Chapter 9

Talent Management:
The Elephant in the Room

Nigel Paine, Managing Director,
nigelpaine.com

What’s in this chapter?

• The five key shifts in the employer-employee relationship
• Findings from a U.K. study of talent and leadershi
• Tips for moving toward a talent-driven culture

 

ASTD is running an online seminar called “Talent Management: The Key to Success in the Knowledge Economy.” A new magazine has popped up from the CLO stable called simplyTalent Management, and there are numerous senior corporate roles in both the public and private sectors with the word “talent” in the title. These include head of talent, head of talent management, and even head of talent planning! You cannot work successfully now in the human resources (HR) area without understanding some of the issues concerning talent—or, indeed, what talent is.

This was heralded in October 2006 by a prescient 20-page feature inThe Economist, “A Survey of Talent,” which seemed to open the floodgates.The Economist’s insight can be summed up in its own concluding words:

The success of advanced economies is increasingly dependent not on their physical capital but on their capacity to mobilise their citizen’s brainpower. . . . [This will lead to] all sorts of benefits, from higher growth in productivity to faster scientific progress. It can boost social mobility and allow all sorts of weird and wonderful talents to bloom. (The Economist 2006, 20)

 

In some ways, this journey fromThe Economist supplement to the ASTD webinar over nearly two and a half years takes us full circle. This is the journey from the genesis of an idea to its extrapolation as a practical call to action.

 

 

Another Elephant in the Room

If you had been anywhere near Piccadilly in London on Saturday, May 6, 2006—at the point whenThe Economist was commissioning its supplement—an incredible and bizarre sight would have greeted you. About a quarter of a million people thronged to a usually traffic-packed grand London thoroughfare to witness something they had never seen before and would never see again: a mechanical elephant over 45 feet tall and weighing 42 tons walking down Piccadilly toward Piccadilly Circus, occupying both carriageways (that is, all four lanes of a wide thoroughfare) and dwarfing the street’s grand facades. And when I say walk, I do not mean being dragged on wheels, I mean walk! Each huge hydraulic, treetrunk-sized leg would raise up and stomp down, as the next one lifted, and slowly, painfully slowly, the elephant would inch its way down the street as the musicians played, and the dancers danced on the wide stage on top of the elephant.

Above this scene, the sultan who owned this elephant wandered out onto his side balcony and waved at the crowd or sat and sipped tea. This was indeed his elephant. Meanwhile, the elephant’s head turned, ears flapped, eyes blinked and revealed lashes about eight inches long, and trunk contorted in a prehensile way, up and down and sideways until, at the height of its trajectory, it would disgorge gallons of water onto the unsuspecting (and remarkably good-natured) crowd.

This had been presaged two days previously by the arrival of a large (15 feet high) wooden barrel that simply appeared that morning in Whitehall, breaking up the ground where it “landed.” This is narrative told on a grand scale!

In reality, this was the largest piece of open air theater ever seen in London, the creation of a French Theater Group called Royal de Luxe, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2009. The elephant has performed all over Europe, but nothing could take away the impact, amazement, and incongruity of this London spectacular.

The event told a story loosely based on a Jules Verne short story, “The Sultan’s Elephant,” and was commissioned to mark the 100th anniversary of Verne’s death. But the elephant was big business, and if you needed to draw a massive crowd, this was the guaranteed way to do it. And for this reason alone, event organizers of various sorts were prepared to dig deep to secure this elephant.

But what makes the elephant even more interesting are some facts about its inception and creation. It had taken more than two years to design and build, and more than 1,000 people had been involved at one time or another in the construction process. It was the embodiment of the vision of the Royal de Luxe’s director—Jean Luc Courcoult—but to make this vision a reality had required a team of skil ed engineers, materials scientists, artists, puppeteers, actors, painters, logistics experts, and many more.

This team worked in multidisciplinary groups charged with executing their parts of the design. There were no models to copy, no blueprints, no benchmarks. No one, anywhere in the world, had ever done this before. The groups worked entirely in unknown areas. Every step was the creation of a new reality and the solution to numerous logistic, mechanical, electronic, and aesthetic problems that took small steps toward solving the bigger issue: how to bring Courcoult’s vision to life. And as with many visionary companies before them, only with the delivery of the product did anyone begin to understand what it was all about.

