Talent Management
In its Human Capital Trends dashboard, Deloitte surveyed over 2,500 leaders in more than 90 countries who are concerned with talent management. The survey respondents see talent as a major challenge to growth. A few key findings were:

  • “Softer areas such as culture, engagement, leadership and development have become urgent priorities.
  • Leadership and learning have dramatically increased in importance, but the capability gap is widening.
  • HR organizations and skills are not keeping up with business needs.”

Research from Bersin by Deloitte also found that organizations with strong learning cultures were 92% more likely to develop innovative products or services and 52% more productive.

Many executives consider leadership and culture to be factors like strategy, structure, marketing, and financial management that determine an organization’s success. Decades of research now show that leadership and culture are catalytic agents. They have a multiplying effect that top leaders and organizations use as leverage on those other factors to elevate performance to the very peak of their industry.

Tomorrow we publish my January blogs in the February issue of The Leader Letter. This issue looks at a few crucial aspects of leadership and culture. There’s a link to last month’s webinar on key elements of leadership, coaching, and culture development. And we’re now planning to drill deeper into those areas with a March 9 webinar on Executive Team Building and Culture Development.

Many leaders and leadership teams fall into 7 deadly time traps that drain their energy and effectiveness. This month’s newsletter reports on how one team addressed a few key traps they’d fallen into.

Two of January’s blogs looked at the futility of the yearly ritual of forecasting and predicting. The key is to strengthen leadership and culture to be much more agile and adaptive to change since predicting the future is impossible.

I also reviewed how building on the uplifting forces of leadership strengths is much more effective than being drawn to the dark side of fixing weaknesses. As Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi famously told Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars movie, “Use the Force, Luke.”