Managing Talent

One of the major challenges to leadership today is to work with, retain, and get the most from their talented employees. The first task is to define real ‘talent’ and reorient the leadership skills to address this ‘talent’.

Talented people are the ones who create extraordinary value from the seemingly scarce resources their organizations make available to them.

But in spite of creating high value, they are not able to fulfill their potential and in many ways, this becomes a sore point and a major area of concern for the leadership with respect to the retention or motivation strategy to be adopted for them.

How can a leadership approach be different for this talented pool? There are some rather special challenges involved in leading the people who are the highest sources of value for their organizations.

First, the desire to be ‘independent’ and ’self-made’ is often the greatest motivator of such talented people. They have a need for recognition, which may come from outside the organization-from professional colleagues, peers or from industry excellence awards etc. Plus they’re often obsessed with their particular area of expertise or talent.

Because of these characteristics, it’s rather understood why often this ‘talent pool’ has a kind of a ‘love you / hate you’ relationship with their organizations. They recognize that they need the organization for its resources and personal fulfillment, but yet they yearn for independence.

One can assume that they’re highly motivated and typically love what they do. Thus the main challenge to the leadership is of making their organization ‘valuable’ to people who themselves are valuable.

Conventional leadership has always thought about people in organizations in terms of getting maximum value from them. The management language of “motivation, engagement, rewards & awards” sounds nicer but it’s still really about extracting maximum from a person. It has been about the commanding figure who is supposed to lead the charge into the battlefield.

But what ‘talented’ people really want is a low-key orchestrator-someone who makes things possible but stays back at base camp. Yes. He needs to make it clear why the battle is worth winning.

Leadership in the twentieth century is about making organizations more attractive to valuable people, rather than ‘motivating’ them. This shift requires more imagination and creativity from the leaders and their fraternity.

Leaders must figure out what will draw ‘talent’ to their organizations. There is a Brahmin saying – “Talent breeds on Talent”. Talented people like to be where other similar people are so that they can add more value to their repository, be challenged, and grow.

In many professional services organizations, HR professionals keep hunting for a leadership that has knowledge within their domain of activity. IT companies will like to hire leaders who have spent a good decade of their career in IT. Or we also see that leadership in a Pharma Company would always value a person if he / she has a pharma background.

In other words, we want leaders to be form the same knowledge pool. Legitimacy can come from professional expertise, and that’s how some leaders prove and establish their right to lead. This is understandable and obvious. But then comes the question do these ex-professionals – Do they have any idea what managing or leading is all about? Mostly they don’t.

In order to manage the ‘talent pool’ effectively, leaders have to consciously shift their focus and develop attributes that this pool may respond to. They must develop alternative ‘talent areas’ and do the things the ‘talent pool’ may not want to do themselves. This is complex, but could be the sure winning strategy.

Leaders should create the kind of discipline that their ‘talent pool’ respects. Simple and clear norms work better. The inherent issue is that the real talented lot do not want to be part of an organization and regard it as a bit of a distraction. The real leadership is to frame the working rules in such a ay that they don’t notice it. The only thing that they should notice is their work, their colleagues and their fulfillment of personal ‘intellectual aspirations’. Leaders should know that their creativity increases with diversity, which in turn encourages innovation.

But what really switches such talented people off is the organizational politics. Unfortunately, in many organizations, politics is organized and often used as a tool to keep various groups in check. Indians will never forget the British policy of ‘divide and rule’.

The other thing that turns them off is excessive measurement of their work. When leaders measure everything minutely, the ‘talent pool’ finds it stifling. If you give a ‘talented’ person three KRAs to meet, it reduces the possibility that the person will imagine a fourth possible goal.

The real ‘talented’ person is attracted by a sense of higher purpose. NASA convinces scientists and engineers to go work there because they’re going to achieve breakthrough knowledge in unchartered areas.
Leaders need to create places where people want to be. But Lehman, Satyam and the likes have misplaced trust of their talented employees.

An inner thought urged me to apply the same perspective to our politicians and citizens. Why should people ever think of immigrating to another country?

Well..this discussion can be really absorbing. Maybe, we will visit the topic some other time….

Related posts:

1. Managing Change
2. Defining Leadership
3. Leadership in Professional Firms
4. Client Relations
5. P & L Management

Tags: challenges, employees, excellence awards, industry excellence, leadership, leadership skills, management, motivation strategy, motivator, personal fulfillment, professional, rewards, Talent Management, talented pool