There were three key characteristics of each and every one of the groups forming the elephant-construction team: massive diversity (they were multiskil ed, multiethnic, and multiage), mutual respect for these various differences, and a belief that they could achieve their goal on time. For many of the team members who were interviewed, this was the best job they had ever had, and yet it was the most demanding and the most likely to fail. This project embodied the spirit ofThe Economist’s view that by mobilizing citizens’ brainpower, it would be possible to achieve the impossible.

The elephant was neither a work of art nor an elaborate machine. It meant nothing and everything. And it was certainly not something that evoked lukewarm reactions from those who saw it. Like Ken Blanchard’s call to create “raving customers,” it evoked strong emotions (see Blanchard and Bowles 1993). People were astonished by what they saw. Most people there on the third day had been urged to participate by onlookers from days one and two; hence the exponential growth in the crowds.

There was also the massive logistical job of getting the crowds and the elephant from point A to point B and preventing any unwanted collisions between elephant and human beings. But this worked, both at the level of vision and the level of detail. The total experience was positive and delightful.

In many ways, “The Sultan’s Elephant” extravaganza embodies the future of work. Most industrial economies will have extraordinary numbers of people working in areas that involve breakthroughs, are breathtaking, and are astonishing. Hundreds of thousands of employees will be working on projects that have no precedent and that, in their own small way, will change the world. And the only way that this will be possible will be to mobilize the brainpower employed and to understand talent, thoroughly and completely. The concept of talent is not a restatement of existing HR procedures that have existed up to now, but, rather, a reconceptualization of the relationship between employer and employee to build a talent-driven organization.

 

 

The Changing Relationship between Employer and Employee

There are five key shifts in the relationship between employer and employee that trace the trajectory from perceiving an employee as an entity to be corralled, controlled, and directed to seeing that same person as talent to be developed, encouraged, and, in a sense, set free. These five shifts are

• from doing a job to inventing a role
• from being skilled to being talented
• from development as a privilege to development as a right
• from knowledge hoarded to knowledge shared
• from individual performance to team achievement.

Each shift needs a certain amount of elaboration and explanation.

 

 

From Doing a Job to Inventing a Role

Clearly there are jobs to be done! A range of competencies fit each role. But in a talent-oriented organization, the individual grows into his or her wider role and therefore builds and constantly changes the actual role played. If you look at companies as diverse as WL Gore and Google, what links them is a more flexible attitude to the role of the employee.

At WL Gore, project leaders are chosen for their fit with a specific project and, when they finish, they may return to being a participant in someone else’s project. An employee is an associate, and that is the only information on their business card. Job titles are ephemeral, roles change, and the individual grows with the company. Likewise, Google allows employees to focus on their own projects for 20 percent of the workweek. They can freely associate with self-directed and self-sustaining teams to get this work done, and therefore they increase their own competence and creativity for the company as a whole, not just for a particular role or a specific project. Every member of the staff is therefore expected to have ideas and be prepared to articulate them. And ideas transcend hierarchy.

Consider the treatment of the character Frank Wheeler by his boss and boss’s boss in the film (or, indeed, the novel)Revolutionary Road (Yates 1961). The story, which is set in New York during the 1950s, illustrates just how little has changed over the intervening half century in employeremployee relations, whereas every other aspect of society has changed radically. Wheeler feels essentially alienated from the work process, and he moves seamlessly from being perceived as a difficult, and not very satisfactory, employee in the eyes of his dull, unimaginative boss to being seen as a special talent selected from the run-of-the-mill majority. This shift occurs because he designs a different sort of brochure for the Tacoma Regional Office concerning a machine he only begins to recognize later is a computer. He describes it to his wife as a big adding machine, and she could not be less interested.

Even Wheeler’s special selection and promotion are poorly handled, and he never contributes a fraction of what he is capable of in his new (or old) role. This development of work roles that are as unfulfilling as they are futile is a norm, still expected by many employees. When employees the world over are questioned about their level of motivation, “unchallenging” is still their dominant description of their work. There is much evidence for this, from surveys of various kinds, but the YouGov survey quoted by Stefan Stern in aFinancial Times article on May 14, 2007, is illustrative. YouGov questioned more than 40,000 employees, at all levels and in all sectors, and it found that

only half (51 percent) feel fully engaged by the company they work for. Less than two thirds (63 percent) say they feel loyal to their employer and an even smaller proportion (51 percent) believes their employer deserves any loyalty.

