How to Keep Good Employees in a Bad Economy, Marshall Goldsmith

Marshall Goldsmith is an old friend of mine – and I always enjoy reading his ideas. This one popped into my reader courtesy of the Harvard Business Review.

“As we make our way through the challenges of the global economic crisis, high-impact performers are in demand. I’m speaking here of the indispensible workers who are willing to do what it takes to help the company succeed even in the most difficult of times. Those who pick up the slack when the organization is forced to cut back; those whose ideas save time, money, and effort; those with a positive outlook who help keep the organization moving forward.

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In the Talent War, the Ceasefire is Over

From Harvard Business Publishing, by Michael Watkins

With so many companies focused on simple survival during the downturn, with so much job loss and anxiety among those who survived, it was easy to forget about the war for top talent. But the downturn was just a temporary truce; the battle is about to erupt again in full force. And ironically the companies are the most at risk of losing their best leaders are ones that responded most vigorously (but often misguidedly) during the recession.

Why? Because there is tremendous pent-up demand for new opportunities and advancement among high-potential leaders. According to a recent study just 10% of high-potential leaders lost their jobs during the recession (with many quickly securing new opportunities). But fewer than usual received promotions or moved to new companies. So at the first sign that the job market is heating up, many will be dusting off their resumes and seeking greener pastures.

Companies that did a clumsy job of managing cost-cutting and restructuring during the downturn are particularly at risk of losing their best talent as conditions improve. Given plummeting revenues and the need to get costs under control, many firms rightly went into crisis mode. But the way they went about making the reductions varied greatly. For some, it was a process akin to taking a meat cleaver to the organization, with rapid, often indiscriminate cuts, and the attitude that virtually anything could be demanded of the survivors (longer hours, reduced salaries) because things were so dire.

These same survivors, especially the most talented of them, understandably feel absolutely no loyalty to their current employers; they will jump ship the instant they feel it's safe to do so. In fact it's a wonderful time for strong companies to consolidate their positions and accelerate out of the downturn by cherry-picking the very best talent out of competitors who have (probably irreparably) damaged their corporate cultures. Some attention to effective on-boarding is also warranted as it will help you to retain the talent you hire.

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How to Fill the Talent Gap

From the Wall Street Journal Online, by Douglas A. Ready and Jay A. Conger

"Global companies face a perfect storm when it comes to finding the employees they need.

It's no secret that global companies are finding it harder to fill critical jobs these days. They're struggling to land top recruits in emerging markets, for instance, and haven't prepared people in their own ranks to step seamlessly into management slots.

Companies are racing to find solutions, but most of them are making a crucial error: They're treating these problems as separate issues. At most multinationals, a host of problems in recruiting and developing talent are converging to create a perfect storm -- a crisis that could derail the company's growth strategies.

To meet the challenge, companies must rethink how they hire, train and reward their employees, placing those tasks at the heart of their business plans. In doing so, they have an opportunity to address all these separate problems with a unified plan, rather than waste time and resources attacking each of the issues individually.

We arrived at this conclusion after researching more than 40 companies to gain a better understanding of their concerns in recruiting and developing. We wanted to identify what steps companies were taking to excel in these areas -- to see what it would take for a company to become a world-class talent factory.

As a part of our research, we identified five common problems in recruiting and development".

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Attracting Talent in Spikes and Firms

From edgeperspectives by John Hagel

"If you want to create wealth, find and address scarcity. Chris Anderson proclaims the economics of abundance, but abundance in certain areas inevitably generates relative scarcity in others.
Emerging ScarcitiesI have posted in the past about the growing relative scarcity of attention. This is a key factor in the growing power of customers and their ability to squeeze margins of firms, especially in times of great abundance. There’s another scarcity that will also squeeze margins of firms, at least in the near-term. That’s the relative scarcity of talent. In times of great abundance, the ability to stand apart from all the others becomes increasingly valuable and this in turn depends upon the ability to mobilize talent. In more and more domains, talent is capturing growing premiums. Between pressure from customers and talent, corporations will find it increasingly challenging to capture economic value in times of great abundance because they have not yet mastered the techniques required to address the new scarcities.

These two scarcities are related at multiple levels. As just one example, the growing power of customers resulting from the relative scarcity of attention increases the need for sustained innovation which in turn increases the relative value of talent.

Talent in SpikesRichard Florida recently did a great post summarizing the role of talent in driving regional economic development (by all means, don’t miss the study by Edward Glaeser on “Cities, Information and Economic Growth" cited in Richard’s post). Reading this account, I couldn’t help but think about the role of talent in driving value creation for the firm. One of the most important observations Richard makes is:

• While most economists . . . continue to conceptualize human capital as a “stock” or “endowment” of a given place – either you have it or you don’t. But the reality is that human capital is a flow. The key question thus becomes: What factors shape that flow and determine the divergent levels of human capital across regions?

Human capital, or talent, is definitely not a stock, especially in rapidly changing times. Talent flows readily across geographies (immigration laws permitting – for a fascinating comparison of trends in immigration laws in seven high income countries, check out this report and then this discussion of "brain drain" from rural to metropolitan areas in the US), attracted by opportunities to realize greater economic value. Talent similarly flows across institutional boundaries."

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