59: Talent Troubles: 4 - Focus on individual talent (instead of collective)

Modern-day business technology is a double-edged sword. The ease of starting and scaling means complexity in capability and coverage across the evolving tech and product landscape.

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Excessive expectations and resulting failures occur when leaders focus on individual talent instead of enabling collective talent.

We still need all-rounders and individual superstars. Modern technology, cloud, and product ecosystems constantly change and evolve. The benefits of this evolution are many. Some of them are...

1. The barriers to entry and pivoting are near-minimal: Any company can get into an established field, bring rapid innovation, and disrupt more prominent players.
2. It is possible to take a product from idea to launch in a much shorter amount of time and at lower capital investments than it would have taken a decade ago.
3. Sourcing ongoing customer feedback and promptly responding to the market's needs is significantly easier.

However, realizing these benefits requires access to an outstanding team of talented individuals who can collectively bring out capabilities to tap into the advances in tech and product.

Opportunities are everywhere and the path to realization is through collective talent

When a company is committed to transform and grow through coordinated efforts towards

• offering new products or services
• expanding their customer base
• enhancing customer experience
• effectively managing risk and compliance at optimal expense levels
• enabling high ROI, shareholder value, and profitablity from their investments
• achieve higher levels of efficiency and savings

it is mandatory that they leverage the advancements in business-technology, cloud, digital, data, and AI.

The challenge is that even though product and platform vendors have made it easier to embrace these advancements, the reality around starting, building, and scaling through these advancements is complex and needs access to outstanding differentiated talent.

Conventional approaches to attracting, training, enabling, developing, and retaining talent will not support the needs of high-growth companies and driven leaders.

Moving from individual to collective talent capabilities along the talent management chain

Focus on building an A-team instead of several A-players. This is done in various stages of talent management and development. However, the most significant gap that needs to be bridged is how leaders approach talent engagement and engage their teams to enable rapid growth.

I have discussed how you can achieve these benefits at various talent stages below:

1. Attract & Hire

Identifying, attracting, and hiring new talent is an excellent opportunity to elevate your collective talent pool. While we must bring in individuals who can quickly help fill the open positions for our immediate needs, it is crucial to ensure that the individual can advance the team's collective capabilities to handle the now and near-term challenges and opportunities and expand the long-term possibilities.

Everytime when someone joins a team or moves teams, there is a leverage shift happening. No two experts or leaders with identical titles or experience can deliver similar results. Moreover, when such moves happen, it is a chance to reevaluate the collective talent composition, and bring in someone who can complement the team's capabilities.

Internal mobility programs are a great way to enable adequate business and technology capabilities while saving immensely on expensive recruiting and exec. search initiatives.

2. Train & Develop

Most training across companies and organizations is focused on imparting process, product, technical or generic management aspects. Very limited help is provided in addressing the unique on-the-job challenges.

Whenever an individual comes into a team it is required to assist them to enable with accelerated transition. This is more than getting them the laptop, access to systems, and getting them familiar with processes. Proper transition support provides the incoming expert or leader to quickly understand the current state, identify areas of opportunity and risks, and get them contributing in the shortest amount of time.

While internal mentoring is one way to address the gaps, often your best leaders suitable to provide this mentoring are extremely busy. Peer-to-peer coaching and ongoing, timely, mentoring/coaching delivered by seasoned former executives who have walked the path is missing. Done right, this can effectively improve your collective capabilities of your high-potential aspiring and rising leaders.

3. Enable & Expand

Experts and leaders also need ongoing support and opportunities to expand their value to the company. Just because someone has years of experience in one area does not mean they are suitable and can easily slide into difficult and complex situations. This is byfar the biggest issue of an individual-focused talent strategy.

Situational leadership requires that an individual can be engaged and helped as applicable across the four areas of directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating. For this to happen, a collective talent approach is needed to know who can help and where. This approach enables focusing an building an A-team versus growing a A-level player.

4. Grow & Promote

With a collective talent approach, growth of the individual happens much faster than any other means. They are learning from each other, know that the team's and their leader have got their back, and it is ok to not know everything, are able to experiment, take risks, think creatively, and go after larger goals.

An added benefit is that team members do not have to worry about work-life balance, as they operate under a work-life integration set-up. When one person has a difficult life situation, the team has it covered, as we have built capabilities across the board. Succession planning, bench strength, and ability to go after big goals are now possible, while mitigating risk of single-person failures.

5. Retain & Retrain

If we are doing steps 1-4 effectively, retention is not an issue. From an individual's perspective, they are able to learn, collaborate, and grow while being able to thrive in a supportive collective set-up. When there are performance issues in a specific area, they can be effectively handled or reassigned or retrained for other areas within the business and technology.

