What could be more essential to organizational success and the corporate bottom line than talent?
Yet many of the people in our employ continue to be marginalized and neglected, often taking a backseat to the various other matters that occupy our workdays as leaders.
And the problem seems to be pervasive.
While writing The Talent Mandate: Why Smart Companies Put People First, author Andrew Bennett spoke with a prominent business school professor who noted improvements and innovations in every area of business except in talent management. In fact, the professor said no corporate function today lags behind as dramatically as how we manage the employees for which we are responsible.
That’s astonishing, and it’s also lunacy when the “war for talent” continues to rage and employee costs represent a majority of corporate expenses.
These things will lose your best people
So the author suggests we keep doing the following if we want to free ourselves from our brightest, most dynamic, and highest-potential employees:
- Hire for the past, not the future. Choose talent based on what worked before, not on where the company is heading now. Emphasize candidates’ narrow former experience over a more generalized, nimble agility to adapt in a fast-changing world.
- Downplay values and mission. Send the signal that anything goes in pursuit of profit, making employees guess about what choices are truly acceptable. Fail to spend time articulating to your workers why they come to work every day and how the greater community benefits from their efforts.
- Bungle the teams. Avoid mixing generations and skill sets, instead grouping like with like and producing stale and predictable solutions that are safe and excite no one.
- Put jerks into management. Reward the old-fashioned, autocratic style that stifles unorthodox, creative thinking and feels threatened by fresh ideas, energy and dynamism.
- Measure hours, not results. Keep an expensive cadre of stern enforcers busy with policing everybody. Don’t trust your talent to use their time wisely. Crack down on social media. Forbid personal activities during the workday, even as you continue to expect work to be conducted over the weekend as well.
- Promote people straight up the ladder. Fail to give them exposure to different parts of the business through lateral moves or cross-training, giving them the sensation of being narrowed over time, rather than being broadened and improved.
- Leave talent management to HR. Expect the staff who must deal with the minutiae of personnel issues to also be exceptional visionaries in hiring. Detach the C-suite from talent recruitment and retention since it’s not their department.
- Hoard information. Keep decision-making securely ensconced in the executive wing. Avoid empowering mid-tier managers or employees lest they suddenly become entrepreneurial and unpredictable.
- Don’t bother with training. It’s costly, and employees will probably jump ship with their new skills. Instead, have your workers do the same tasks over and over in the very same way.
- Hire outsiders. After you’ve failed to train and develop your best people, follow it up by stifling their ambitions for increased responsibility. When they come to you and say, “I’m leaving,” express astonishment and outrage.
If this sounds at all familiar, you’d better hope your competitors are following the same game plan.
The post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on OCTanner.com