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Strategies to develop your top talent

Archive for the ‘Talent Management’ Category

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How can this be?  Productivity is supposed to be a good thing.  Productivity is the measure of how much a business produces divided by the number of workers, so if productivity goes up a business should make more money.  How can this be a talent killer? (more…)

How to give an appraisal

Groan…  Yes, we’re going to talk about performance appraisals/annual reviews.

Why do we dislike them so much?  Common reasons:

  • The process feels awkward.
  • It doesn’t yield meaningful information.
  • Bosses don’t do it well.
  • Employees experience great anxiety.
  • It seems so subjective or unfair

How can we do a better job? (more…)

Top talent and the money game

talent-money-gameRecently we looked at two different approaches to developing talent:  paying premiums in compensation packages and investing in a strong internal culture. 

Yesterday  John Mack, Chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley told his shareholders that he has to pay employees well to keep top talent and grow the business, but he doesn’t see the ability to sustain that into the future.  (more…)

Talent and the culture factor

top-talent-1What kind of companies tend to keep top talent?  Those that pay a lot or are leaders in their field?  What about those who have an engaging culture?  Let’s take a moment to look at both of those possible answers and see what part culture plays in attracting, developing and retaining top talent. (more…)

charles_m_schwab_crop One of the first people in American business to be paid a salary of a million dollars a year as a professional manager was Charles Schwab.  He was picked by Andrew Carnegie to be the President of United States Steel in 1921 when he was 38 years old.   Why did Andrew Carnegie pay a million dollars a year to Charles Schwab?  

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Headaches over my people

“How do I stop the headaches without firing my people?”

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You own the business and so all the problems that can’t be solved by others end up in front of you.  You have someone who handles personnel matters, but that means the transactional side of HR.  The personal issues, interpersonal conflict, lack of performance, all of the soft, squishy (but really difficult) stuff comes to you.  And you wish you could make it go away without needing to fire someone.  Maybe you can… (more…)

Capital investment

Meltdown, bailouts, recession–the last six months have provided quite a crash course in economics for us.  There has been a lot of talk about Wall Street vs. Main Street, as if you could easily separate the two.  The truth is, you can’t.  What is needed right now is a serious capital reinvestment in the economy.  I’m not talking about infusions of cash and liquidity like the Federal Reserve has been attempting.  I’m talking about an investment in human talent.  dollar-shadow-capital

 

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Let the job speak

Last week I was in a session with several executives benchmarking a job.   That term is used to describe a number of different activities or approaches, so let me give you an insiders view of what we did.  

bigboardroom_byrappaportcenterOur task was to determine what the organization needed from this job for superior performance (in our case it was the job of President of the company).  We discussed key results that the person filling the role of President was accountable for producing.  When we agreed on the five key results, our assignment next was to “let the job speak”.  (more…)

ruler_by_mauiinvermontPardon the somewhat philosophical title for this post.  But I do ask it with some earnestness.  I commented before about how “talent” is climbing up the list of important business issues that executives are paying attention to.  I also noted that CEO’s seem to have great difficulties explaining what they mean by talent.

Here’s why:  they lack data.  Hard measurements and operational data belong to the CFO and the production side of the business.  When it comes to talent, we can’t agree on what we’re talking about because we simply cannot measure it.  The truth is we can, but most people don’t know how. 

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Talent planning a top priority

New research highlights how important the idea of “talent” has become in the business world.  It is no longer a concern of the more progressive HR departments; trends indicate that it has become a key business issue that executives are paying close attention to. 

An annual survey of executives by the Aberdeen Group shows that over the past year talent planning has risen from tenth to second on the list of top ten business issues that companies are facing today.  This is really striking to me.  What I’ve encountered, however, is that executives can’t agree on what “talent”  really mean (beyond a superficial synonym for “our people”).

What do you think-why do we have trouble defining talent?