HR.com's Thought Leaders for April 19, 2007

DC: It's a cliché that we are living in a knowledge worker economy, but it is one of those clichés that happens to be true. Understanding how the careers of these people work-what the underlying dynamics are- is important for building and retaining talent. 

KS:  I have been doing a lot of work with HR managers in a variety of organizations, helping develop better ways to manage talent. The predominant metaphor that is out there is the "War for Talent," and that comes from the McKinsey book back in the end of the 90's. I am convinced that the "War for Talent," although a very good book, is an aging metaphor and it does not work as well as it used to.  There are a lot of ways you can lose the war: not attracting enough talented people, losing talented people…but in our minds the unrecognized opportunity is helping all the talent that you have to boost their contribution. That can add more value than the buying and selling of talent that happens in the marketplace.

Jeff Pfeffer came out with a critique of the "War for Talent" book after it was published. He makes a number of points about how the book emphasizes individuals versus teams and how it glorifies outside talent at the expense of inside talent.  More recently, Deloitte Research has published an article called "It's 2008: Do You Know Where Your Talent Is?" and I encourage everybody to go to Deloitte's website and download the article. It is fascinating, and talks about the need to be seen as a developer of talent, not just an acquirer of talent

A number of things are indicating that we need to emphasize how we grow and develop people and instead of using a war metaphor, the metaphor that comes to mind for me is that of a garden.  A garden takes a lot of work and takes constant vigilance, but the results can be tremendous and sustainable.

DC:  I think metaphors are extremely important in how we understand the challenges facing us and I love the garden metaphor.

Audience Poll:  What is the biggest challenge for your organization in terms of talent? The three options are attracting top contributors, retaining top contributors, or providing challenging development experiences for your top performers.

Poll Response: Almost 60% say the really hard part of talent management is providing these growth experiences.

PL: That is certainly consistent with what I hear managers saying as we do work with various organizations. Gene Dalton and I were studying knowledge professionals back in 1968 and we were invited to study a technical company. One day a manager said to me, "I want you to study our older engineers because they are not as productive as many of our younger engineers."  So we followed that lead and gathered data about performance ranking.  We plotted performance against age and saw that performance increased to about 35, 40, and then went down.  That was not very painful to me when we first gathered that data because I was 29 years old.  Now that I am bit older it is a very painful chart.  But we say, "The average hides a lot." When we looked at the top performers and compared them with the middle and lower performers in each age group, we found a much greater difference in the average performance rankings within each age group than between age groups.

The question we got interested in is, why is someone 45 years old at a much higher performance than someone else at 45 years old? What's the difference between high and low performance?  We began interviewing knowledge workers, engineers, scientists, accountants, and professors. We interviewed hundreds of people and we asked them to tell us what it means to be a high performer in this organization. Gene Dalton said, "You know, Erikson wrote about eight ages of man, maybe what is important here is that performance is different at different Stages of one's career."  And the idea of four Stages evolved out of that research and that led us to what we are going to talk about today.

DC:  It is painful to see that curve of declining performance, but also it is something that I suspect people might be completely unaware of.  If you don't go out and collect the information the way you did you might not be aware of what is going on in your organization...

• The ten killer constraints.
  
• Why focusing on strengths is not enough.
• Success stories of those who have tackled their constraints.  ...and more