also very important in talent management. There are three levels. As the level of the individual, how can I tap in on the individual? If people can work from the talents that they can do the things where they’re getting energized, comfortable and feel safe, then they will perform and contribute to the utmost. They will take the extra mile but that is on the individual level.

It comes to the team level. This is something that strikes me on my travels through all the companies around our globe. When I asked teams, “How many teaming sessions or training sessions do we have with your team in the context of your work?” I find that astonishing. Most of the time, none. People are assuming, “As long as we work together on a day-to-day routine, we are doing the things.”

When I turn into my clients, customers, CEOs or VPs saying, “Why don’t you take 4, 5 times a year or 4 hours where you do some simulation or reflection, where you see how we learn from each other?” That has to do with being agile. I’m not talking about agile in terms of scrum technology. One thing that we can learn from scrum technology is that they have little sprints and reflect after 2 or 3 weeks every time when there’s a process. I’m not saying that in your running operations, you have to do that every two weeks but think about it. The world has changed. People are working online, offline, remote or in the office. The teams are almost integrated because some are working at home. They don’t see each other.

 

To survive and have a good strategy to go forward, you should have an agile approach and talent management. That means that you have to do that on a level of teams. Train with the financial team and marketing team. Engage your stakeholders in the company to say, “How can we contribute, prevent things to go wrong or improve? Let’s train that and project on what we have learned from our failures or daily process. How do we do that?”

This is a very strong position a team leader or manager should take. Advocate to do that on a regular basis. That is also stimulating to create that psychological safety for people because then they are in a natural environment and working contextual, not just by an exercise on teaming, playing with balls or pulling a rope to see who’s strongest.

It is more like going into the routines and process. Find space so that people have the possibility to step a little bit outside the spectrum of the process and say, “We can do that in a more proficient way or in a way where it’s not the right timing but maybe with new technologies or half a year.” This is adaptable. I have a little framework for that. It’s not a semantic discussion. Are we looking for being agile, resilient or anti-fragile? That is an interesting part. Being agile, when you look at the dictionary that say, “Can you adapt to new circumstances?”

If you are capable of doing that, then they are considered being agile. What is the market demanding? Out a new way, can you take a step forward and be progressive? What is resilient? When there’s something changing in your environment, can you bounce back? I use the metaphor of a tennis ball. When you hit a tennis ball, the moment you hit on it, the form of the tennis ball is changing.

It bounces back to the original form. That is not what we want with being agile. We want to be anti-fragile. When it hit on us, we came out stronger. That’s the same as going to the gym. When you want to build muscle, you have to hurt your muscle. Recuperate to get stronger. Maybe agile and anti-fragile is the bridge between the structure and human being.

Can we help our teams, our human beings to be anti-fragile so that we can bounce back but in a stronger form? That is also a very important mindset to have because that means you need to train. You have to go to the gym to create bigger muscles. You have to train to get a better performance. This way, you create an anti-fragile organization. That was the second level. The first one was the individual. The second one was the team. It comes to the organizational level where you have a community. I prefer the triple A teams where the teams are accountable, action-driven, adaptable and anti-fragile.

When they work and you have these different teams on the organizational level, the leader or senior leadership has to balance that. “How do I go around with it? What kind of resources do I need? How flexible am I that people are thinking outside the box in order to maneuver in our VUCA world?” For that, the organization needs data.

Sam, you said that the TMA is using psychometrics. That is true but there’s only maybe 15% of doing your orientation of identifying the balance. What we are trying to do is build the bridge between the organization and people. That means that as an organization, you have to be very clear on what you expect from people but you also have to be very clear in the spectrum of their mandate of the working circumstances. Are they allowed to take a step outside the box? This is how talent management can come in place.

It’s what Char said about having that improved, communication with your team, understanding with your teams, your team’s talents, leveraging those talents and strengths, so forth. In this world where we’re having this instability where we’re faced by the great resignation as they’re calling it and people are thinking about leaving and so forth, it’s more important than ever to have those stay interviews. Those stay interviews should be in place of that performance evaluation. We should be thinking about having a discussion about how we can best use your talents in the organization.

