Managing talented people is a challenging task. For two reasons. First, talented people are skeptical about management’s contribution to the organization. Second, managerial controls may distract rather than help talented people do what they do best -- innovate.
But there’s a simple strategy for managing talented people -- convince them that, beyond offering promotions, management is there to help them advance their careers in other ways. That’s the finding of a Google study published last year in the Harvard Business Review. As one Google manager put it: “Engineers hate being micromanaged on the technical side, but they love being closely managed on the career side.”
Simply put, managers should be career coaches rather than day-to-day work supervisors.
In theory, this strategy is a straightforward proposition. But in practice things aren’t that easy. There’s two reasons for this.
First, coaching talented employees requires much more than conventional managerial skills acquired through education and work experience. It involves true leadership skill -- a range of insights that are categorically distinct from the mundane execution of daily administrative affairs.
As discussed in The Ten Golden Rules Of Leadership I co-authored with Mike Soupios, what distinguishes real leaders -- the executives who make a tangible difference in the workplace -- from mere administrators is a unique series of perspectives and values. Where others become entangled in details and trivialities, the methods and approaches of genuine leaders reflect a clarity and insight that only comes from a well-examined life.
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The trouble, however, is that it’s hard to find such executives, as the traditional recruiting process cannot effectively screen candidates according to their perspectives and values. In most cases, personal traits come out after an executive is hired—and that’s too late if they happen to be the wrong ones.
Second, coaching can be quite costly, as it requires a great deal of corporate resources. And there's a dilemma over its effectiveness. “Employers are understandably reluctant to make big investments in workers who might not stay long. But this creates a vicious circle: Companies won’t train workers because they might leave, and workers leave because they don’t get training,” write Monika Hamori and Burak Koyuncu in the July-August 2012 Harvard-Business Review.
The Bottom Line: Talent management can be simple, provided that: (i) it focuses on the career side rather than the technical side of the workplace; (ii) managers posses a unique series of perspectives and values that help talented individuals advance the cause of the organization and their careers in the process; and (iii) the organization is prepared to invest the required resources.
