of these are taken for granted. there is an increasing realisation that it is not functional skills alone or intellectual capacity that matters, but leadership qualities, the ability to straddle different functional areas, businesses, and cultures. in essence, talent in leaders, refers to the ability to effectively handle competing imperatives. while there would always be a place for the passionate niche specialist or the stellar uni - dimensional performer, the task of leaders would be to stitch together and harness their abilities. it is thus that in most corporate training establishments there is an increasing focus on softer skills such as ability to present, to carry a team, values, creativity, and the willingness to learn and to share. talent in itself has little meaning unless it is woven into the weft and warp of the corporate strategy. the need for talent arises directly out of the business strategy adopted. the linkage between talent and an organisation ’ s business challenges and strategies, effective strategy execution requires sufficient numbers of the right people with the right skills and knowledge, in the right roles. the inevitable next issue involves the approaches to talent management. two quite distinct approaches that come to mind are the ( i ) talent based on stellar performers and ( ii ) talent based on robust systems. the first approach leverages individual and group performance of an elite group of the brightest people ; the second focuses on recruiting and retaining ordinary people and getting extraordinary performance from them. the focus is on systems – focusing on the collective vision which brings together the disparate pieces and sews them together in a common purpose. whatever be the model followed, talent management entails that the organization knows what it is looking for, that is, what talent one needs for business, now and in the foreseeable future ; knowing how best to source such talent ; getting it and deploying it for optimum effect within the organisation. having said that, one must admit that the ground reality in our country is such that there is a host of issues to contend with before putting in place an effective talent management strategy. forced with legacy issues, constraints, and the sheer complexity of the task, most organizations abandon the attempt to make rational choices. most treat their people with diverse skill sets as undifferentiated resources and merely guess how best to assign employees to their job. this reality of course exists not just in india, where public sector banks have their own constraints – ground rules and framework for employment - which make them less agile and responsive, but across the world.

at the workplace. this in turn helps attract and retain talent. while these for long have been common knowledge, these have been difficult to implement in the absence of human resource management systems. mapping competencies for every job requirement, mapping the competencies of the work force and matching these, anticipating workforce requirements, providing training tailored to individual goals and finally measuring performance are by no means simple. it is in the proper management of talent that opportunities for very substantial gains in productivity, profitability and personnel development lie – it is here that public sector banks can reap very substantial productivity gains. this takes hr and especially talent management from the shadows of the boardrooms on to the proscenium – on to the centre stage of concerns of the banks ceos. the preconditions for an effective talent management is clarity of where the organisation is, i. e., the starting point and where it wishes to reach in a given time horizon, i. e., the destination. talents then constitute the prime resource needed to reach the destination laid out in the organisational goals and vision. to put any successful talent management programme into action, we need data and a robust mis. it is intrinsically linked with strategy, with technology, with processes, with the quality initiatives and the traditional hr subsystems such as recruitment, placements, performance appraisal, and compensation. the questions that come to mind are : do we have a comprehensive idea of all our processes, what percentage of staff is deployed for facilitating functions, can better systems and reengineering of processes release and free valuable talent to explore their potential in functional areas? what are the competency gaps that need to be filled through capacity building and what gaps need to be filled with new recruits or lateral intake or contractual appointments? how do we gauge performance? are we distinguishing between potential and performance? what forces come between potential and performance and is the institution addressing these? what is the reward mechanism which we have in place? what is the flexibility we can offer to move from a compliance culture to and outcome oriented culture – to foster a mindset driven by teleology rather than bureaucratic processes. these issues have always been important, it ’ s just that the imperatives to address them squarely in substance were not so compelling. there have been broadly three catalytic forces that have brought about this changed perception of human resources : first, as the widespread use of the personal computer and the advent of the internet in the 1990s attained a critical mass