Who Are Your Best People? Find out who your best people are - and keep them |
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Related articles by the authors: What is this thing called talent? How can you keep your talent in a downturn? How do you know who has potential? Managing talent isn't straightforward About the authors: Chris Dunn
Robin Stuart-Kotze's blog
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Do companies create talent? According to research at Harvard the number one concern of top level executives at global companies is talent management. To be able to take advantage of growing markets you have to have good people in place. But what does that mean? Does your company have the talented people it needs or do you have to recruit them? Do you know who your good people are? Do you have a system that identifies who they are and where they are in the organisation? Do you know how to capitalise on the potential of people and do you create talent? The Talent Foundation, a global not-for-profit organisation that conducts independent research focused on the development of talent in the workplace, carried out a study in 2001 of 850 innovative companies in the UK. The objective was to find out what successful companies were doing to develop their people and organisations and what the unsuccessful ones were doing. Half of the most successful companies but only a third of the least successful companies, agreed with the statement, “We create the talent we need.” The difference between how successful and unsuccessful companies approach the issue of talent is significant. But the overall picture remains dismal: the fact that only half the successful companies surveyed said they actively developed the talent they needed is somewhat disturbing. Does it mean that talented people are something that companies have to find elsewhere? Is that what the so-called War for Talent is all about? If you’re not creating/developing the talent you need, then who is? Two or three decades ago a number of companies like Xerox, P&G, IBM and ICI acted as important training grounds for large numbers of people, some of whom stayed working with them, and some of whom moved to other companies. They weren’t overly concerned about people leaving because they had sophisticated development processes that acted like farm systems, producing continuous crops of able and capable people. But today no company today wants to develop talent for someone else. Retention is critically important and we shall look at how to do that most effectively in chapter five – and it’s not a matter if simply pouring more silver into the palms of people. |
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