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Mark Allen

 Congratulations, William Yeager! You’re the winner of the Aha Moments in Talent Management book giveaway! Please email your mailing address to Ann Parker at aparker@td.org.Most likely your organization has protocols to secure money—you make sure money gets into the bank, and you make sure it stays there. Appropriate policies and procedures also ensure money is being spent properly, and expenditures over a certain amount require approval from senior executives.But do you have the same level of security protecting your talent?CEOs tell me that people are their organization’s most valuable asset. Yet their people policies and procedures rarely reflect this declaration.One reason for this disconnect is that money truly is an asset from an accounting perspective—it is something we own and can list on the asset side of our balance sheet. People, on the other hand, are not owned, and therefore don’t fit the accounting definition of an asset. But people are valuable resources.Think of the roles that are the lifeblood of your organization. I’m not talking about the top of the org chart, but about the engineers, product designers, service deliverers, or salespeople who truly add value for your customers. What is a top performer in one of those roles worth to your organization on an annual basis (not what do you pay them, but is their true value)? A quarter of a million dollars? A half million? A million or more?Now what protocols and safeguards are in place to ensure that this valuable resource isn’t squandered? I’ll bet they are not nearly as rigorous as those for financial or technology security measures.So what are the risks to your top talent? First, your employee could simply walk away (and perhaps walk right into the loving arms of one of your competitors). Ample research indicates that one’s immediate manager is the main reason she leaves an organization. Do your policies ensure that your top performers are being led by skilled managers who know how to engage and retain talent? Are your managers held accountable for retention and turnover?Underutilization is another risk. Research by Gallup consistently shows that fewer than 20 percent of Americans answer “yes” to the question, “Do you get to do what you do best at work every day?” What an incredible waste of talent and potential! More than 80 percent of us spend our work days doing things other than what we do best. People not only add more value when they do what they do best, but they are generally happier and more engaged. When we don’t deploy people optimally, we drive down production and engagement.One of the other leading reasons that people leave organizations is lack of challenging work. Again, we could end up losing good people by not deploying them around their strengths. And again I ask: Do you have policies in place to ensure that your top performers are being managed in ways that play to their strengths?The first sentence of my book, Aha Moments in Talent Management, is: “People are our most valuable asset.” It is spoken by the CEO of the book’s fictional company, Capital View. Like most CEOs, he truly means it when he says it. But like most organizations, a deeper dive reveals that the day-to-day talent practices are not consistent with this philosophy. Until we institute management policies that protect our talent with the same discipline and rigor that we safeguard our financial resources, we will not live up to the proclamation that people are our greatest asset, and we will not fully leverage the value of that asset.So here’s the question: What is one thing your organization can do to ensure that your most talented employees are being managed in a way that maximizes engagement and reduces the risk of turnover?For a chance to win a copy of Aha Moments in Talent Management, answer the above question in the comments section below. Your comment must be received by 5 p.m. EDT on Friday, September 5. If you prefer to email your response, please send it to mark.allen@pepperdine.edu. After reviewing the comments and emails received, we will select and announce a winner in this post by Wednesday, September 10.

Book Giveaway: How Do You Protect Your Organization’s Most Valuable Resource?

The title of this post might lead you to believe that I don’t think leadership development programs are a worthwhile endeavor. While this is not true, I do believe that the execution of most leadership development programs does not give us the results that we need.I have been involved with leadership development programs for more than 20 years. I have designed them as part of university executive education programs, I have delivered them for numerous corporate clients, and I have consulted with corporate universities about their leaders’ development. Yet only recently have I begun to realize that most of these programs do not really benefit their organizations.This epiphany has resulted from conversations with learning and development professionals. When I ask, “Why do leadership development programs?” they usually answer by saying that such programs are required. But when I ask why, they often respond with a question: “Isn’t better leadership a good thing?” I don’t know. If better leadership translates into better business results, it’s a great thing. If better leadership does not yield better business results, then it’s not so great.The true nature of the problem comes from the responses to my question, “What is the goal of your leadership development program?” The answer, more often than not, is “better leadership.”Therein lies the problem. The goal of leadership development programs is better leadership. But better leadership is not a business outcome. Better leadership should be a means to an end, but not an end unto itself.The best way to design a leadership development program (or any learning or development program for that matter) is to start by asking the most important question: “What is the business outcome we are trying to drive?” If you can clearly articulate an answer to that question, you should create a program designed to deliver that outcome. And perhaps the most vitally important principle in learning and development is that if you cannot identify the business outcomes you are trying to drive, then you probably shouldn’t be delivering the program.In Aha Moments in Talent Management, the fictional protagonist, Maria Green, challenges her Chief Learning Officer to provide an answer to the business outcomes question for every program he delivers. While he balks at first, he finally comes to realize that if he can’t identify the business drivers, then he can’t justify the time, energy, and expense of running a program. It’s true for this fictional company in the book, and it should be an “aha moment” for your learning and development department, too.Learn additional talent management principles in Mark’s just-released ATD Press book, Aha Moments in Talent Management_._ And hear from Mark during his free ATD webcast presentation on Monday, August 25.

Why Most Leadership Development Programs Are Not Worth the Time (and Money)

What is the job of a manager? This is not an easy question, and there are a number of possible answers. The talent management approach suggests that the job of the manager is to hire, develop, engage, and retain talented people. This makes a lot of sense to me—if you hire, develop, engage, and retain talented people, aren’t you pretty much guaranteed to get good business results?When I teach talent management classes at the Human Capital Institute and MBA classes in management at Pepperdine University, I ask people to decide the extent to which they think managers should be held accountable for hiring, developing, engaging, and retaining talented people. Most people suggest pretty large numbers: 70 percent, 80 percent, and sometimes even 100 percent. Almost everyone agrees that the threshold should be more than 50 percent—in other words, such accountability should be the most important part of a manager’s job.Here’s the problem: In most organizations, we do tell our managers that hiring, developing, engaging, and retaining people is important. But the same people who say that managers should be held accountable for these four talent practices between 50 and 100 percent report that managers are actually held accountable for them anywhere from 0 to 10 percent.That’s a pretty big disconnect. Most people believe managers should be held accountable to a great extent for hiring, developing, engaging, and retaining, but in practice we barely hold them accountable for these functions. Why is this?I believe that measurement is the biggest problem. Measuring a manager’s ability to hire, develop, and engage talented people is hard (measuring retention is easy). However, measuring traditional business measures—sales, revenue, profit, productivity, and quality—is much easier. While the traditional business measures are important, they are lagging indicators. They tell us what has already happened. If we could accurately measure our managers’ ability to hire, develop, and engage talented people, we would have leading indicators to help predict future results and course correct if we are not on target.As I mentioned, measuring a manager’s ability to hire, develop, and engage talented people is difficult—but it’s not impossible. If we could do a better job of measurement, we could do a better job of accountability. And if we start holding managers accountable, we are much more likely to get the talent results we want.This concept is so important that it actually encompasses two of the 13 talent principles in Aha Moments in Talent Management. Principle number five says, “Employees are smart and know how to pursue rewards. If you want to see certain behaviors and results, hold employees accountable. It’s irrational to expect employees to deliver outcomes if we do not hold them accountable.” Principle number six states, “If you’re going to hold people accountable, you must provide clearly articulated, measurable standards. There is no accountability without measurement.”Learn additional talent management principles in Mark’s just-released ATD Press book, Aha Moments in Talent Management.

Mark Allen

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