Where are the Talents?

What is the biggest challenge in an economic down turn? Loosing Talents! It sounds a bit contradictory, because you may think that now we have more talents to compete for fewer positions. True. However, you might overlook the fact that talents always have options. And by the way, real talents require high standards of environment. They will not tolerant for mediocre working process, the type of work and of course the boss, exactly because they have options.

Let me ask you a question. In your last reorganization, when people felt uncertain, which people tented to leave first? Of cause the good ones. They are always alert, look for the best path for their career and they take quickly actions. Well, how do you identify the best talents in your organization?

Talents know how to position themselves as experts in some specific area. These people's names will immediately jump into your mind, when you think about a certain term. For example, who is doing marketing in your company? Who will you ask, when you have PC problems? etc. These people's job title may be different than their area of experts, but they are the ones people looking for advice. Just to name another example, people come to me, when there is an issue on leadership challenge.

There are no static talents. Real talents constantly develop themselves, reposition themselves, whenever the needs of the market (inside or outside) shift. They are learning and most likely also by providing value to others and by solving problems for others. Since these people are extremely useful. So it happened that they end up with 2 to 5 job offers during reorganization. Their problem is actually to make tough decision among all the good options, while many others will end up with no job offer at all.

Now, how do you, as a boss, attract those talents?

1) Position yourselves as some one who loves to be around with smart people, you do not mind that there are people working for you who are more capable than you. Question for you: do you have the gut, inner security and wisdom to do so?

2) Fully recognize their specific working style and try to meet their individual requirements, including working time, ways of communication and salary expectation etc.

3) Understand and meet their development needs. Where do they want to go, career, emotion, spiritual, life style? What are their values? Can you fully accept, recognize and support them?

4) Give them a lot of freedom.

If you do all these continuously, you will be overloaded with talents. And you are automatically positioning yourself as a "leadership talent" who will never have difficulty to find a job again.