Exchanging ideas to create the well-being advantage

“The war for talent” is an established phrase for summing up the challenge that all organisations face in terms of keeping and securing the best people. Many businesses, particularly bigger ones, have established programmes and processes for finding and developing talent, but the key relationship is always the one with the direct line manager.

Griffeth, Hom and Gaertner (2000) looked at a large number of staff retention studies and aggregated results across them to look for the trends. One of the strongest predictors of whether a person would leave was the quality of exchanges between employees and their boss - stronger than gender, ethnic origin and intelligence. Indeed, the critical role of the line manager in employee retention arises countless times in the literature and it is also frequently cited as a reason for quitting by employees after departure.

So this is where it can all go wrong…..or right. When a manager has genuine concern coupled with the motivation to develop talent and to inspire staff to do their best work you get a fantastic coming together of organisational processes and individual leadership talent that enables employees to realise their full potential.

But the other side of this is when a manager sees a talented team member and interprets it as a ‘let-off’ for him/her. When this happens, and it happens more than you might think, the employee’s talent is his/her worst enemy because it has convinced their manager that he/she is capable of delivering what’s required with minimal intervention. And this can work for both parties…..for a short time. The manager is free to get on with ‘real work’ and the talented team member is rewarded by being given autonomy to get on with his/her work independently. This can feel like a privilege in the early stages of a career, but it’s really an illusion because managing and developing talent is real work - more strategically important than many of the administrative tasks that most managers undertake every day.

So the situation described above is simply not sustainable - after a certain amount of time talented people get bored of doing the same work to a predictably high standard. They start to wonder ‘What’s next?’ They need to be constantly challenged if you are to see their potential and, just as importantly, if they are to stick around.

Then there’s the wider organisational perspective: It doesn’t matter how good the talent management programme is - if the operators of the system (the managers) aren’t engaged it will not deliver. Imagine a business with 200 managers each managing 10 staff- if half of these behave in the manner I’ve just described you have a pattern that will undermine the development of the talent pool that has been earmarked as the future of the organisation.

Finding talented people is no easy task – it’s time consuming and expensive - so it’s nothing short of criminal to use people’s talent as an excuse not to manage and nurture their potential. The best businesses have a constant eye to this potential ‘derailer’ of their talent programmes.