Developing talent: The magic bullets
| Published date | 01 January 2005 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14754390580000581 |
| Date | 01 January 2005 |
| Pages | 3-3 |
| Author | Mike Lombardo |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
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Volume 4 Issue 2 January/February 2005
STRATEGIC COMMENTARY
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Thought leaders share their views on the HR profession and
its direction for the future
DEPARTMENTS AT A GLANCE
STRATEGIC COMMENTARY
,
e-HR
,
HOW TO…
,
PRACTITIONER PROFILE
METRICS
HR AT WORK
REWARDS
,
RESEARCH AND RESULTS
,
,
,
,
A
ccording to a 2004 Conference
Board survey of over 500 CEOs,
availability of talented managers
and executives is sixth on a list of 62
major challenges their organizations
face. Succession planning is eighth. Most
readers are undoubtedly familiar with
why these are top 10 issues for CEOs. In
McKinsey’s War for Talent studies, only 7
percent of multinationals said they had
enough talented managers and 3
percent said they developed people
effectively. Only 15 percent of executives
get selected from the succession plan.
The problem may be that we tend to
look for a magic bullet; a key to solving
our woes. And most of the magic bullets
used aren’t really magic. Grades in
school predict technical, not managerial
performance. The college or university
we graduate from predicts nothing,
although many continue to believe that
this predicts success somehow.
The three magic bullets
If success were essentially a matter of IQ,
academic results and number of years’
experience, we would have the talent and
bench problem solved. Long-term success
actually involves three magic bullets:
1. Basic intelligence, which most
organizations assure through their
hiring practices.
2. Variety of experience.
3. Continuously learning to do
something new or different.
It’s the last two bullets that cause our
troubles. Only some people have the
requisite experiences needed for
managing and leading in the world of
change and fewer still have been taught
how to learn from them.
To remedy this: first, people can’t learn
from experiences they aren’t having. It’s
now fairly well proven what kinds of
experiences season leaders: startup and
turnaround assignments; business critical
projects; moving to a different function or
line of business; jumps in scope and scale.
These experiences demand people learn
new competencies and ways of behaving.
If they learn, they become more rounded,
capable people than they were before.
Yet in the War for Talent studies, 66
percent of executives had never had a
startup, and 40 percent had never been in
an unfamiliar line of business.
Learning from experience
Second, just like people can’t learn from
experiences they aren’t having, neither
can they learn anything new without
making sense of the experience. In our
research, we call this learning agility.
This is unrelated to how intelligent a
person may be – here we are talking
about adaptability. What promotes
adaptability? Many tactics, but here are
a few examples:
• Searching the past for parallels, looking
at history, asking others, reading a
biography. Whenever Harry Truman
Mike Lombardo
is co-founder of Lominger,
the US-based leadership
consultancy.Previously, he
was in research and product development at the
Center for Creative Leadership. He is co-author of
The Leadership Machine and The Lessons
of Experience.
faced a “first-time” crisis in the White
House, he consulted what he called his
“council of presidents.” He would go
to the presidential archives, find as
many roughly parallel situations as he
could, and see how previous presidents
thought them through.
• Making sense through rules of thumb.
Many learners keep lists, mental or
otherwise, of things that might be
true most of the time. These are
guiding principles and trends they use
to view situations. Colin Powell is a
famous current example of someone
who has such a list.
• Learners have more ways to handle
situations because they have more
conscious learning tactics. They’ll keep
a journal, write down a plan, engage
in a visioning exercise. In one study,
effective supervisors had five times
more methods to handle difficult
employees than did the average
supervisor. That’s learning in action.
So, the three magic bullets together are
what create a successful executive.
Bright enough, varied enough in
experience, and adaptable enough to
learn from their actions. Combining
these three is what effective succession
planning should be and the last two
have often been ignored. Variety in job
experiences and targeted, active
learning from them is what will shrink
the talent gap.
Developing talent:
the magic bullets
New experiences and the agility to learn from them are the keys to
succeeding in the war for talent, says Mike Lombardo.
© Melcrum Publishing Ltd. 2005. For more information, go to www.melcrum.com or e-mail info@melcrum.com
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