What If All Your Senior Execs Left? from BusinessWeek addresses a topic we have been shouting from the mountaintop. First, a great point that I haven’t considered:
Organizations today are running with lean, highly productive staffs. While such streamlining is great for budgets, the fact that workplace productivity levels have continued their upward trajectory has created a dearth of available talent.Losing multiple key executives within a short time can tear a hole in the business plan and hurt both a company’s bottom line and stock price.
Companies are highly streamlined today which makes every position important to overall corporate success. Technology continues to drive productivity increases, but I believe the impending Baby Boomer exit will create too great a gap to overcome. Of course, necessity is the mother of invention so some technological breakthrough is probably on the near horizon. Or perhaps a dramatic rise in offshoring to countries with expansive labor forces.
The approach addressed in this article is the solution “workaround” we endorse – hiring the right talent from outside your industry. We even wrote an article on the topic. The author of the BusinessWeek article seems to agree:
Where should companies find this diverse group of talented people with appropriate knowledge and experience? Companies should be careful not to try to replicate the current senior team. Instead, they should consider creating a “new team” made up of internal promotions and a few hires from competitors, with the majority coming from outside the industry and outside the hiring company’s comfort zone.
Amen to that. The best return on your investment is to get ahead of your competition and start implementing this approach now. Stop recycling mediocrity by only hiring from within the narrow scope of your industry. Instead, follow the author’s advice:
The solution, then, is to act now. Evaluate your current team. Identify the holes and the available pool of qualified talent. Determine the core competencies you will need, and consider where you will find diverse talent. Build a leadership program to bring the talent on board, and fund the program for success. Then recruit the best talent in the market.