Life is tough and just getting tougher for employers all around the world. As knowledge workers become more important in all types of businesses, they are becoming more difficult to find and even harder to keep. Turnover in the US alone is over 4 million a month. As the baby boom generation prepares to retire, some are estimating that half of the senior management in American corporations will simply walk away, with no one sufficiently skilled, trained, or experienced to take their places. Even now, the average employee even in the final decade of his or her career, between the ages of 55 and 65, has been in his or her current position barely 10 years. Job longevity definitely isn’t what it used to be.
Consequently, the competition for what has come to be called “talent” – referring to anyone from skilled labor to knowledge workers to senior management – has been hotting up for some time, and looks to be getting more intense in short order. As a result, consultants are pouring into this new market with prescriptions ranging from designing more “employee-friendly” work spaces to greater opportunities for training and meaningful projects. Please see the survey on this topic in this week’s The Economist for an excellent overview of the problem and steps being taken around the world to try to come to grips with it.
While you are doing so, bear in mind that the problem isn’t actually, and never really has been, how to attract and retain “talent.” The survey will offer some anecdotal evidence that workers are, as ever, alert to misguided efforts to manipulate their perceptions of how they benefit from their employment and are valued by their employers; they aren’t really buying it, and that’s a major factor in what’s behind the changing labor demographics we are facing today.
What’s more, recruiting and grooming coteries of “alphas,” as the survey puts it, is not only not a guarantee of success, it is quite possibly a prescription for disaster. The solution is to properly identify the nature and source of leadership in any organization, and how to manage it. Doing this, alone, will go a very long way to developing and retaining truly competition-beating “talent” in any organization.
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