 

 

From Being Skilled to Being Talented

Most governments of industrial countries have skill development policies. In Britain, the most recent report on these policies, by Lord Sandy Leitch,UK Skills: Prosperity for All in the Global Economy—World Class Skills, was published at the end of 2006. It makes the assumption that formal, recognized qualifications to standardized levels will improve, in themselves, the overall prosperity of a company or the nation. In the foreword to the report, written by the author, he argues,

[i]n the 21st century, our natural resource is our people—and their potential is both untapped and vast. Skills will unlock that potential. The prize for our country will be enormous—higher productivity, the creation of wealth and social justice. (Leitch 2006, 1)

 

In other words, untapped human potential can be released by skills development. The reality is more complex, and it takes us away from the simple correlation that because training is good, therefore the more training the better for the individual—and the more a company invests in training, the better the company will perform. In short, more skills equal increased productivity.

One of the report’s key recommendations is that companies make a pledge to fund, voluntarily, the upgrading of the vocational qualifications of their workforce up to a defined minimum level (called level 2). The weakness of this argument is that skills development alone is rarely enough. And in the current climate, spending training funds on skills development, with no clear idea of how or if payback will occur, is to tread on very thin ice indeed. The wreckage of corporate training departments around the industrial world—especially in the United States—attests to this.

Two companies with similarly skilled workforces can perform very differently in the marketplace. The difference reflects how work is organized, the quality of the processes in place, and the way the workforce is managed and positioned. Attitudes toward talent and a talent culture are therefore as significant for performance as the delivery of skills and qualifications. With such a culture in place, organizations naturally begin to evolve measurable outcomes and clear business benchmarks for success.

 

 

From Development as a Privilege to Development as a Right

Development as a right does not imply that individuals can take on any portfolio of learning they want, at any time that suits them. Rather, it implies a culture of learning in an organization. Learning and development are the expected norms of behavior. This is coupled with an attitude where questioning decisions, curiosity, and innovation are dominant. This is not the general experience of most employees, and this culture is by no means the dominant culture. The bookOrganizational Learning andthe Learning Organization (Easterby-Smith, Aráujo, and Burgoyne 1999) makes this abundantly clear.

InThe Future of Management (Hamel and Breen 2007), Gary Hamel describes Google as being more like a research university than a large multibillion-dollar company in terms of its attitudes and behaviors. Debate, brainstorming, and the free exchange of ideas are a dominant part of the culture. And in this economic downturn, it has posted increased profits and is still recruiting, though not at its former rate. Contrast Microsoft; the company announced 5,000 redundancies and abandoned profit projections for the later part of 2009. Both firms have smart, highly skilled workforces and function in the same sector. But their attitudes toward ideas, workforce innovation, and talent are different. Some of the answer to the success of one and the relative decline of the other must lie in this area.

Learning organizations tend to amplify the impact of informal learning and to create pathways for this to happen more regularly. They also encourage the sharing of knowledge, so success or problem solving in one part of the organization can be quickly replicated in other parts. IBM, for example, builds in a knowledge-sharing element to every project it runs, so that any staff member can access IBM’s global position on any aspect of its work and trace the key people in any area almost instantly. And this is for a workforce of more than 250,000. Therefore, what IBM has learned about almost any situation is rapidly available across its networks to almost all employees.

At the third-largest supermarket chain in the United Kingdom, ASDA—now owned by Walmart—the then–chief executive, Archie Norman, inherited what many told him was a basket case of a company and the worst-performing supermarket chain in the United Kingdom. He set about rebuilding the company and transforming its performance, investing time and energy in the existing staff by

• Rewarding good ideas and implementing staff suggestions in as many cases as possible.
• Offering the loan of a Jaguar car for a month (formerly the exclusive property of senior executives) to the highest-performing shop-based team.
• Writing personally to every staff member who made an exceptional contribution to the company or made a suggestion on how to improve the place.
• Building loyal teams and a proud staff. (Each morning before the stores opened, the staff would huddle in teams and shout what was cal ed the “ASDA Cheer”: “Give me an A, S, D, A. . . . What does that spel ? . . .”)

No idea was overlooked, and every contribution was recognized. The massive learning culture that he instituted was largely informal and largely workplace based. Without paying any more than the supermarket norm, he built an exceptional workforce that changed the quality of the shopping experience for customers and bred loyalty and trust that continue to this day.

