The impact of promoting these four kinds of conversation is firstly that the organisation and its talented employees can be much more honest and open about their aspirations and intentions. Secondly, that they can plan together in a flexible way that not only allows both to make use of opportunities, but to allows them to create opportunities.
And how do we prevent the wrong people getting to the top? There are two types of “wrong people”. One group is wrong simply because their skill sets do not match the job they are in. (For example, the job may have changed around them.) The solution for this group is to make it easier and less painful (especially to their ego) for them to move out of their roles and into ones which are a better fit. HR spends masses of time and effort putting people into roles, but very little attending to their sell-by date in those roles.
The other kind of “wrong” person is the sociopath, who becomes a more serious danger the higher he or she rises. Here, one simple tool I recommend is the legacy audit – a review, three months after they have left each role, to evaluate what exactly they left behind. When direct reports are no longer under their thumb, a more accurate picture of their leadership style and accomplishments may emerge!
Riding the Talent Wave
Intelligent HR functions and leadership teams should not be frightened at the thought of letting go of control of their talent. Indeed, many HR professionals I have interviewed and spoken with have been excited about the opportunity to shift from a policing to a shepherding role. Some of the practical steps these insightful HR people are taking include:
• Changing the language and focus of talent management and succession to emphasise opportunity for a much wider range of people. • Using social networks to encourage people to take initiative and stimulate
change – so often the real innovators and the most competent leaders are people, who make things happen through influencing these informal, less obvious channels of communication. • Decreasing reliance on simplistic models and frameworks that aim to select and predict leadership talent. While it is hard to jettison these entirely, they are able instead to use them as simple minor inputs into the planning of developmental resources and opportunities. • Having processes to recognise and counteract “snakes in suits” (organisational sociopaths). Again, this does not necessarily mean labelling such people and keeping them out of the leadership circle; it is more about making sure they are not permitted to gain access to roles, where their fatal flaws will become uncontrollable. • Challenging the culture that values conformity and box-ticking over originality and personal maturity – recognising that the best leader for tomorrow’s organisation probably would not be like the best leader for today’s. This also means challenging top management, when they want to appoint successors, who are clones of themselves!
I began my journey of discovery behind The
Talent Wave with a great deal of disquiet (and sometimes anger) about the damage that simple linear thinking is doing to the potential for talented individuals and organisations to achieve great things. I’ve ended it with far more optimism than I’d dared to hope. I am constantly observing that, in facing up to these issues, many HR professionals are empowering themselves. As one recently expressed to me in private, “When we have the courage to apply original, creative and genuinely evidence-based thinking to succession planning and talent management, it exposes the logical flaws in so many other HR practices, which is equally based on overly simplistic assumptions. Embracing complexity is liberating and, in our company at least, I hope it will lead to a radical – and long overdue – realignment between HR and the business.” I hope she is right.
May 2012 | Management Today 69
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