Holding company Marsh & McLennan Cos. has roughly 50,000 employees globally and is composed of four different operating organizations: Marsh, an insurance broker, Guy Carpenter, a risk reinsurance specialist, Mercer, an HR consulting firm, and Oliver Wyman, a management consulting firm.

As vice president and global head of talent management, Arturo Poire runs talent strategy for the entire enterprise. He said the systemic use of development and performance management practices, workforce analytics and a new focus on social media tools are helping to create coherence between the companies and expand communication between all of its leaders.

TM: Describe your company’s approach to talent management.

Poire: We are basically four companies in one, and our strategy has to account for that. There is a good level of decentralization that goes on, so each operating company has its own model when it comes to talent management. At the same time we have a large umbrella because we are an intellectual capital company, so there are certain processes and programs that run across the company.

Our company focuses on performance management and talent to a very big extent. We have a very strong performance management process that cuts across all the different operating companies. We make sure that we have consistency in terms of language, we share the same systems and platforms for that process, and in the past few years we’ve been working very hard on talent reviews, succession management and leadership development. We have meetings with the enterprise CEO once a year to review the top talent across the organization. We also have meetings with top functional leaders, CFO, head of HR, head of legal, head of technology, to look at the functional talent across all of the operating companies. That’s what I’m building now, programs that cut across the enterprise in terms of leadership development and managerial skills with a common language and approach for talent management. Much of what I do is leverage what we have internally, learn from each other’s best practices and try to reuse things that have been developed in other companies. You have measurement processes — performance management, talent review — then you apply the action — leadership development and learning strategy.