The War on Talent…Management

“None of us is as smart as all of us.” – Ken Blanchard

The greatest cost in business is talent and should therefore be the greatest focus of a business in terms of investing time and money to secure it’s stability. Without properly managing talent, the risk is greater in damaging your business sustainability.

So what seems to be the core of the issue with talent? Is it a lack of qualified staff, unengaged workers or employee mismatch causing the worry for business leaders and CEO’s? Could it be that employees simply don’t trust their employers anymore? See my blog on Trust in the Workplace

My experience leads me to believe the center of the issue is managerial decision-making and their interaction with talent.

A recent Gallup study found that companies fail to choose the candidate [manager] with the right talent for the job 82% of the time. According to the article written in the Gallup Business Journal by Randall Beck and Jim Harter, “Most companies promote workers into managerial positions because they seemingly deserve it, rather than have the talent for it.”

Properly training your management to understand talent demands and meet them is key when making hiring or promotion decisions. Those in management have the greatest impact on employee engagement and retention. When requirements and job duties/tasks change, it’s management who monitors and relays criteria to employees, seeing to it the work gets done. Without management developing effective communication and healthy relationships with workers, ultimately they become disengaged and fail to produce quality work; a direct connection to the employee and manager interaction.

Talent plays a significant part in reaching organizational goals.

Failing to consider your talent when making adjustments, implementing changes and growing your business is a costly mistake.

Key ways to get management to understand the importance of talent:

• Include talent management in the conversation when making business decisions
• Encourage them to be creative in engaging employees
• Make managing talent a natural topic on the meeting agenda.

Considering talent is a huge chunk of expense, I think it deserves a little more attention, don’t you?

There are a plethora of opinions on the dilemma of talent management, but whatever you believe the problem is, the solution is clear – finding and keeping good workers requires authentic interaction, positive emotion and a genuine desire to invest in your people. The greatest direct relationship to display these characteristics is that between a manager and the employee.

Don’t just hire or promote a knowledgeable worker because of their experience. Find out how well they can manage others, resolve conflict, engage workers and make good talent decisions. This may take time and it requires investment, but it is a necessary sacrifice to secure future growth for your organization.

Invest in training your management before giving them the responsibility to manage others.

Don’t assume having decades of experience working in an industry will automatically generate good management skills. If you don’t have the time or qualified training staff, hire a leadership coach. Because having a coach is mutually beneficial decision, many organizations tend to split the cost with the employee. This way, prospective managers will receive the right tools and techniques necessary to effectively manage others without interfering with daily work activity.

Lead by example.

If your organizational culture welcomes, prioritizes and invests in talent demands, you can expect your management will too.