Lack of employee engagement is a rising issue for most companies, mainly because the individuals do not feel supported enough. Even while working in teams, these individuals operate as "every man/woman for themselves." That is hurting retention and how productive they are as part of our teams.

Ongoing retraining efforts are a part of talent development, as everything we know and have experience with is continuously changing. The "half-life-period" of existing knowledge and experience is diminishing at a faster pace, when what we know is getting outdated sooner.

Ways to promote collective talent enablement

1. Execute through micro-teams

Just like how large, complex programs must be managed through focused projects, micro-teams are highly effective in driving results, even when you have a large team.

Every individual has their core set of skills, experiences, and capabilities. How we enable optimal use of this individual potential in a collective format is centered on creation of micro-teams that can bring speed and efficiency into their working.

Micro-teams enable leaders to accomplish more through smaller high-performing teams, that can continously learn and grow while they tackle their workload. For this to work, a leader must know their team members well in terms of what they bring to the team, their aspirations, gaps, and level of support required.

Two things are needed to enable this well. Phase-based leadership where the best suited person within the team leads that phase of the project and flatter hierarchies.

2. Enbrace flatter hierarchies

Organizational hierarchies exists more for administrative needs than for ideation and delivery. When we force creativity, planning, solutioning, and project leadership through the hierarchy, the result is friction and slowness.

The micro-teams approach I mentioned above, needs a flatter hierarchy to function better. Delegation must be pushed down for the various decisions to be made by people who are closer to the challenge / opportunity, act decisively and timely along the project phases. This means, a business analyst could be the leader for a phase or an entire project while the director could be supporting with resources, ideas, and inputs where required.

3. Introduce a Leader-Doer Tier

Promoting your best expert to a managerial role can sometimes have detriminal effects on the team and the results they can produce. Additionally, technology evolution needs higher-levels of expertise and deeper experience from experts who can think and operate as leaders, especially on large firmwide transformational initiatives.

There are many ways to reward an individual and companies must think of differentiated career tracks for those who may not want to manage a team but can want to be deeply engaged and lead the technology or business aspects of your growth plans.

This is largely accomplished by bringing in former leaders into leader-doer roles. Step-downs role transitions are not looked at as a career failure any more as we see more and more taking them as a lifestyle change or chosen career path, to go from managing a team to an individual contributor. The added advantage is that these leaders can now coach and mentor mid/junior level talent in the team.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle in enabling such a transition for individuals to set them as leader-doers would be that in some cases, these leaders may be over-qualified than the managers they report into, and if those managers can approach without insecurity, establing leader-doer layers is a definite possibility.

4. Engage Fractional and Advisory talent

COVID brought in extensive remote work options, but also paved a way for many experts and leaders with corporate leadership experience to rethink and create newer work-life-style options.

Whether it is for caring for a loved one, taking a break from an active high-profile job, volunteer for a cause they are passionate about, build a product on the side, just to have a different industry experience, or time to explore their next without having to jump to their next role, there are many experts and leaders who have embraced this new approach of work-life integration.

This helps driven companies and their leaders at all levels, from large corporations to private equity firms, to small/medium businesses access to outstanding field-tested talent to be a part of their initiatives and growth agenda. In some cases, your needs for specialized talent may not be a full-time need, while in other situations, the flexibility offered by fractional and advisory steams is the perfect option to cover a wide area of digital, data, and AI capabilities. Use them as part of your teams. There is no more excuse to not having the right talent for pursuing your boldest dreams.

5. Accelerate growth through external leader-driven coaching/mentoring

Conventional ways of leadership development must evolve to enable today's high-potential and high-performing talent to become intrapreneurs. Every company is now a data and digital firm that must leverage cloud platforms, use meaningful analytics, and embrace AI to grow and transform the business successfully and consistently.

When we seek to transform and grow the company, it is crucial to approach leadership from a different perspective. Leadership is very different than business or technology expertise. The usual route of promoting individuals for a job well done has its drawbacks, as these individuals often find themselves in unchartered territories when they land higher-level roles. What has worked for them for so long does not work anymore, and the people in the executive ranks who can guide them are extremely busy.

As a result, the development and retention in the middle layers of organizations suffer.When we build adequate bench strength in the middle layers, we increase the investment ROI and position the firm for consistent and guaranteed growth. This takes more than a few one-off training efforts or all-day workshops.

