Training Magazine Middle East March 2015 | Page 16

TALENT

MANAGEMENT

In many global companies, particularly those based in developed markets, it’s found that half of senior leaders will be concluding their careers within the next few years, and half of them don’t have a successor ready or capable to take over.

As Boris Groysberg (a professor of business administration in the Organizational Behaviour unit at the Harvard Business School) puts it, “Companies may not be feeling pain today, but in five or ten years, as people give up work or move on, where will the next generation of leaders come from?”And never a truer word would be spoken in this region, albeit sooner rather than later.

Organizations know that they must have the best talent in order to succeed in a competitive and intricate global economy. It is no mean feat to hire, develop, and retain talented people but few organizations here have an adequate supply of identified key talent or systems in place to control the flow for the next generation of flourishing business leaders.

This point of view was reiterated in one-on-one interviews with top executives, conducted as part of Groysberg study.

This emphasis on talent management is inevitable given that, on average, companies now spend over one-third of their revenues on employee wages and benefits. Your organization can create a new product and it is easily copied. Lower your prices and competitors will follow.

Go after a money-spinning market and someone is there right after you. But replicating a high-quality, extremely engaged workforce is nearly impossible. The ability to effectively hire, retain, deploy, and engage talent—at all levels—is really the only true competitive advantage an organization possesses.

There is a demonstrated relationship between better talents equalling better business performance. Increasingly, organizations seek to quantify the return on their investment in talent.

The result has been a mountain of “proof” that paints a compelling picture of the impact talent has on business performance. To highlight just a few:

- A 2010 study from the Hackett Group found companies that excel at managing talent post earnings that are 15 percent higher than peers.

HAS THE UAE GOT

THE ISSUE OF TALENT

UNDER CONTROL - OR NOT?

BY PAULA JANE COX