Talent, one of the most used buzzwords in the HR industry since the advent for the War for Talent, was aptly coined in 1997. Since then, various industries have adopted strategies to manage their talents and at the turn of the century, most MNCs and large conglomerates had already established their own Talent Department, to manage an exclusive group of individuals.
In this day and age, it is almost incomprehensible for any corporation to not have a talent management team.
As a one of Malaysia’s leading property developers, Mah Sing has had to continuously anticipate market trends and ideas. Following our corporate transformation in 2015, we laid out a three year plan to transform our HR infrastructures, facilities and operations into a world-class practice and build a culture of excellence. One of our objectives was to source the talents that would play a key role in leading Mah Sing into the future.
To achieve this, our first step was to identify the characteristics and traits of these individuals. Contrary to the popular model of categorizing talents by potential and performance, our belief in Mah Sing is that the definition of talent is bipolar; either you are a talent, or you are not.
We believe that performance is a given prerequisite for a person to be considered a talent. When a person is not performing, they are not regarded as a talent. Hence, we do not see a need to plot ‘talents’ by the low performance region of the talent model.
We also view potential as an ambiguous concept, as most talent managers fall back to the various level of agilities to determine the potential of an employee. More often than not, the real talents are the ones who peak in the talent chart, with high potential and high performance.
Based on this belief, we created a talent model in Mah Sing Group that moved away from the commonly applied talent models.