 

 

From Knowledge Hoarded to Knowledge Shared

The 16th-century British philosopher, scientist, and political pundit Francis Bacon (1561–1626) coined the phrase “knowledge is power.” And the ramifications of this extend into the 21st century. A culture of hanging onto and hoarding knowledge exists in many workplaces. Your position can be related to how much you know and with whom you choose to share knowledge. This was perhaps more prevalent in Europe than in the United States, but it dominated structures and distorted organization charts and hierarchies. In one large British company, the general mythology was that it took eight years to work out with whom to talk to circumvent the bureaucracy and get things done. Conversely, you had to work out whom to avoid, for they would never help, almost on principle, and would disrupt any project in which they became involved.

In a climate where we rarely have eight months to get to peak performance, let alone eight years, a new culture is required that rewards the movement of information and the sharing of knowledge. Status accrues to the person who transmits knowledge rather than to the one who stores it.

One could argue that the large consulting firms are massive knowledge-sharing hubs. They can quickly assimilate what the organization knows about a given subject and “sell” it back to a new client. Talent and potential are associated with expert knowledge shared. The wider the net is cast, the more valuable the contribution.

One of Toyota’s greatest contributions to auto manufacturing was the introduction of the idea that every person was responsible for the quality of the product, not just the quality control people at the end of the line. Therefore, any single individual or team on the production line had the right and responsibility to stop the line and fix a problem before the line moved on. This was diametrically opposed to the then-prevalent best practice that made it a punishable offense to impede the line—it kept running 24 hours a day unless it broke down. Any problem was simply passed down the line to, ultimately, the quality assurance person, who had to fail the car and fix it off the line or run it through the line again.

In one large car plant in Britain in the 1970s, the managers sat in a glass box in the center of the factory and managed their role remotely, speeding up the line whenever they thought they could get away with it and stopping it when there was a major problem. The workers on the floor were totally disempowered. One section, famously, had a sign attached to the workspace saying “Don’t Feed the Monkeys.”

Toyota, conversely, made its employees feel valued and rewarded for their contribution. Astonishingly, in a former GM plant in California, the former GM workers, now rebranded as the Toyota workforce, contributed an average of 50 suggestions a year each to the company and received compensation ranging from a few dollars to thousands of dollars, depending on the nature of the idea and its intrinsic value to the company. There were plaques all over the factory acknowledging the really great ideas that had emerged from the line, naming the individual who had made the suggestion, and building that person into a corporate hero.

Toyota saw its workforce as talent to be developed, whereas the other manufacturer saw the workforce as replaceable cogs in a machine. These are stark contrasts in the treatment of individuals that led to even starker contrasts in performance. But you will find analogies to this situation in every sector of every economy all around the world. The principle of treating the workforce as hard-to-replace talent will make a difference wherever and whenever it is applied.

Although it is naive to see the demise of General Motors in its prebankruptcy form as purely a talent issue, the issues of GM’s failure to respond fast enough to market trends and reliance on a compliant U.S. consumer market buying the same cars year after year have knowledge sharing at their core. GM was not in touch with the consumption patterns of its own staff, let alone the rest of the world. Its failure was a long time coming, not merely a reaction to the current economic climate. It has been more than 10 years since another car manufacturer took over the worst-performing GM assembly plant near San Francisco and, using the same workforce, made it into one of the most efficient auto plants in the United States. The lessons were clearly written a long time ago.

 

 

From Individual Performance to Team Achievement

If we go back to that Toyota production line, every employee believed that he or she was building a perfect vehicle. Every car rolled off the line flawless. And there were no quality assurance teams to monitor the work. The members of each team on the line believed that they had a role to ensure that their element, whatever it might be, was a perfect contribution to the whole. When changes occurred, they occurred to make the process better, faster, and simpler. And when someone else stopped the line, the teams came into their own. They would discuss production issues, exchange ideas on how to improve their piece of the vehicle, and make notes to exchange with other teams about how they, too, could improve. Rewards were at the levels of the whole plant, the team, and the individual. The success of the element was a direct contribution to the success of the whole.

