Warning: Your competitors are head hunting your best performers NOW!

By Mark Holden in Leadership

It comes as no surprise that our best and most productive employees are the ones that get approached by competitors and head hunters. So if the success of our businesses is determined by the performance of our HiPo’s why does it take one, or more, of them resigning to start thinking about what we should do to retain them? I had this conversation with a client not too long ago, and the response was, “I’m not sure, I guess I just take them for granted.” Exactly! And you can’t afford to if you want them to be a part of your future business.

In a 2008 Global Human Capital Survey, conducted by IBM, 75% of respondents identified “Building Leadership Talent” as the most significant capability-building challenge facing their organisation today. View results here

In the Global Unified Talent Management Survey, 2008 by Taleo Research with Human Capital Institute (HCI), Business Intelligence, Markess International and Quantum Market Research, 89% of Australian companies that completed the survey identified that talent shortages due to the ‘Babyboomer drain’ are effecting leader development. They state: 

“19 percent of managers and 29 percent of executives will be eligible for retirement within five years. This anticipated “baby-boomer drain” should raise a “big red flag”, and propel succession planning to the front lines in the quest for future success.”

That was two years ago! The pressure’s on.

There is no doubt we are facing a talent shortage in the very near future and our best performers will be in great demand - it’s time to start developing our HiPo’s now.

Never have the words of Peter Drucker on this topic been so relevant to Australian organisation today:

“Leaders are not born, they are grown.”

Learning from Rupert Murdoch

In 1992 News Corp commissioned Matrix Global to design and deploy a Future Leaders Program. This program was implemented globally and in fact is still in place today with Rupert Murdoch himself as its patron. Since then we have put literally hundreds of people through our Future Leaders Program, for a range of different companies in a range of industries, with a high percentage of them being promoted to executive positions within their organisations. 

Providing a structured and strategic process for growing and developing your high performance, high potential staff is good business. In fact it’s essential business if you expect your companies to survive in the increasingly competitive markets in which we all work.