A Guide to the Human Resource Body of Knowledge (HRBoK)

4Human Resource Development

The Deliberately Developmental Organization

A New Paradigm for Twenty-First-Century Greatness

Andy Fleming

HR professionals would do well to look beyond twentieth-century models for guidance in building great organizations for this century and the next.

My purpose here is to briefly consider a widely accepted set of ideas related to people development and to raise two questions: Given the need for an ever-expanding set of capabilities to meet the stream of challenges organizations face today and will encounter tomorrow, how suitable is the twentieth-century model for organizations that aspire to greatness? Is there a new conceptual frame available to HR professionals and leaders in general that can better serve their organizations and people going forward?

The Twentieth-Century Talent Management Playbook

When it comes to growing people in their organizations, most human resources professionals today follow a playbook that we can trace back at least as far as the early 1980s to places like General Electric (GE) under the direction of famed CEO Jack Welch. The basic idea: identify and label a small percentage of your workforce as “high potential” and create special workshops and initiatives, usually including some form of executive coaching, to accelerate the development of your “hi-po's” and perhaps other key leaders as well.

What are the problems with the core elements of this playbook? First, they provide people punctuated inputs, delivered from ...