Who has the more difficult talent challenge? Small, Medium, or Large Companies?

Small growth companies face a tougher talent environment than medium and large companies. Here’s why: While they all share the challenge of finding workers with the needed work ethic and skills, two additional challenges make it far more difficult for the smaller employer:

First, because they have fewer employees, each employee is much more important to their operation. So misfits and mediocre performers are a far greater detriment, and any defection of a high performer really hurts.
Second, the small growth company desperately needs leaders with the talent and experience to make the right decisions and navigate growth stages, but it’s nearly impossible to pay what those leaders are looking for.

An important talent strategy then is to continually raise performance expectations, while making sure that everyone is developing greater strengths and making bigger contributions. Be especially watchful for people who are underemployed — whose skills and abilities have been overlooked, suppressed, or ‘pigeon-holed.’ There’s gold there.

Leading by Looking in the Rearview Mirror

Past performance data is great for identifying problems and trends, but sooner or later you have to shift your focus to next month, next quarter, next year, and beyond. Planning, anticipating, and making decisions are all about looking ahead. You cannot lead by looking in the rear-view mirror.

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Bob Legge provides organizations with the ability to exceed their most ambitious goals. I work with leaders of Fortune 500 companies, small and mid-size companies, nonprofits, education, and government. Together, we drive strategy, lead successful change, develop high performance cultures, improve individual and organizational performance, and produce faster, sustainable growth and value. Contact him at bob.legge@leggecompany.com

Escape Velocity for Cultural Gravity

Your company has a culture. It’s the values and beliefs that cause certain behaviors. For example, if people are routinely late for meetings or if there is a stampede to leave precisely at five o’clock, that’s the culture. If people prefer to send each other emails instead of talking, or if performance reviews are always late, that’s the culture too.

Cultures are strong. They are often difficult to change because they have a gravity that makes behaviors become habits — even for new people just entering the culture. If you intend to change your culture, the biggest force you’ll need to overcome is the old culture’s gravity. Your change effort will need the power to attain escape velocity.

What parts of your culture do you want to change?

Want More Accountability in Your Organization? Do This.

If you want to build accountability within your organization, you have to identify the results to be achieved. It is necessary, but not sufficient, to be concerned with behaviors, activities, and actions. To say it another way, the actions, activities and behaviors lead to results.

For example, the training department might do 20 training sessions on a subject. That’s good, but the question is, “Did the training do any good?” If you need sales people to be better at closing sales, it’s necessary to do training, but what you want is not the training sessions, but the increase in sales.

Think of it this way: People are responsible for taking action and behaving in certain ways, but they are accountable for the results of the actions and behaviors.

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Make Your Strategy Work

Getting the most from your organization and yourself

Monthly Archives: June 2016

Who has the more difficult talent challenge? Small, Medium, or Large Companies?

Leading by Looking in the Rearview Mirror

Escape Velocity for Cultural Gravity

Want More Accountability in Your Organization? Do This.