Contrast this with a financial services organization that was trying to increase the birthrate of new financial products. Its staff could manage about two new products a year, and some of their more fleet-of-foot rivals managed two a week! The ensuing investigation revealed that the company had no skills deficit. Its people were as smart and well trained as those of the rival company. The issue was about reward. This company focused on individual targets and individual achievement. There was no real incentive to contribute to the company’s success over and above the individual’s performance, to the point where sales leads that were not appropriate for one section were rarely passed on to the relevant team elsewhere in the company. Teams were collections of individuals who rarely helped each other, even though they managed a portfolio of clients or products that contributed to the overall firm performance. And interest was rarely ever shown in contributing to another team’s success or assisting when it encountered difficulty.

If you demanded better and faster ideas for new products, what was the incentive? Time on new ideas could either detract from performance today or generate revenue for some other team tomorrow. Most new ideas did not fit neatly into the current structure, and they could therefore threaten everyone’s bonus.

Radical change only occurred when there were incentives for sharing. Bonuses were based on the team, not just the individual, and there were rewards for team-spanning and cross-company ideas. Also, new appointments were needed in key influencing roles.

If talent is seen only as what an individual possesses to a greater or lesser extent, then the organization will not benefit from a talent culture and it will not learn from within or from outside. Recognizing the range and diversity of talent in an organization is the key to leveraging its talent and helping it flourish as a whole.

Talent is, therefore, a way of looking at the workforce and building a culture that leverages it for the best possible outcomes. A much-used quotation from Henry Van Dyke, the 19th-century American writer and Presbyterian minister, captures this holistic view of talent: “Use what talents you possess: The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.”

Generally, an individual working for a talent-centric employer feels valued, developed, and stretched, and is seen as knowledgeable, informed, and committed. A talent-centric employer sees the workforce as hard to replace; as trusted, with some autonomy; as worth giving a voice to; and as highly committed to the organization’s success. In tough times, a talent-centric employer will do everything to retain that talent. In an organization that thinks differently, employees will be the first cost to cut.

In a talent-centric workplace, there is a continuous focus on the future—on building and developing capabilities, on seeking out new opportunities, on taking counsel from employees and customers alike. There is a strong culture of innovation fed by both continuous improvement and radical transformation. Such an organization is an exciting place to work. And this does not mean, necessarily, that such an organization must be located in one of the “sexy” industries. The best employer in the AsiaPacific region in 2007, according to a report by Hewitt Associates, was a flash memory manufacturer in China called Spansion—SalesForce; an Australian call center came in sixth. And this was out of 750 employers who signed up for the study and after analysis of the data supplied by the 160,000 employees who submitted questionnaires. The final endorsements came not from managers but from the employees themselves.

 

 

Talent and Leadership

In an excellent report by Momentum Executive Development (2007),Talent and Leadership Practices 2007, 16 large companies, from a wide range of sectors, with a U.K. base, were interviewed about their current leadership and talent practices, and the results were chilling. The survey found

• Many managers simply lack the skill or will to identify and nurture talent, yet they are the key to this process.
• There is not yet a convincing correlation between talent, leadership, and business success.

These results draw the unsurprising conclusion that “no one is satisfied with where they are in meeting these challenges right now.”

These conclusions are based on research that was conducted in 16 leading-edge companies employing well more than a million people worldwide who are at the forefront of traditional models of leadership development. They all (except one) work with top business schools or provide executive programs for leadership development and have complex and comprehensive performance management processes in place to regularly review the impact of their leaders. Yet only two of the 16 directly link leadership behavior and impact with remuneration.

When you move four levels below the top team, fewer than half the companies have systems to review the quality of leadership or determine its impact. And in al but one, talent, management development, and recruitment are separate functions with limited communication among them. Five critical issues were raised in the Momentum study:

• engagement, in terms of catching top management’s attention to talent issues and relating it to bottom-line business
• capability: building and ensuring the best investment in this area
• organizational boundaries, such as the structure and geographical spread of companies and how to manage across boundaries in a meaningful way
• life and career stages, with meaningful engagement at critical points to ensure both retention and development
• talent processes and their alignment and effectiveness, and how they are related to business outcomes.

Good practices are emerging across these five areas from companies all over the world. The talent issue is not North American or European or confined to industrial countries. Some of the best solutions come from the least-expected locations and the most-surprising companies.

 

 

Engagement

There are several indicators of good practice here. The first is to create a senior management role that has oversight of the total talent process from recruitment to retirement. Under this function, the processes should align and the managers should be clearly aware of their responsibility to implement the processes. The manager’s role is critical, and this should be acknowledged and rewarded not as a performance afterthought but as a core job element.

