Why You Need a Strong Talent Bench

One of HCI’s recent daily mailings contained a link to an interesting article from Harvard Business Review, called When Growth Stalls, by Matthew S. Olson, Derek van Bever and Seth Verry.

The article states that: “Successful companies lose momentum for four main reasons. All are within management’s control if spotted in time.” It goes on to identify the 4 main reasons why companies stall; one of them being the lack of a strong talent bench. They characterize this as “a lack of leaders and staff with the skills and capabilities required for strategy execution.”

Now I thought this point was interesting. The authors point to this problem as a self-inflicted wound that is the consequence of promote-from-within policies that have been too strictly applied. They state that a company needs to recruit 10-30% of its senior management from external sources in order to remain healthy.

But I wonder if it’s also a problem with a succession planning program that is too narrow in scope. If we only look to develop people to fill leadership roles, then we’re not developing our internal talent pools to fill all the vital roles in the organization. Promoting a specialized knowledge worker to a leadership role can create a void in the company, unless you’ve also been grooming a pool of employees to fill the knowledge worker’s role. That’s the whole point of talent pool based succession planning; it develops pools of employees with the knowledge and skills the company needs to grow and succeed in all areas, not just management and leadership. We sometimes forget the importance of this.

Now I’m not saying that it’s not important to always be bringing in new blood and fresh perspective from the outside. But you can’t rely on being able to do this all the time, especially with specialized knowledge or skills. And every company has them – that one person who knows the product inside out, is the technology expert or visionary, understands the order processing system like no one else, etc. If we only focus on leadership or management roles for our succession planning and talent pool development, we’re putting our future and growth potential at risk.