To better reflect the blending of talent management phases, we’ve organized the ATD

Talent Management Handbook into four broad sections:

■ Section I: Attracting Talent—how to build employer brand and purpose as a strategy
to attract and keep top talent.
■ Section II: Engaging Talent—how to engage employees and connect them to an
organization’s culture from day one.
■ Section III: Optimizing Talent—how to rethink performance management and
leverage talent analytics in order to optimize individual and organizational
performance.
■ Section IV: Growing Talent—how to incorporate leadership development and
succession planning at all levels.
The chapters in each section address a talent management topic. More often than not, they
integrate multiple and overlapping topics, strengthening the case that the topics are now
rarely independent of each other.
Take employee engagement. A predominant theme across the talent management
spectrum, employee engagement appears in 13 of the 21 chapters. In section II, Rebecca
Ray and colleagues smartly identify eight critical elements for creating a highly engaging
culture and demonstrate how to evaluate and apply them in your organization (chapter 7).
And what about analytics? The massive wave of data collection and mining has meant that
talent managers must rely on analytics at all stages; talent analytics appears in 10 of the 21
chapters. In section III, John Boudreau and Ed Lawler take a survey approach to tackle how
talent managers can turn talent analytics and reporting into decision science (chapter 14),
while Kevin Oakes and Cliff Stevenson look at seven trends influencing the need for
workforce analytics and talent measurement (chapter 15).
You may notice that except for the leadership development and succession planning
chapters we don’t address learning and development, talent development, capability
development, or competency management separately. This conscious decision for topics
and chapters is meant to highlight that talent development is integrated into all
components of talent management.
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We’ve endeavored to include both best practices and forward-looking, progressive thinking
on each topic. Some authors incorporated both in their chapters; others approached it from
one of the two perspectives. In each case, the authors have included next steps with clear
recommendations about what you, the reader, should be thinking about or putting into
action now. Each author has considered how best to address the fact that new and complex
talent models, inclusive of contingent workers, are rapidly becoming the norm.
This Handbook benefits greatly from its collection of contributors, all leaders in the
profession and experts on the topics they’ve shared. Many of the names you’ll recognize
instantly—Marcus Buckingham, Jenny Dearborn, Julie Clow, and Kevin Oakes. Others
may be new to some of you; their ideas fresh and intriguing. They were a joy to work with
and very patient when we pressed them to tease out some point or expand on a concept we
thought readers would want to know more about. My sincere thanks to them for the time
they invested in researching and writing their contributions. I also want to profusely thank
Ann Parker and Jack Harlow at ATD for their exceptional professionalism in helping me
pull this Handbook together. You are amazing!
I trust you will find this Handbook a go-to reference when you need either a good
grounding or some fresh ideas on a talent management topic. No need to read it front to
back if you don’t want to; just dive into the section or chapter most relevant to your
current challenge. You’ll find that once you start pulling that thread, you’ll be led to
chapters in other sections and see how they are inextricably linked. Seek me out on
LinkedIn and let me know what you think.