Talent

What ‘time horizon’ should you leaders look at when ‘identifying and developing talent’? Longer term, obviously!  A longer term focus is certainly a greater than 1 year focus.

But then how do leaders react when a ‘talent’ has an average performance year? Usually there seems to be a tendency to de-select person from ‘talent list’.

Leaders place their ‘talent’ in challenging/next generation roles. There will be some hits. There will be some misses too – but that’s obvious because these roles are at forefront of shaping what company might be wanting to do in longer term.

But leaders need to back your ‘talent’ through highs and lows. I am not talking about backing them through continued failure. But they certainly need to have backing through periodic troughs – or when a critical project is going through a challenging phase.

Else an organization, in long run, might end up with a weak internal pipe of candidates for leadership roles. Those who are ‘leadership talent’ will not have survived. Those who are not ‘leadership talent’ might have survived through not taking risks.

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Sourav