In one Brazilian company, the recognition of an individual as having high potential led to difficulties on the line. Managers had to be specifically trained so that their behaviors reinforced rather than detracted from the centrally established process. Ultimately, they were rewarded for the number of high-potential staff they managed—more meant increased remuneration.

One U.S. company keeps track of its key staff when they leave. An annual “reunion” dinner is held, at which former employees are invited to consider rejoining the company. Job opportunities are circulated, and up-to-date résumés are collected. This revolving door has resulted in key former employees returning to the company with wider experience and better skills. Similarly, newly retired staff are kept on retainers for a certain number of days each year. These contracts allow knowledge to be shared at appropriate times, mentoring, and even temporary reemployment, should the need arise. There have been instances of nominally retired employees maintaining key intranet sites, shaping the knowledge contained there, and entering into online dialogues as coordinators. These critical roles can sometimes best be managed by someone who has the time and will enjoy the connection with the company. The quid pro quo is sometimes as simple as leaving the company computer hooked up in the person’s home and paying a modest per diem. This can maintain loyalty and occasionally ensure that knowledge is not shared with the competition!

 

 

Capability

The mythology that any development is good development—based on the old principle that only 50 percent of advertising works, but we cannot be sure which 50 percent—is slowly being discredited. Companies that review all capability development for the impact that ensues as a result can better target their investments. Learning and development departments that add programs for no other reason than to increase the size of their portfolio, incorrectly believing that more is better, are coming to be seen as wasteful and out of line.

There are, therefore, three trends coming together: Learning and development departments are being held accountable for business impact, experiencing a more complex focus on evaluating learning programs for both qualitative and quantitative returns to the company and developing increased clarity about the kinds of capabilities required for both the present and immediate future. Detailing capabilities in minute detail via long lists of competencies is also falling out of fashion. In the Momentum report, a significant number of companies had moved away from this model to one incorporating more emphasis on values and attitudes.

This complex mesh of skills, engagement, and attitude requires more complex programs of support and development, including action learning, coaching, development outside the normal work environment, and community involvement. These newer forms of development are growing at significant rates in organizations worldwide.

 

 

Organizational Boundaries

Even big organizations can feel claustrophobic because of their structure and culture. In many large companies, movement between divisions is difficult, and movement between different locations can be complex and bureaucratic. Even within one division, the team focus can make it difficult for an individual to change teams, even if it is in the best interests of the organization. In one media company, an individual recruit (at any level) was seen as a member of that team until he or she left the company. Anyone making an internal change was shunned by the previous team and talked about as disloyal.

It took change at the top to attack this philosophy and breed a culture of talent pooling and career development. For example, it was made known that no one would rise to the level of executive director having remained his or her whole career in only one division. This was in direct contradiction to the previous model, in which “divisional loyalty” appeared to be the only way of rising to the top. This was exemplified recently when the head of radio retired after a lifetime career with the organization in that one division, to be replaced by the director of marketing, who had had no previous radio experience.

In a model apparently borrowed from the English Premier Football League, some organizations are prepared to loan out executives to other (nondirectly competing) companies for only salary recovery, to give these individuals the opportunity to gain new experience and new skills that can be applied when they return—usually to a new role. The benefits of being exposed to a different culture and ways of doing things go far beyond a simple skills development matrix. The receiving company also has the benefit of a new approach and an injection of capability, with neither the cost of recruitment nor the cost of a continuing salary to worry about.

Many companies now see a woman on maternity leave as an employee to be cultivated, briefed, and developed during her absence—rather than as a nonemployee who has the right to become an employee once again and in whom no one has any interest until she walks back through the door. In a large company, several hundred women can be in this position, often with some time on their hands. This cadre can be mobilized to think through new ideas, comment on policy, or remotely coach or mentor staff. Not only does the company get the benefit of this group’s intelligence and skills while they are on leave, but these employees are also able to get up to speed far more quickly when they return to work than others who have stayed out of contact for the duration of their leave. Also, such staff may be allowed to work part time for several years without jeopardizing their chances of promotion, and flexible working can be a norm, not a privilege. These are boundary-breaking ideas that actually work. But to make them work requires a different view of talent and reconceptualizing the nature of the workforce.

