Untapped Talent

Unleashing the Power of the Hidden Workforce

D. Monroe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137282224
• eBook ISBN: 9781137321350
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

A practical guide packed with examples of organizations that have successfully tapped into the hidden talents of their workforce. Managers will learn to recognize and mine some key, fundamental leadership traits that are essential for a competitive business.

PART I

Defining

CHAPTER 1

The Hidden Workforce

Talented people need organizations less than organizations need talented people.

—Daniel Pink, author

The CEO of a Fortune 500 securities company once shared with me the one question that most keeps him up at night: “Where am I going to find the talent to lead this corporation forward?” he said. “I just don’t see it.”

He’s not alone. Thousands of leaders are asking themselves and their talent management executives the same question. The fact is modern leaders face two harsh realities: One, the talent that once delivered corporate success no longer is good enough to meet modern corporate goals. Two, the talent needed to deliver corporate success now and in the future is scarce.

The talent that once made organizations successful isn’t necessarily obsolete. It’s just insufficient.

There was a time not so long ago when people and organizations interacted in a pretty limited and straightforward manner. Life and work weren’t easy, and complications often arose, but there wasn’t the widespread complexity that we face today.

Technological advances have greatly increased the “touch points” between organizational systems, multiplying the factors that affect every decision a person or organization makes. Trans-Atlantic conference calls at 9 PM are now the rule and not the exception for conducting business. Video conferencing, or “halo” calls, have replaced face-to-face meetings. Text messaging is the expedient way to get in touch with someone, and the telephone is convenient but often not necessary unless things are too complicated to explain on paper.

The world—the people, the systems, the organizations—exists in increasingly interconnected ways, and interconnected systems are, by definition, more complex.

The new norm in our complex world is about differences—on multiple dimensions. Each “difference” that’s introduced into a situation makes that situation more complex. It becomes a new factor that can contribute to the richness and success of the situation, but it can also present new hurdles and challenges. Such differences take a variety of forms—people, experiences, skills, worldviews, talents, relationships, politics, gender, race, social status, education, reputation . . . the list goes on.

Nowadays very few organizations are localized or even regionalized: they’re global. Markets are expanding to the farthest reaches of the planet. More and more Americans are seeking employment in the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India, and China—better known as the BRIC countries—unsaturated markets that were growing at a rate of nearly three times that of developed markets¹ prior to the global economic crisis of 2008–2009 and continues today. The growth might have slowed, but these markets still provide opportunities for employment and development while building a person’s global resume.

Many US corporations are building their wealth outside the country where emerging markets provide a greater return on investment. GE, United Technologies, Hasbro Inc., and MacDonald’s Corp are some of the many companies that have been increasing revenues significantly overseas while their revenues in the United States have been decreasing or growing very little. GE, for instance, saw its US revenues drop 3.4 percent in the second quarter of 2011 but jump 23 percent in its international business.²

Also, international companies increasingly are buying US corporations and filling top leadership jobs with expatriates from other countries. In Massachusetts alone, Manulife Financial, a Canadian company, acquired John Hancock Financial; German-based Adidas Group purchased Reebok; French-based Sanofi-Aventis purchased biotech giant Genzyme; and Santander, the Spanish financial giant, acquired Sovereign Bank.

Business leaders now come from all over the world. In 1999, the QS Global 200 Business School Report listed only 15 MBA programs that were based outside of North America or Europe. By 2012, that number had grown to 51, including 36 in Asia-Pacific countries.

English is the business language of the world, but international teams often slip into their mother tongues when working in groups—it’s expedient to do what comes naturally.

It’s no wonder then that the United States is struggling to maintain its global competitive advantage.

So Americans are working all over the world, and the world is coming to America to work. But that’s just part of the cultural complexity business leaders face now—continuing to build the sense of urgency. There’s also the generational dynamics—the mixing of baby boomers, gen X, and gen Y with all their differing expectations, ways of working, and values around employment. Managing and working across generations has become one of the major challenges facing organizations.

Demographics also are shifting along ethnic lines. The number of Americans who identify themselves as “mixed-raced” has grown by more than 35 percent since 2000, while Hispanics are the fastest-growing and most influential demographic in our time, evident by their impact on the 2012 US presidential election. Latino votes made the difference in President Obama being reelected.

The talent that organizations develop and hire in the middle of these realities can’t be homogeneous. But it’s counterproductive and inefficient to have an organization in which everyone looks and thinks the same. A complex, globalized economy demands diverse, complex talents. Gocke Sargut and Rita Gunther McGrath put it this way in a 2011 article for Harvard Business Review: “Complex systems are organic; you need to make sure your organization contains enough diverse thinkers to deal with the changes and variations that will inevitably occur.”³

While this notion may appear simplistic, it’s not. One of my large pharmaceutical clients prides itself in hiring only from the “best” schools in the world—Harvard, Stanford, Penn, London Business School, INSEAD, Hong Kong UST, the Indian Institutes of Management. They look for a certain type of candidate with specific degrees and technical experience. Limiting their candidate search to Ivy League–type schools minimizes their opportunities to employ professionals who may be just as intelligent, creative, and innovative but who developed their skills through a very different path.

