Talent Management - Stimulating the Blood Flow

To survive, an organism needs to renew and refresh itself or it will stagnate and die. The same is true for organisations, especially large ones[46].

Attracting and retaining good people or 'talent' is an increasingly hot topic as Innovation climbs the ladder of management buzzwords. Every organisation wants the best people, and so they should, but not every organisation can attract or afford them - a particular problem for government organisations where rigid grades of pay scale rule supreme.
Productivity is the other major 'people' issue in government. In his book “The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future” Charles Handy, the British management theorist, suggested that traditionally a person's career followed the classic Sigmoid Curve (the black S shaped curve illustrated in the figure opposite), but that in the emerging paradigm, a career must be a series of sigmoid curves, where a new Growth Phase is entered from the existing Maturation Phase, and so on and so on.

From anecdotal evidence this seems to be increasingly common: people go back to college, change careers, and change their circumstances, all in the name of personal growth, or the 'self-actualisation' made famous by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs .

People make your organisation work, they ensure its fitness, or they ensure its failure, as evidence by the collapse of so many British firms, particularly in the 70s - some of which (British Leyland for one) contained shop stewards who actively organised the workforce to sabotage the company's productivity.

Making the assumption that your staff are not actively working to disrupt your organisation's efforts, how do you ensure that your existing employees stay fresh, and that your new employees are of the right calibre? How do you ensure that the blood flows around your organisation effectively, and that your company antibodies can fight disease successfully?

In his autobiography, Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric from 1980 to 2000, addresses this issue: how to ensure that an enormous and bureaucratic organisation can re-invent itself to survive in a much more competitive world. Many people in the old GE thought as many in government organisations do now: 'I'm doing my job satisfactorily and that's enough'. But it wasn't, and isn't.

More than 100,000 people left GE in one way or another through the 1980s (a quarter of the workforce) and a similar but possibly less concerted revolution is headed government's - particularly local government's - way.

To understand why this should be the case, look at the design of local government in relation to the services it provides. If you were to set about designing the delivery of local government services from scratch, it is unlikely in the extreme that you would stipulate that around 150 local government organisations would all provide identical statutory and business support functions[47] (Human Resources, IT Production, Payroll, Revenue collection and Benefit payment, for example). This is the current reality however, and these duplicate services are managed with a huge variety of competence, as the Audit Commission's Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) figures[48] indicate.
This is not a situation that can continue, especially when considering the macroeconomic picture. The forecasted slowdown will put increasing pressure on public purse strings, as will the increasingly worrying demographic situation - an increasing cost profile of the ageing population against a decreasing pool of taxpayers to fund it.

Leaving aside the demographic time bomb, and addressing the talent recruitment and retention issue, GE solved these issues with two sides of the same coin: Differentiation, and the Vitality Curve.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 1283