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How are you seeing those stay interviews being leveraged? Among my clients, I’m influencing them to have discussions sooner than later about their importance to the company, their unique talents and how they can apply those in the future. It brings a sense of engagement so that a person might rethink their thought about leaving the company. What do you think about that concept?

I’m going to answer this a little bit on a high level, Sam. A very significant element in this is the corporate culture and is it aligned with the strategy because people are willing if they have a perspective to make a decision. Are you then willing to give them space so that they can voice their opinions, share their objectives and perspective with you?

This is also how you can learn. If you have what I witness a lot when I’m going around in companies, they have an HR cycle where they have these appraisal forms and all these dialogues. What I hear from people that are also shown out of the surveys from employees is what is asked and presented does not live in an organization.

It’s not even a dialogue. It’s almost a monologue. When they have these appraisals, there is a disbalance. It is like, “I say something about you. Don’t say anything about the organization or me.” In that way, people are not getting the sincere attention that they need because it’s not about what you can contribute. It is mostly about, “This is the profile that we have, what you have to do and what you have to do for the next three years.”

Sam, you are in compensation and benefits. People are rewarded by a 3% raise or maybe category eight to a leasing car or these materialistic compensations but that is not what people are driving for. People are engaged in a company when they’re getting sincere intention and feel that they can contribute, the culture and environment where they live in is meeting their norms and expectations for their own future.

This is how you balance this. That also means on the other end, if people cannot be aligned with what you want to do as an organization, how can you be fair and say, “Let’s go for a replacement. Let’s find you another environment where you can blossom and I will help you with that.” That is something that people are not doing. The turnover becomes too high. That should not be the case. There should be a nice flow. If people have the right perspective that fits the company, go ahead. If people have a different perspective, go ahead but let them in another way.

This is also how you create the flow. I truly believe and that also has to do with diversity, that it is about not only the professional cohesion of your team but also social cohesion. When it comes to the ambition, ideas or perspectives of people on their career, that should also be recognized and supported or not. That is fair enough.

I’m happy to play football but I will never get a position in basketball. I would be crazy if I will do that because I cannot contribute. People have this. They know where the capabilities aligned, so help them instead of keeping them with a dialogue like, “What do you want to do?” Not making it through or making it concrete.

In that way, when it comes to the issue of retention, retention dialogue for me is, “What you have learned? Are you still in your place? How can I give you different tasks, assignments or contexts so that you can grow again?” I do that with my whole team. I lift them. That is what people feel like, “We are recognized. We are not just a number who has machinery and has to do things.” When it comes to these dialogues, they are essential but it has to be done from the right perspective, culture, strategy and with the right intention. It has to be a fair dialogue.

 

I’m not blaming people or saying that they are fooling around but there’s also a reality. Managers are managers because they are good in the job. They have to keep things together and perform but are they those people who can develop people or redefine the task and assignments? Therefore, we need senior leadership and experts to tap in.

As we’re in this VUCA world, we’re looking at these new systems that are coming out, performance management techniques and different things like this. We’re being faced with the adaptation or using technology in our practice. Some of these technologies may leverage AI or Artificial Intelligence. What are your thoughts of how AI can be used? Can it be used in performance management? Is that possible or is this more of a relation between humans?

It can work. Without going too much into specific details, with AI, Artificial Intelligence, you need to have clean data. Artificial intelligence can come with certain algorithms that you might not think of as a person. If you look at the workforce, how I look at the future, there’s going to be a lot of automation. The new workforce is going to exist on the hybrid employee, the one who can make the connection between the data, technology and human side of it, then you have the people who deliver the service.

When we have all this data together, then we can use analytics. That is a big thing for me. HR analytics is the first step before you can come to artificial intelligence because if you do the business, the HR analytics is saying, “What talents do we have onboard? How are the correlations between our performance and business capacity?”

There’s also some basic knowledge in that. What do I mean with basic knowledge? You can have the data that is very rational and explicit but you also need the vision, insights and expertise of people to come to analytics. When you have that level of reach, then you can build up on artificial intelligence like, “Can I be supported as an organization by artificial intelligence on top of my analytics to give me new perspectives?” That is the case.