Today's aspiring and rising leaders need more guidance, support, and consistent feedback without fear of backlash to evolve into the thriving leaders of tomorrow. The spending on external recruitment efforts and executive search fees could be better repurposed for focused, ongoing, long-term leadership development through coaching and mentoring.

However, most traditional coaching and mentoring firms are highly HR-focused, and the programs delivered by HR leaders are far removed from the ground realities and challenges that business and technology leaders face. It takes someone with experience growing and rising to higher leadership roles to provide unbiased, confidential feedback and practical guidance based on their field-tested knowledge of having held senior roles within organizations.

6. Redefine performance goals and measurements

Setting performance goals and holding individuals accountable for achieving them are critical and must continue. But at the same time, how well are the individuals coming together as a team and achieving team level goals. Very rarely we set team level goals and measure them for collective achievement.

This approach, when done effectively will bring out the slack and weakness in the organization. Fixing some of that will need fortitude and effort on the part of the leaders. But it is a required aspect of growth.

The risk/reward structures must also align with accordingly. Executives who sponsor initiatives must understand that sponsorship is much more than funding and providing a mandate. What type of aircover, support, talent, and adoption assistance can we have from these executives?

In terms of talent, are the sponsors willing to share their best people for the program to succeed? Most sponsors are business executives, and their teams have an excellent grasp of the needs and challenges that the program will address. Can we have a few key personnel from these business teams to be loaned to the project teams, partially or even fully for a period of time?

7. Encourage shared budgets

Budget allocation is mostly done at a department or function level. But all budget allocations come out of the company. We cannot be efficient in one area and have overruns in another area. Ineffiecienies in project delivery, spending on tools and platforms, underutilization, or over capacity of talent, when reviewed at a larger level brings about opportunity for timely intervention and realignment of resources.

Shared budgets also prevent wastage and overruns as they will be caught earlier. We also have the added advantage of doing the right things and doing things right that is useful for a larger audience.

For e.g., when the risk management team is sponsoring a data/analytics project, could that work be utilized by the accounting or finance team? Most probably, as there is a strong overlap across those three functions. If so, can we bring those leaders and their teams into the discussion. What talent can be brought together to create that collective capability? Is there an opportunity for sharing some of the accounting and finance budget in the process to create larger results from the work done?

8. Promote intentional mobility

How often have we heard a leader say, "this person is very critical to our team, we cannot disturb them?" That signals a process issue. Good talent must be moved around. Thats the way to bring in process, business, and technology capabilities across the company, thereby increasing the collective talent potential.

Few companies have an active internal mobility program in place. Even if there is nothing formal, it is in the companies interest to move people across functions. This will create many advantages.

1. The best practices and knowledge related to business, data, technology, and digital will now be spread across the company. The cultural change that many aspire for will be a reality and will happen in the course of working instead of being a forced side effort.
2. Your best talent will be continuously challenged and their capabilities expanded. They need not seek other companies to expand their capabilities, will not get bored, and will find more opportunities for growing their career.
3. Continuous learning will be part of their work, as no amount of training will match the experience of real work.
4. Your talent base will build a significant network across the company, and combined with the flatter hierarchies, this will enable faster solutions and intricate knowledge at the lower levels of the organization.
5. We will be able to identy who needs additional help, easily determine who need to be reassigned, realigned, or retrained, or coached out.

9. Rethink vendors and vendor management

Vendor talent is largely underutilized in many companies. Even when engaging vendors for specific consulting work, it helps to think that except for who is paying the individual directly, the vendor consultants are your team members. How can we effectively use thier capabilities and experience as part of your collective talent? Instead of boxing their work for specific tasks, it helps to understand the potential of each consultant and use their skills to solve pressing problems or pursue bigger opportuniities.

If we think beyond the reporting structures and hierarchies, senior talent from vendors could be put to use on a larger scale that we typically use them for. Given that we have many former corporate leaders working as consultants these days, they could well be that leader-doer layer to expand the potential of our mid/junior-level employees.

But for all this to happen, the outdated vendor management processes must addressed. Cost alone is a driving factor in many large vendor decisions and from first-hand feedback I receive from senior leaders in companies, their hands are tied as the company decided to consolidate the vendor list to two or three offshore vendors. It is counterproductive to expect leaders to deliver results in 2024 with vendor management practices that are in the 1990s.

In Closing

The pace of change and the urgency of transformation is increasing across businesses of all sizes and complexity. When every company is now a tech, data, and digital firm, talent plays an important role in sustaining and growing companies. Taking an individual approach to talent does not help and collective talent enablement is required. The strategies and approaches we used in the past will not help us.

If you need help implementing any of these, reach out through a direct message or email [email protected]

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