The Differentiated Workforce: Transforming Talent into Strategic Impact [Hardcover]

Brian E. Becker (Author), Mark A. Huselid (Author), Richard W. Beatty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 2009

Do you think of your company's talent as an investment to be managed like a portfolio? You should, according to authors Becker, Huselid, and Beatty, if you're interested in strategy execution. Many companies fall into the trap of spending too much time and money on low performers, while high performers aren't getting the necessary resources, development opportunities, or rewards. In "The Differentiated Workforce", the authors expand on their previous books, "The HR Scorecard" and "The Workforce Scorecard", and recommend that you manage your workforce like a portfolio - with disproportionate investments in the jobs that create the most wealth. Based on two decades of academic research and experience working with hundreds of executives, "The Differentiated Workforce" gives you the tools to translate your talent into strategic impact.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Brian E. Becker is a professor of human resources in the School of Management at SUNY Buffalo. Mark A. Huselid and Richard W. Beatty are professors of human resource management in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. Huselid and Beatty consult extensively in organizations and speak frequently to practitioners in the HR professional associations around the world.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 242 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Press; 1 edition (April 20, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 142210446X
• ISBN-13: 978-1422104460
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #214,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to use workforce differentiation to achieve significant and verifiable strategic impact, April 26, 2009

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Differentiated Workforce: Transforming Talent into Strategic Impact (Hardcover)

Brian Becker, Mark Huselid, and Richard Beatty shares their thoughts about how to solve the various strategic challenges that line managers now face. "Specifically, it is about making senior managers more successful at executing their strategy" by putting strategy, not people, first. "For most organizations, that success has an important talent dimension. When it comes to workforce strategy, our approach requires that line managers define success but that HR professionals deliver the solution. This requires a new perspective on workforce strategy for both." That said, the transformation they recommend requires thinking more broadly (perhaps even counter intuitively) about the respective roles of line managers, HR, and the workforce because all of them must be centrally in any change initiatives.

With regard to this book's title, Becker, Huselid, and Beatty explain that "there are four key domains that distinguish a differentiated approach from a more conventional (undifferentiated) approach to workforce management: a focus on equity instead of equality; a focus on engaging the right employees, not necessarily all employees; an emphasis on hiring choice employees, not becoming an employer of choice; and finally, a focus on earned increases (i.e. increased responsibilities and compensation." More specifically, strategic talent becomes a competitive advantage (equity), those with strategic talent fully understand how to acquire and retain customers as well as how to accelerate improvement of organizational performance (employee focus); strategic talent is retained and helps to attract and hire fewer but much better-qualified job candidates (employee of choice); and peak performers are generously (and appropriately) rewarded and remain whereas poor/mediocre performers are not rewarded and asked to vacate their strategic roles.

There at least two major reasons why workforce differentiation is so important to almost all organizations, whatever their size or nature may be. First, it can help them to achieve significant and verifiable strategic impact in their competitive marketplace. Also, it will address one of the greatest challenges now facing their senior-managers: How to get more workers positively and constructively engaged? Recent Gallup research indicates that only 29% of the U.S. workforce is positively engaged (i.e. loyal, enthusiastic, and productive) whereas 55% is passively disengaged. That is, they are going through the motions, doing only what they must, "mailing it in," coasting, etc. What about the other 16%? They are "actively disengaged" in that they are doing whatever they can to undermine their employer's efforts to succeed.

In their book, Becker, Huselid, and Beatty provide a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective program by which achieve these two very important objectives, achieving significant and verifiable strategic impact in the competitive marketplace, and increasing the positive and productive engagement of workers at all levels and in all areas of operations. More specifically, they explain

1. How to put strategy, not people, first

2. How to link strategic capabilities to workforce strategy

3. How to identify and evaluate strategic positions

4. How to establish leadership accountability for workforce success (e.g. the line manager's HR role)

5. How to design architecture for the differentiated workforce

6. How to develop and apply strategic workforce measures

My repetition of the word "how" is deliberate because Becker, Huselid, and Beatty devote most of their time and attention to explaining how to implement their various recommendations. They are diehard pragmatists, with an insatiable curiosity to know what works, what doesn't, and why. Their determination to focus on real-world issues, problems, and solutions is perhaps best illustrated by the detailed and surprisingly lively case study they provide in Chapter 7 (Pages 171-231) of how th4 American Hat Association created a differentiated workforce. Obviously, it would be a fool's errand to attempt to duplicate those initiatives without appropriate modification in another organization, even one in the healthcare field. It would also be a fool's mistake to ignore the lessons to be learned from this case study.

Those who share my high regard for this brilliant book are urged to check out Becker, Huselid, and Beatty's previously published The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance and The Workforce Scorecard: Managing Human Capital To Execute Strategy as well as Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution co-authored by Jeanne Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson, James O'Toole and Edward E. Lawler III's The New American Workplace, Dean Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, and Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value co-authored by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great questions, wrong answers, April 10, 2009

By 

Jon Ingham "HCM consultant" (Warfield, UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Differentiated Workforce: Transforming Talent into Strategic Impact (Hardcover)

Becker, Huselid and Beatty have come up with some really important challenges to existing practice in talent management. I'd suggest that all HR professionals should consider these challenges themselves, and then develop their own responses.

I don't personally agree with all the solutions that the authors themselves propose (http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.com/2009/04/10-reasons-not-to-implement.html), but I think they've done a great service for HR in proposing them as they're hopefully going to provoke some deeper thinking than we often see in this profession.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Service, October 18, 2010

By 

Jessica Newberry "Nikebrazen" (California) - See all my reviews
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