The Talent To Value Capability Issue

Welcome to my newsletter. Consider this a collection of insights and ideas from myself and the team at CEO.works.

CEOworks started as an advisory firm rooted in Connecting Talent to Value. But, as the firm grew (exponentially in the last year!), we realized that we needed to create an environment where we could transfer our capability to our clients -not just advise them- to better serve them. This is how our capability business was born.

My friend and colleague, CEO.works Co-Founder and Head of Capability, Shefali Salwan, and I have been working on a piece that informs our current and future clients on the firm's capability business and our framework for helping them connect their talent to value. Here is an excerpt from our whitepaper titled Talent to Value Interventions. Please enjoy and stay tuned for the full release of the whitepaper in the coming weeks.?

Old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but then the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish.* -YUVAL HARARI

Disruptive change has hit the world of work—hard—and its pace is accelerating. Companies have pivoted on a massive scale to remote work—and now to hybrid work—in response to the pandemic. But even before COVID, a whopping 73% of executives were anticipating significant industry disruption within three years (a leap upwards from 26% in 2018), according to Mercer’s 2019 study of global talent trends. Those leaders were expecting automation and artificial intelligence would replace one in five current jobs. The majority were concerned about corporate responsibility for societal issues, rising geopolitical tensions, and the migration of talent. Amazingly, four out of five of them confidently believed their companies could lead disruption in their industry.**?

Why such conviction in the face of escalating change and uncertainty? Perhaps it is because these senior executives, observing values and value shifting, set a trajectory towards what customers will deem valuable tomorrow, transform their organizations and confidently embrace the future.?

As our world changes, so too does “value”. It literally moves around. What consumers willingly paid for yesterday becomes passé overnight. What they will willingly pay for tomorrow just as quickly becomes today’s business imperative. Senior executives, with years of experience at moving money at lightning speed from points of low return to points of higher return, rapidly and skillfully shift financial capital to where this new value

will be created. That is necessary, but not sufficient. Financial capital can only get an organization half-way to tomorrow.

Talented individuals, using that money, must do the critical work necessary to deliver value. Yet talent remains trapped in a hierarchical web of entrenched power structures and outdated job descriptions, stuck doing work that only delivers yesterday’s value. Senior executives, watching the gap between today’s talent and tomorrow’s value widen, try to rapidly redeploy their human capital. All too often, they fail.

Sadly, we see a huge time lag between the movement of money and the redeployment of talent.

A fundamental disconnect between business executives and human resource leaders feeds into this time lag. Mercer’s study indicates only 43% of HR leaders are redesigning work in their organizations—even though executives in high-performing companies see that it makes a sizable difference in business performance. Further, a mere 29% of HR

leaders think their business executives prioritize “people” risks, while only 33% of the executives themselves see their company as being very effective at mitigating them.

With this as our status quo, is it even possible to effectively redesign work, connect talent to value, and pave the way to future growth in time??

We believe it is.

Practical Solution

Considering the speed of disruptive change and the increasing complexity of value creation, the time lag between the movement of financial capital and the redeployment of human capital is a big problem, one that warrants the attention of almost anyone who has to pull the talent lever in an organization. The Talent to Value? process is a new kind of human capital intervention designed for today’s era of exponential technologies, changeable consumer demand, and low employee engagement. Its work is the rapid redeployment of human capital, of which connecting talent to value, as well as pay and performance, are fundamental elements. To avoid value “leakage”, the Talent to Value methodology departs from traditional talent management practices by seeking out, identifying, and mitigating risks.

Talent to Value offers us a new way to dynamically connect top talent to value—and keep them connected—even as value shifts.

We find a diverse mix of players are interested in the Talent to Value concepts, practices and tools—from forward-thinking chairpersons of companies and leadership capital partners and operating partners in private equity firms to CEOs, strategy experts, human capital executives and HR leaders. Many of these players are already engaging in the work of a Talent to Value practitioner without even knowing what it is or what it’s called.

We watch these individuals get visibly excited when we talk with them about connecting talent to value and they begin to see that a workable methodology exists into which they can pour their own experiences and insights. In fact, some HR leaders have told us that, once they have been introduced to the new distinctions, frameworks and tools, they slide into the Talent to Value seat much easier and faster than they ever moved into the business partner seat.

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* "Read Yuval Harari's blistering warning to Davos in full", World Economic Forum website. Accessed January 24, 2020 at?https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/yuval-hararis-warning-davos-speech-future-predications/.

** Global Talent Trends 2019, Mercer (Marsh & McLennan Companies), pp. 1 and 7. Accessed February 5, 2020 at?https://www.mercer.com/content/dam/mercer/attachments/private/gl-2019-global-talent-trends-study.pdf.

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If you'd like to learn more about this whitepaper or our Capability business, contact us.

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