It’s what I see in the world as far as my knowledge goes. I’m not an expert of this but I do get a lot of questions like, “Can you help us with the data? Can you provide something with machine learning and artificial intelligence?” We are getting onto that level but it is not an easy job. It is still an underdeveloped world but it has great potential.

As an organization, I would say, “Try to step down first and make sure that you have your right talent data available that you are capable with different kind of expertise from the business to do the analytics and then go up to the level where you have machine learning and artificial intelligence but data is going to be a driver for companies for sure. It’s inevitable.”

I like the aspect of being data-driven but we need to look at that data and see where it’s taking us. Is it driving us in the direction of our values and mission, where we plan to go as a company and our guardrails that we put down as far as our talent practices? It can be very telling but we need to understand that in the human context of what’s going on.

Let’s give a very simple sample. If you are a manufacturing company that is assembling things with process technology where you have people doing process operators, do you need a large group of innovative people? Probably only a small group but if you are in terms of a consultancy firm, giving consultancy advisory level to companies to blossom and innovate, your group of people, the threshold of creative and innovative people should be bigger than on a manufacturing company.

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There is no devaluation in, “Are you creative or innovative? Are you more structured and process-oriented?” It is aligned to the business. From that data, you can say, “What is my strategy? What do I expect from people? What natural behavior talents do I need? Am I choosing the right strategy for my company based on my work capacity, social capital or is it in this balance?” When it’s in this balance, you have to use the data to make sure that those elements are aligned.

Back to the context of having an agile and resilient company, an integral talent management process that is going to be flexible and adaptable in this age, what can you tell us about making sure that you have a model? What are the first steps to consider in developing that model?

I don’t believe so much in consecutive steps. I have more on a holistic approach. You cannot say, “Step one is this in order to become agile.” Let’s take a company. Let’s call this a brand, an organization or a house. Let’s open the door of the house. What we see in most of the organizations are different levels, the board level, managerial level and workforce. What kind of elements should be there?

I’m drawing this scientific management structure top-down. What you need to become agile is to make sure that the voice of this individual can contribute to the organization. How do you do that? A very important element is your culture, then there’s a strategy. I’m not saying that strategy is not important but it’s breakfast for culture.

If you don’t have the right culture onboard, then you can have a strategy but then it will not come alive. What do I mean by the culture? It’s the way we do things with each other. Do we have a safe environment where we can all contribute? Do we have leadership that is aligned with that? That is important. The culture is driven by leadership.

In this case, leadership should be aligned with your talent management system. How do we appreciate talents? How do we identify talents? How do we give talent space? How do we create professional and social cohesion in our teams to create agile teams? With agile teams, I call this triple-A. They are action-driven with a lot of reflection and training. They are accountable so they feel responsible. They have an agency.

All those people have an agency. “I have to do this. This is how I can contribute. This is my thing.” They should be anti-fragile, adaptable and find other ways. This is my goal. If I cannot go in a direct line, then I can find my way around. If I have to step out of a system process, I have to do that and have that space. This is where leadership takes an important role. They should make sure that the framework and mandates are in place. They should listen, participate and give people space. It’s not based on democracy. You are a leader for a reason because people are voicing their opinion.

It doesn’t mean you have to follow that. With their voice and opinion, you can come with an argument that says, “I agree with your opinion or I disagree. This is the way we go forward.” If you have that dialogue, that’s the same as what you do with your children. That is leadership and culture. The other thing is the culture is creating your brand and identity. How is the market perceiving your service? That is based on how people are doing things.

What is culture-driven? This is an interesting thing. The culture is different by the individuals who are in the culture. You can say like, “What is the culture of Colorado, USA, India, the Northern part, Sri Lanka or Mozambique?” If you take that into an organization, you can say, “What is our corporate culture?” That doesn’t mean that on a micro or team level, there is not a little twist or thing.

 

When it comes to leadership, the culture is driven by the natural behavior of people or the norms that are valid. If you identify talent and put it in a group, you have very good data to identify your culture. What is on the other hand? With these challenges that we have in the world caused by COVID, a lot of things accelerated. What companies did is they reimagined how they should be configurated but with this reimagining, how do we configure rate our organization? How do we find our process? What is our working operating mode? That should be reimagined all the time because the world is changing.