 

 

Life and Career Stages

There are significant difficulties when someone is promised a particular opportunity during the recruitment process that is not delivered when that person arrives in the company. Often, recruitment is outsourced, and the person in charge of recruiting is deemed to have achieved his or her objective when the individual arrives in the company or completes his or her first six months. A more holistic approach would include the future line manager agreeing to preemployment commitments and an orientation plan built into those discussions. Some companies now ask a potential new recruit to meet 15 or more staff members before being offered a job. This has nothing to do with his or her competence and everything to do with fit.

Successful recruitment is not getting someone to sign on the dotted line but the achievement of delivering a new person to the team who is, or can be, fully integrated into the workplace and its ethos, and who feels committed to the new employer. New employees who feel that they were lied to during the interview process will rarely stay long and rarely deliver all that they are capable of delivering.

In a recent case, a bright, new recruit, not long out of graduate school, was persuaded by the HR recruiting executive to take a job that was not the recruitee’s first choice but had been a difficult-to-fill vacancy. On arrival, the new employee felt that the role was inappropriate and that she had been misled when she was persuaded to take it. She lasted barely a year and never performed up to her potential. Meanwhile, the recruiter was doubly rewarded for hiring a talented employee and filling a challenging position.

Most organizations do not pay much attention to career stages unless an employee is joining or being promoted. In reality, the critical stages in a career are at other times. Focusing regularly on an individual’s career can have a dramatic impact on attrition rates. And this can be massively cost-effective. The Center for High Performance in Chicago has completed research on the cost of replacing talent in organizations. Even for middle-ranking executives, it can cost as much as $250,000 to temporarily fill, recruit, hire, and finally train to the point where the person can do the job as well as the previous incumbent. It is obvious that a modest reduction in attrition rates can save millions of dollars. That investment to retain an employee is far less than the cost of finding someone to replace him or her by several orders of magnitude.

Many individuals grow overly familiar and bored with the jobs they do over a period of time. This can occur at different times in someone’s career, depending on the job or the person. Intervening at a critical career moment can help maintain that person’s sense of development and personal growth and can ensure continuing commitment to the organization.

During the final two years before retirement, much can be done to stop a “running down” of the role and commitment of the individual. In some organizations, key staff are taken off their job for part of the time to allow them to concentrate on mentoring junior colleagues, organizing their knowledge, and conducting pre-retirement knowledge-sharing sessions. This helps to maintain the interest and commitment of the retiring employee and allows the employer to capture and transfer the employee’s knowledge and experience—a win for everyone involved.

 

 

Processes

All the ideas discussed above require appropriate processes to make them work. And an organization where the processes work against a new culture will find the new culture far more difficult to embed. The impact of processes on one’s experience of an organization is often overlooked. At the same time, the number of process blockers that exist before something can be executed is directly proportional to its success. Companies that take this reality seriously can often significantly simplify processes. But this is laborious work, and there are vested interests in maintaining the status quo. Unfortunately, complex and unnecessary processes can hinder talent development far more effectively than other more overt challenges.

 

 

Tips on Moving toward a Talent-Driven Culture

Following from the analysis above, here are 10 tips for moving your organization toward more effectively developing talent and building a talent ethos.

The first tip is to take a holistic approach to talent in your organization. Each employee should be working toward the same organizational goals, and at least some of employees’ individual goals should overlap so that they have to work together to succeed. The result will be that employees will hear the same message from each team they support and will experience consistency and integrity across the whole organization. In this type of environment, one person must understand and be accountable for the entire employee life cycle and should report to senior management regularly on this area.

Second, the term “talent” should be interpreted widely. All staff should be seen as having potential, and efforts should be made to develop this potential in appropriate ways. Trust is an important part of this environment. Most employees make decisions with the best of intentions, so all individuals should be seen as trustworthy until they prove otherwise—not the other way around.

Manifestations of this can be cheap and simple to implement. One company invited its managers to take the time to thank staff for what they had done. This small alteration to hitherto normal behavior increased productivity and lowered the attrition rate. Yet many organizations take most people for granted, most of the time. It is a bitter irony that many staff only discover just how much they were valued on the day they hand in their resignations.

There has to be some kind of measurement of leadership performance in this area. 3M, for example, makes team development a significant part of a leader’s appraisal. In the Momentum study, three of the 16 companies also ranked and reward leadership and team empowerment.

