Personneltoday.com has just begun a five week series of interviews exploring Tomorrow's Global Talent - starting with an
interview with me, before it gets really interesting with a series of interviews with
Gary Browning of Penna Consulting,
Ken Rowe of YSC,
Tanja Kuveljic of B-Live, and
Caroline Waters of BT.
When we set of with Heidrick and Struggles, together with BT, Career Innovation and the Talent & Enterprise Taskforce, to explore 'how leading global companies will create value through people' we had some idea of what we were about to unleash, but now that the genie is out of the bottle, and that the 'Tomorrow's Global Talent conversation' has begun, it is interesting to connect this conversation to others:
- If you want to change a system, change the mindset - in a recent blog inspired by Ray Anderson of Interface (LINK) I have highlighted the work of Donella Meadows. In reframing how we think about talent, that is what we are setting out to do, from 'Talent is scarce' to 'Talent is abundant';
- Recognise that talent is part of a broader whole - after all we were inspired to do this work through working with business leaders and others in looking at Tomorrow's Global Company. They argued that the future agenda for CEOs and others was to redefine success, live values and create enabling frameworks. All of this depends on people doing it and making it work, so we looked at talent in the context of our enduring focus on what is business success and how is it changing, not in splendid isolation;
- Creating a new paradigm - one of my favourite soundbites is this: 'what we thought was scarce, we now recognise as being abundant; what we thought was abundant, is scarce'. I really like the way that the Personneltoday.com 'gets' this: the time has come for businesses to take a new, sustainable approach to selecting the people who lead, manage and deliver on the front line" (For clarity, it is talent that we used to think was scarce, and fossil fuels and natural resources that we thought were abundant ...)
- Developing a new practice - two of the really good things about the report are the 10 Questions for CEOs and the new talent mindset map (as well as the case studies, which I think are great). They work back from thought leadership into what to do about it, and how to make it operational. And it is no accident that much of the rigour for these tools came from Heidrick & Struggles, drawing on their global experience and expertise
- Passing the CEO test - I hope he won't mind me sharing this, but I had a great chat with Jeremy Darroch of Sky recently, and having rehearsed the argument he sat back, thought about it for all of a nanosecond, and said, paraphrasing just a little: 'So what you are saying is that we spend all our resource recruiting on skills, which we can teach people; and much less on recruiting on values, which you can't really teach but which provide the foundation of whether people will succeed in a company'. Got it!
- Beyond reductionism - for 100 years or so humanity has recognised the limitation of Newtonian physics and the subject/object duality when it comes to subatomic particles, but somehow we have not followed through in thinking about what this may imply for economic and social analysis. In the world of things, the nature of things has dissolved; in the world of people, we still define ourselves in relation to an assumption that 'things are things'. And we carry that thinking to how we think about skills and talent. As Grahame Broadbelt of Tomorrow's Company passionately argues, skills implies a deficit model: you don't have enough, we will fix you, by giving you more. As Rajeev Dubey of Mahindra argues in the report, competencies are inherent traits and mindsets, they come from within, talent is to be inspired and drawn out
Tomorrow's Global Talent is itself part of a broader whole - how we frame things matters more because of what we put out of the frame, than what is in it. As we seek to change the mindset, the possibilities that this will inspire interest and action, and lead to changes in behaviour and practice, is reinforced by recognising that this argument is part of a broader reframing about how we think about a whole load of things: ourselves, our relationship with each other, and our relationship with the environment, across borders and generations.
So thanks
Personneltoday.com, a vital staging post has been reached as we rethink talent.