"Leadership Matters"
— A Management Newsletter —
Finding Talent — Management's Toughest Challenge?
As managers, we have two primary jobs in the
companies we serve: getting business results and helping people
grow. The first is easy enough to explain (though difficult to do),
but the second job is often underestimated and misunderstood by
managers — and by the companies that employ them.
But why is it so important to help people grow and develop? It seems
as if the supply of skilled and talented people has never been
greater — around 200,000 MBAs are awarded every year. Add the
expanding global labor pool, and it would appear that talented
people are quite plentiful. Yet a recent Fortune magazine
article1 unequivocally suggests that the demand for top
talent is greater than ever, creating an auction-like environment
for acquiring this talent.
"…the demand for top talent is greater
than ever."
In today's business environments, it is talented people who make
companies rich. Therefore, talented, experienced people are becoming
much more valuable to their firms — and much more expensive. And the
inability to hold on to those people is becoming a greater threat to
company success. As the demand for talent increases, the talent in
the highest demand of all is that of the skilled, effective manager.
The reason for the heightened need for managers is simple: the pace
and scale of business today makes it impossible for managers to
command and control detailed aspects of the work. Manufacturing and
call center supervisors controlling the work has been replaced by
systems and processes that push authority down the line. In short,
more than ever before, managers must get things done through others.
Intellectually, many managers understand this, but many managers do
not know how to replace reflexive habits that are counterproductive.
MBA programs simply do not "teach" managers the skills they need to
help people grow — and valuable experience is idiosyncratic and
time-intensive.
The primary conclusion reported by Colvin in the Fortune
article: While 77% of companies say they don't have enough
managerial bench strength, more of them are "getting serious about
growing their own leaders."
Unless a company's executives want to bid for "star talent" — an
increasingly expensive proposition — or fight through litigation to
mitigate headhunting, they must grow leadership from within. If a
management pipeline is not developed, then the firm is always
threatened by predators willing to overpay for talent.
Executives must make a decision: should they seek to find and hire
more talented people, or should they seek to develop that talent
among the people they already employ?
Talent is too often perceived as something people are born with.
Perhaps that's true, but firms that just pursue talent will never
really have the top talent — unless their pockets are very deep.
Every company simply can't have the top 10% of the talent.
Primarily, companies are full of ordinary people.
Fortunately, "ordinary" people can achieve extraordinary results.
Great companies help these people gain the talent to achieve at
great levels. Southwest Airlines (who routinely avoids hiring MBAs)
is just one example. Many companies regularly get great business
results through "ordinary" people — without going to the market to
hire the top "talent."
Native talent is not nearly as valuable as learned skill. And more
companies are learning that the job of developing management and
leadership skill is not the job of HR, but of managers. Buying
managerial talent off the street is the easy way, but it's very
expensive — and it's often counterproductive overall, due to issues
with morale and conflicting culture. The alternative is to make it
part of every manager's job to grow the ordinary people you already
have.
Colvin reports that there is a "war for talent." There is only one
way to avoid this costly war: by building talent from within. This
is management's job. It requires that managers pay attention to
growing their people. It requires that managers make bigger jobs for
their direct reports, and that they work more through others.
In fact, growing talent from within may be the only way managers can
succeed in the other part of their job: getting superior results
with limited resources.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
1Colvin,
Geoffrey (2006, Feb.). “Catch a rising star.” Fortune. Click to read
online at:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/23/magazines/fortune/starintroduction_fortune_060206/index.htm?cnn=yes
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