Are Your Employees More Important Than Carbon Paper?

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTIONER

Title: Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage

Competencies: talent management, visionary leadership, strategic planning, strategic problem analysis

Who benefits: boards of directors, executives, organizational consultants, graduate students in human resources

Consultant Usage: internal and external organizational consultants

What’s it about?  I am without reservation a BIG fan of the author, Ed Lawler.  And I highly recommend his latest book…but not for the obvious reason.  The book is about talent management.  If you are like me, your first thought is “coaching”.  Nope.  I am not recommending it to those of you looking for a good book on coaching.  There are many better books on how to coach.

This is also not a “quick fix”, short-term book on how do we get more from our people.

It is not a book about how to train employees. 

This is a serious, no nonsense, well-balanced book for leaders, organizational consultants, boards of directors, and students of organizational design and human resources.  It is a book about creating and sustaining what Lawler calls the Human Capital (HC) Centric organization. 

It is a book about how to optimize talent attraction, retention and performance by having the right structures, systems, processes, and practices in place. As he elaborates, he points out that all too often organizations have great people but do not manage or support them correctly.

As he also fairly points out, not all organizations need to be HC-Centric.  It may not be necessary in low-tech organizations where good is good enough.  But companies that are competing on innovative products and services for which employee contact with customers is central, an HC – Centric approach is essential and critical.
 
This book is about companies that need to “get better” in the present and “get different” in the future.  Here are some of the subjects he addresses:

1. Performance management is one of the most important activities. (My note: I love people who know the difference between performance management and performance appraisal!)

2. The information system gives the same amount of attention and rigor to measures of talent costs, performance, and condition as it does to measures of equipment, materials, buildings, supplies, and financial assets.

3. The HR department is the most important staff group.

4. The corporate board has both the expertise and the information it needs to understand and advise on talent issues.

5. Leadership is shared, and managers are highly skilled in talent management.

So if you think those topics are important in your world, by all means get and devour this book.

Before I close, you may be idly wondering where I got the title for this posting.  I love humor and there is a laugh-out-loud moment in the book when Lawler cites one of his favorite Dilbert Cartoons: The pointy-haired boss says, “I have been saying for years that ‘Employees are our most valuable asset.’  It turns out that I was wrong. Money is our most valuable asset.  Employees are ninth.”  (My note: apparently employees finish just behind number 8, carbon paper.) 

How’s your organization doing?
[tags]talent, talent management, retaining talent, human capital, human centric, hc systems, reporting systems, compensation, organization structure, information systems, ed lawler, edward lawler, bill bradley, william bradley,  bradley[/tags]

 

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.