Ask a hundred leaders what their most important priority is for their organization, and you’ll likely get the same answer a hundred times: finding, acquiring, developing and retaining talent.
John Wooden thought so. “The Wizard of Westwood” as he was called, was undeniably one of the most successful leaders in our lifetime, coaching the UCLA Bruins men’s basketball team to a record ten national championships from 1964 to 1975, seven of them in a row, in one of those records that we might never see broken.
Arguably the greatest coach in any sport at any level in any era, Wooden said—and plied his trade in keeping with—this about talent: “I’d rather have lots of talent with little experience than lots of experience with little talent.”
Find talent. Build experience.
If we think about Wooden’s pithy comment, it doesn’t take long to recognize its relevance to our personal and business lives. We can gather experience along the way, but talent, just like ore that contains precious metals, must be there to begin with. Sure, it can be further developed, but it’s got to be there first.
What you do with the talent you have
In keeping with Wooden’s pronouncement, in 2007 I surveyed 100 executives on the issue of talent, especially maximizing it. These 100 executives, five from each of 20 corporate clients across 12 industries, included one from HR, one from IT (internal), one from sales or business development (customer facing), one from finance or accounting, and one from operations—allowing for as diverse an array of perspectives as possible.
The objective was to determine how organizations found, developed, and retained talent. I returned to them a proprietary report called “Driving Talent.” Here’s the upshot of that report, 12 years later as pertinent s it was when it was generated.
A simple concept with a complex matrix
Nine fundamental elements that drive talent were identified. In a sentence or two on each, here they are:
1. Selection. A recipe for rabbit stew in an 18th century French cookbook starts with, “First you must catch a rabbit.” The talent acquisition part starts it all. Do you have not only the right people for the jobs, but the best?
2. Inclusion. Are your people included in mission-critical activities from te very start? Are they empowered to carry out the mission?
3. Vision. How clear is yours? Can your employees articulate it? (That’s the real test of how well you’ve articulated it.)
4. Organization. Is your organization structured to accomplish its goals? One outcome of this was the reality that – pardon the cynicism – an org chart is a document that explains, in pictorial form, how an organization is supposed to work …and then clearly exposes why it doesn’t.
5. Leadership. Jack Welch used to say that the primary responsibility of a leader is to develop new leaders. Are you developing today’s leaders? Tomorrow’s? If we apply that to right now, the promising recruit you bring in today could become the CEO of your company by 2055 or so, and be recruiting one who will, in turn, lead the organization into the 22nd century. Stop and think about that for a second: something that far away is not really that far away.
6. Communication. Is it encouraged? Is it active? Is it 360o? Do you do it well? “The single biggest problem in communication,” said George Bernard Shaw, “is the illusion that it has occurred.”
7. Parallels. Are the organization’s goals parallel with those of its people who have to reach them? If personal and organizational goals are not aligned – parallel – then they will, by default, either pull apart or crash into each other.
8. Equilibrium. Question: Which is worse, moving faster than you’re equipped to do and having the wheels fall off, or moving too slow, losing ground to your competitors, and having your talent fall off? Answer: It’s a deadly tie for worst. This was generally agreed upon as the most difficult standard to set and the most difficult to measure.
9. Behavior. And now, all previous eight drivers established, if leaders don’t exhibit those behaviors, it all goes for naught. In simple terms, are you setting the right example?
Anything change?
It is now 15 years later, and random follow-ups revealed that these nine drivers are still at the heart of finding, acquiring, developing, and retaining talent.
No, nothing seems to have changed.