Third, talent is a companywide asset, not the prerequisite of an individual manager. Moving staff to new sections should be a norm, if the organization is big enough to offer such choices. Too many appraisal discussions focus on what an employee can’t do and what needs improvement. People tend to do their best work when doing the things they are best at. And appraisals work best when good work is recognized and rewarded and where staff are given the opportunity to excel in the areas they are good at.

To deliver these things requires a systematic review of an organization’s overall HR strategy and its goals. This is tip four. Such an HR

review may raise painfully basic questions. For example, the gap between the aspirations of HR (a key strategic role) and the reality in many workplaces (tactical and process based) ledFast Company magazine to publish its much-quoted critique of HR in a 2007 article titled “Why We Hate HR” (Hammonds 2007). The opening stated bluntly:

In a knowledge economy, companies with the best talent win. And finding, nurturing and developing that talent should be one of the most important tasks in a corporation. So why does human resources do such a bad job—and how can we fix it?

 

Fifth, check your processes. Make sure that they are aligned with the purpose for which they were created and include personal development planning, the right kind of appraisal systems, and regular performance feedback and performance management. If these are coupled with real choices for the manager in terms of developing his or her team, and the employee is given access to temporary transfers and placements within the organization, the processes move from routine impositions that add little to vibrant tools for engagement.

Sixth, get your organization’s board or senior management directly involved. Have a standing agenda item on people issues that gets beyond recruitment and retention statistics. And make sure that the discussion of talent is not the one agenda item that can be dropped to make way for more pressing issues.

The seventh tip concerns knowledge sharing. No learning is possible if key people cannot share, will not share, or are discouraged from sharing their knowledge. If knowledge sharing as an ethos can be built, then knowledge will flow throughout an organization. Simple mechanisms can be developed to help achieve that goal. For instance, in the current economic climate, a mattress retailer issued cheap video cameras to its stores and invited managers to share their tips and techniques for making sales in difficult times. These could be quickly shot all around the company, so that what worked in one place could be made to work in another without the bureaucracy and controls that usually accompany the distribution of training materials.

Eighth, explore social networking in your organization. Bloggers have valuable insights, wikis allow many more people to co-create content, and podcasts allow instant stories to be heard and shared. But you need an etiquette that establishes the ground rules for the use of such tools.

The value of this is that the organization tracks reality rather than clinging to myths and incorrect perceptions about how they are doing at any particular point. This can be about employees’ attitudes and perceptions, the impact of products and services in the marketplace, and the overall well-being of the company.

Ninth, make sure that all leaders up to and including the CEO know how to listen as well as talk, ask questions as well as give answers, and admit mistakes as well as champion successes. If you can build this kind of environment, there is a chance that employees will—in a phrase going back at least to the 18th-century Quakers—“speak truth to power,” and reality is always the best base from which to operate.

Tenth, leverage the data you gather, so that at least some of the indicators you use track the points that we have been discussing above. Over time, an annual survey of staff opinions and feelings can track the staff ’s perceptions of the organization. Such questionnaires and surveys must be anonymous and fairly administered. Gathering data from most staff on 15 key questions can be illuminating and challenging. So not only must the organization face up to the nature of the emerging messages, it also has to be brave enough to do something about the results. The raw data can reveal problems that are like a cancer in the organization. So if you find something out, you have to have processes in place for dealing with it. These processes must be transparent, and action has to be seen to be happening.

 

 

Conclusion

Talent is a worldwide issue. And the emerging long-term shortage of talent will be a continuing trend, despite the current temporary staff surpluses in industrial countries. Employees with high potential will be sought out all over the world, regardless of their country of origin. This will mean that the right people will be able to pick not just their preferred employer but also the country where they wish to live. No company or, indeed, country is immune from this pressure, despite the short-term disruption of this trend.

There are signs that, in some organizations at least, real progress has been made in monitoring, developing, and supporting the workforce—with surprising and spectacular results in terms of innovation and performance.

The future will be more about building giant elephants that have never existed before than copying current best practices. The main instruments that you will need to accomplish this are freely available, such as creativity, knowledge sharing, and diverse teams. These have the potential to make work more stimulating, challenging, and infinitely more enjoyable. These seeds for successful 21st-century companies could well generate shoots that will aid the world economy in growing and thus resuming its upward trajectory.