• Co-evolutionary – when talented people adjust their ambitions and develop new skills in line with their observations of opportunities, they stimulate change, for the business as well as themselves (if they are allowed to!). • Self-organising – if people are genuinely talented, they will find their own ways to respond to opportunities. All they need is information and support. Increasingly, talent turns out to be invested not in individuals, but in networks within the business. • Sub-optimal efficiency – HR’s response to the waste of talent, through attrition, in current HR processes has been to seek ever more complex means of control, with increasingly little effect. If there is a sufficiently wide and varied Talent Wave in the organisation, then it does not matter that there is a degree of inefficiency. What matters is whether there are enough motivated, competent and creative people to move into roles when needed.
• Requisite variety – the more HR tries to pin down the qualities of leaders, the less variety in the system. Competence-driven homogeneity is guaranteed to undermine diversity objectives. More attention to ensuring sufficient difference in the Talent Wave allows for greater flexibility to the needs of specific and emerging roles. • Simple rules – underlying the complexity of adaptive systems are simple rules that shape the way the system behaves.
Some potential simple rules we have identified are:
o All other factors being equal (e.g. broad satisfaction with pay and benefits), employees seek roles which provide an appropriate balance between stretch (new learning), exploit (applied learning) and coast (work without significant learning potential). o Diversity of talent thrives in an atmosphere of psychological safety.
o Employees tend to have to have been working substantially at the level above, before they are promoted to that level. o The strongest connections exert the strongest influence. So, if someone’s strongest work or career connections are external to the organisation, it will be harder to keep hold of them.
Achieving high alignment between organisational aspirations and employee aspirations is not easy. In a complex, adaptive environment, however, the trick is to support people in creating this alignment in their own unplanned, inefficient and messy – but ultimately highly effective – way. Some of the approaches the company can employ include:
• Use every vacancy as an opportunity to
rethink the job role. Is it still needed? Rather than who could fill a role, ask “Who could transform it?”
• Letting people compete for jobs. Instead of limiting the talent resource by deciding in advance who might be suitable, offer people the opportunity to say how they might tackle the role and what they would bring to it. • Raising the quality and scope of conversations about jobs and careers, so that a wide spread of employees understand
66 Management Today | May 2012
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