The diversity of someone’s path can add incredible value and perspective to their problem-solving abilities and innovative thought. Some professionals may have attended state universities for undergraduate work and then gone on to a more elite school for graduate work. Others may have found summer internships in local nonprofits, gaining experiences that add significant value to their resumes but that lacked the perceived value that comes with an internship at a Fortune 500 company. Or they might have earned their college educations later in life after years of taking night classes.

For modern organizations to achieve success, they have to find talent that looks, thinks, and acts differently from the norm. Anything less simply isn’t good enough.

Scarce Talent: The Skills Gap

This dovetails into the second reality that modern leaders face: Right talent is scarce.

In 1997, a McKinsey & Company research project on talent management practices and beliefs coined the term “war for talent.” They updated their findings in 2000, by which time they had surveyed roughly 13,000 managers at 112 large US companies. The surveys examined the existing and developing needs of corporate employers and compared these needs to the skills and talents of the workforce.

The reality painted by McKinsey (and subsequent research by others) hasn’t changed in the last decade: The available talent required for success in US companies is shrinking and companies aren’t prepared for it. Start-ups, midsize companies, and large corporations all need more than bodies to fill seats—they need sophisticated talent that understands global issues, multicultural influences, technology, and how to navigate in increasingly delayered organizational structures. This is particularly relevant in health care, business services, leisure and hospitality, construction, manufacturing, and retail—the industries that account for more than two-thirds of employment.

“The caliber of a company’s talent increasingly determines success in the marketplace,” the 2001 McKinsey report said. “At the same time, attracting and retaining great talent is becoming more difficult, as demand for highly skilled people outstrips supply.”⁴

This doesn’t mean there are or will be fewer workers. In fact, there are far more workers than available jobs, and that’s not likely to change any time soon. The world population continues to grow and baby boomers, in part because of hard economic times, aren’t retiring as early as once predicted. McKinsey released research in 2011 predicting a need for 21 million jobs to bring the United States back to full employment by 2020.

So why are corporate employers struggling to fill the openings they have with qualified workers? There’s a skills gap.

“Under current trends, the United States will not have enough workers with the right education and training to fill the skill profiles of the jobs likely to be created,” McKinsey reported. “Our analysis suggests a shortage of up to 1.5 million workers with bachelor’s degrees or higher in 2020 . . . The configuration of the labor force will not neatly fit the requirements of employers.”⁵

In some cases, Americans simply aren’t learning the skills that a changing corporate world needs. There is a misalignment between the skills of the unemployed and those needed to fill many of the jobs in our technical world. Our school systems have been very slow in adapting curricula to meet the needs of today’s marketplace. American schools are continuing to teach repetition and memory techniques as opposed to critical thinking, science, math, language, and basic living and leadership curriculum skills. But that’s a totally different book.

While the overall talent pool is growing, some parts of it—parts that often have many of the skills relevant to the changing marketplace—are shrinking. More and more of the best talent, including those fresh out of college, are opting for a trip down the entrepreneurial highway, either starting their own businesses or leaving the corporate world for smaller companies.

Most corporate leaders take one or two approaches to these challenges. They buy proven rock stars or invest in workers who most obviously demonstrate high potential.

These tactics, however, simply aren’t enough.

Buying talent is expensive and often proves detrimental to the existing corporate culture. It contributes to an organization’s struggle to develop a reliable culture because it has little or no institutional memory on its payroll and because it has such a constant infusion of new ideas and people. Or it rejects new solutions to existing challenges because those solutions don’t fit the norm. Leaders come and go without making an impact—the very reason they were hired.

As McKinsey’s research confirms, the pool of traditional emerging talent—those with required skills who are easy for managers to spot—has shrunk. Thus, an insufficient, relatively small percentage of an organization’s workforce ends up with the right assignments, the right mentors, the right coaching, and the right training for developing its potential.

Being in the “right” everything is that rare situation when your expertise, training, experience, and opportunity come together, allowing you to maximize your talent. So what employers need is to expand the pool of workers they can develop by giving them the “right” everything. Where can they find these workers? In a place I call the “hidden workforce.”

Defining the Hidden Workforce

The corporations that stand to win are the ones that mine the talent that’s already in the economy but going untapped—the hidden workforce. I will focus more specifically on how organizations can do this better in a later chapter, but for now let’s look at what this hidden workforce is.

People in the hidden workforce typically perform at an acceptable level, get decent but not career-advancing assignments, and move from month to month and year to year in an invisible, uninspiring space. Or, they have performed above average and steadily advanced, and then find their careers in a stall and can’t figure out what’s needed to change their trajectories.

They lose sight of their potential. They don’t know how to present that potential, nor are they motivated to present it. Their managers, meanwhile, don’t recognize or acknowledge that potential. So everyone simply accepts a status quo—a misinformed dictate that limits the person’s success, the manager’s success, and the organization’s success.

Great organizations selectively recruit the very unique talent they need, but they also routinely find and develop the internal talent that other organizations overlook. They don’t just rely on their “A” players; they bring out something better in their “B” and “C” players—or the ones who really were “A” players all along, but just didn’t realize it.

They find their Susan Boyle.

“Susie Simple,” as she was nicknamed while gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction: When Lightning Strikes
• Part I   Defining
• Part II   Mining and Refining
• Part III   Exemplifying
• Notes
• Index