The VUCA world is not a buzzword. It is a reality. The last thing, what you have to do is to create an agile workforce. What do I mean by that? People are capable of saying like, “How is our market responding? How are we doing it internally? What can we learn from our mistakes? What can we improve?” If there is no space for improvements, adjustments, learning or development, you cannot be agile.

You cannot expect from people to be accountable if they’ve raised their voice and they’re not heard. If they take action and are hold back like, “Don’t do that because that is not the system,” you will not operate them. What I believe is not self-steering teams. People need guidance and leadership but they need to have some space where they can try things out within the teams on a corporate level.

These are not consecutive steps like start with talent management and then create the culture. It is an holistic approach. If you do something with talents, make sure that you also take these steps. With reimagining that comes from the scrum technology, you can say it like, “We do take little sprints. We reflect, project, adjust and try.”

Thank you, André. As far as the systems that we use in specifically artificial intelligence, if we’re using a system with artificial intelligence, is that something that we should make sure that our workforce is well aware of? Are there things related to that? What are your thoughts there?

People are engaged when they feel they’re not excluded. There are different levels of knowledge that you can share but if the receptionist doesn’t know what’s going on in the organization, how can she represent your organization? This is a little bit on that strike answer but if you use these elements like artificial intelligence and get new insights from technology, then take your time and momentum to share that with the organization and try it out.

It is a lot about experimenting together. Don’t think that because this is coming from high technology that everything that comes out is solid and sound. It is something that you have to try to experiment. Do and allow it after you are experimenting. Allow some time to consolidate and then do the proper implementation. This is how I would approach that. Include everybody so that people know what is going on.

There are many tools that we use on a regular basis in the workplace but we cannot delegate our authority and accountability to these tools. We need to make sure that we’re the one that are making the call for our people. It’s important when we’re using these tools in context. It’s great to be transparent in those tools that we trust and so forth.

There are also sources that we don’t quite trust completely. We think that they’re directional or we may use those in our analysis but it’s not something that is going to be a driving factor. To have full transparency and a lot of things could cause alarm doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be transparent. It means we have to have an explanation but we need always to retain our accountability for our decisions.

Maybe it’s also the wording, Sam. Glass is transparent. If you say, as an organization, we are transparent, you allow people to become a value but the value is not included. When it comes to transparency, I rather say we engage and share, instead of, “Have a look at what we are doing and I’m not explaining it. You can have a look at it.” It’s a little bit semantic again but transparency, for me, is something that is not based on interaction. That is what I’m advocating.

 

André, it was a pleasure having you on as a speaker once again. For people to learn more about that TMA method, they can continue joining the show. We talk about TMA all the time but on other avenues where they can learn about TMA, what would you recommend?

I know that after every seminar that we are doing here, you’re always offering the present of the TMA. I want to add something, Sam, for the audience on this session. If they are interested in finding out what it is to have the team assessed and go ahead for this agile approach, I’m happy to support selected participants for this session to see if we can bring that to the next level.

To our audience out there, if you’re interested in a team assessment, please reach out to me at [email protected]. We’ll make that happen for you and take those first several that we can handle. As far as the team assessment, we’ll get you signed up. First come, first serve. Email me. Thank you for the wonderful discussion. André, it’s always a pleasure to hear your expertise and explore your knowledge of the international scope of talent management.

You’re welcome, Sam.

Thank you, André. You’re sitting in my team meetings. I can tell everything what we’re doing.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• Rocky Mountain Health Advocates
• CompTeam
• TMA International
• Randstad
• [email protected]

About André Blom

Blom’s brand promise is sustainable adaptability by utilizing talent potential. With an easy to apply a set of instruments organizations are able to align their human capital with the organizations strategy, brand promise and core values by compiling accurate performance profiles for the individual employee.

This enables management to map out the potential level of contribution from employees and applicants. The assessment tools are designed to unveil the true talents (core drives) in order to get the ‘best’ out of the human capital as well as how management can contribute to make it work most effectively.