What is Talent Management?
How to Retain Innovative Knowledge Workers
To be a strategic undertaking, talent management efforts need to focus on the strategically most important employees: innovative knowledge workers.
The ability to manage talent effectively is a key source of competitive advantage in business today. Why is this so important? A lot of writers talk about demographics when answering this question. They say that baby boomers are retiring and the loyalty of younger workers isn’t what it used to be. These facts are part of the story, but the deeper explanation is that much of today’s work is knowledge work. Now that many services and much of manufacturing are being outsourced to China, India and similar low cost locations, it is harder for North American businesses to be successful.
The Importance of Innovation
Low cost, commodity products and services have little future in a high cost economy, except those that need to be delivered locally, such as in restaurants and hotels for example. We have known for a few decades that innovation is a key source of competitive advantage, but now thanks to the rise of China and India, innovation is really all that North American companies have got. This reality drives home the hard truth that talent management is absolutely critical to business success. In the past, when businesses could succeed with efficient execution and low cost, but friendly service, with a bit of innovation here and there, employees could be seen as less indispensable. So, it’s not so much the potential scarcity of talent that is the problem. The real issue is just how important such talent has become for a company’s future survival, never mind prosperity.
What Talent to Retain
All businesses need a wide variety of people, from accountants through human resource specialists and engineers, but their strategically most important people, those with the most potential to deliver new sources of competitive advantage, are their technically brightest people, those who can create new products and services, higher value added offerings that cannot easily be copied in China or India.
How to Retain Top Talent
When we focus on strategically critical knowledge workers we see the need to move beyond merely creating a supportive culture or a best place to work. Top innovators understand their worth. They are independent and entrepreneurial, like the originators of eBay, Google and Facebook. To keep such people, it is necessary to make them feel like they are building their own businesses within the larger organization. This can be achieved partly by recognizing their status as thought leaders but they also need to be given a stake in the new lines of business they develop.
Employees as Partners
The bottom line is that organizations need view key talent as partners, less as employees or “resources”. Like it or not, the balance of power has shifted such that highly skilled innovators need to be seen as partners or they are gone.
