PEOPLE, TALENTS AND WINNING IN THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY

By Dr Austin Nweze

What determines the success or failure of any business in this knowledge economy is the company’s ability to attract and retain talented people. Beyond attracting and retaining talents is the issue of the company’s ability to properly fit these talents for maximum impact.

In his famous book, “Good to Great,” Jim Collins, a management researcher and writer, said that “People are not your most important asset. The right people are. Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.”

Some time ago during the democratic dispensation, a former minister of the federal republic stated that out of the about 30, 000 people that that graduate from Nigerian universities every year only about 10 per cent or less are sure of getting jobs. Meanwhile every day you open national daily newspapers you find organizations looking for talents to hire for good pay. What’s going on here? Is it our education? Is it the people themselves? What could be responsible for the current dearth of good (talented) people in the market space today?

The rate of poaching and mobility of workers is increasing by the day. The banking and the financial services sector is the hardest hit, and other sectors are not speared by this talent hunt. Head hunters are having a field day, and a hard time too, finding the right people for their numerous clients. The situation is not only peculiar to Nigeria or Africa, but it is a global problem. Many thanks to globalization and the flattening of the world as Thomas Friedmann wrote in his book, The world is Flat.

As Greg Smith once said, “Today, business success is measured in talent – the right talent for the right job. No matter what kind of business you are in, having the right people determines success or failure.” This is absolutely correct as far as the knowledge economy is concerned. There’s something some organizations, hungry for talent in order to drive growth and compete in the market space, are currently doing. They have resorted to search for talents outside the shores of Nigeria for both foreigners with rare expertise and the Diaspora community who are willing to risk their security of life and comfort of their environment where they reside and come back to Nigeria to work. Few banks are recruiting talents from abroad to fill the gap and paying them handsomely to settle or resettle them in Nigeria.

This is a welcome trend. Something Professor Pat Utomi has been working so hard in the past many years talking to the Diaspora Nigerians in different parts of the world to return home and help build Nigeria. Tom Iseghohi, the Group Managing Director of TransCorp was among those who heeded the call to return to Nigeria and contribute toward building the economy. I hope the Yar ‘Adua government’s policy flip-flop will allow him perform.

A study done some years ago showed that about 95 per cent of any population is doing or has at one point or the other done the wrong job. That means that a greater percentage of the working populations are probably wrongly fitted for the wrong job. That is the right talent doing the wrong job or wrongly fitted within organizations. We see this happening in the government, public and private sectors.

When you have the wrong person doing the right job or the right employee doing the wrong job you can never get the job done well or get the person work faster or better. The person’s productivity will not measure up the expectation. One major aspect of the leader’s job is to be able to fit the right people to the right jobs. This is what you find in any winning organization. This is not an easy task but it can be done. I can hear someone shout to remind me of the Pareto efficiency rule that state that 20 per cent of employees produce 80 per cent of the revenue of the company. This also supports the idea too.

I was told a pathetic story of a once thriving mid-size company that the employees and the owner of the business had high hopes of taking public by 2005. During the growth stage of the business the business owner was “lucky” to have talented people working in the company. For unexplained reason she (business owner) allowed the whole business to slip. New entrants were paid higher salary than older staff. It was about that period that the banks started searching for talents for bigger pay.

Gradually the good people started to leave the company for a better pay and conditions of service. It peaked in 2005 when a generation of talented people exited the company. In attempt to hire new people the CEO (business owner) hired a new manager who couldn’t work with others. He was a total misfit and that led to the exodus of the best staff. One of the recent hires is already on his way after working for a few months.

This has been the situation at the company up till the time of writing this piece. The saving grace for the company was that the CEO had foresight to invest in other businesses. It is the income from other businesses that is being used to finance this particular business with the hope the things will improve one day. With the kind of managers running the affairs of the company I doubt if much progress will be made. The starting point for this company is to get rid of the “rednecks” in the company and hire the right people and properly place them. Give them the right motivation as well as a sense of ownership and see them roar.

It is important at this point to note that the idea of hiring people to do any job is not acceptable. If you want result and high productivity the right people must be hired to do the right kind of job they have the capability for. A carpenter is not cut out for brick layer job, for example. Hiring people with experience is good. But can experience guarantee future success? Nope! Experience, like any other knowledge can become obsolete if not improved or nurtured or made relevant for the current situation.

One of the major contributors of high employee turnover is when he or she is not rightly placed to do a job he is well suited for. This also leads to low productivity, poor performance and lack of motivation on the part of the employee. As for the company, there will be loss of sales, untapped or missed business opportunities, unsatisfied customers, and all these will lead to increased cost. Apart from the cost of keeping such staff, all other negative consequences cost the company money. It is usually said that you cannot give what you don’t have. An unhappy and unmotivated employee will never produce a happy customer.

As earlier mentioned; one of the challenges a leader or manager faces especially in this knowledge economy is, to borrow from Jim Collins, “getting the right person in the right seat.” Each work activity requires its own special skills set, competencies and talents. Each work activity also has its unique motivations. Managers should be able to know the right incentive to give to employees doing certain work activities in order to motivate them. Knowledge workers, especially those in IT, have different kind of motivation than factory workers.

Those who are involved in interviewing job applicants will tell you that they are almost as tensed up as the applicants themselves. They worry and hope they make the right selection otherwise it will be a disaster and cost to the company which they wouldn’t like to incur. The hiring of wrong people is sometimes attributed to the use of obsolete hiring practices and lack of proper training of interviewers. According to Greg Smith, part of the reasons why traditional hiring practices don’t work are failure to detect motivational fit with job, applicants “exaggerate” to get a job, relying on past experience as an indicator of success, legal liability, most interviewers are not properly trained to interview applicants, and hiring decisions made by intuition, not fact.

One instrument I used and still use that I found very effective and helpful is the Insight Personality Instrument, developed by Dr Nathan Bryce. It tells you who you should hire or the attribute to look out for when you are hiring an account, a sales person, customer service personnel, etc. It is more than 75 per cent accurate when administered correctly.

Some organizations focus on hiring people with the right attitude and train them for skills. It is important to do proper job analysis to determine what skills, competencies and talents required to perform a certain task. Otherwise it will result in the problem of mismatch – the right person is placed on the wrong job and rather than being motivated the employee is de-motivated resulting in low productivity. It can also lead to high employee turnover.

A friend of mine who runs a consulting firm based in Lagos told me how he reoriented new recruits he hired from other firms. He states: when I hire staff who had worked in other companies I usually don’t give them responsibilities for a period of time until I’m sure they understand the work culture in our organization. I always bear in mind that each new recruit hired brings hi or her own set of unique skills, talents, and competencies to the job as well as the work place. I have come to realize over the years of working with people the challenge for most organizations is that they fall short in matching each individual with the job. Most organizations don’t take the time to analyze what it takes to be successful in each job.

As earlier been mentioned, the dearth of talent pool in most organizations is a global challenge. This challenge is real. Just open the pages of any daily newspaper and you find job vacancies being advertised yet statistics shows there is high unemployment rate in the country. What’s really going on? What should be done by both the government and the private sector to sort the shrinking talent pool?

Smart organizations are finding ways of properly assessing, developing and retaining talented people within their organizations. The truth is that the traditional hiring practices (such as Resumes or CV, job applications and interviewing), though important, but are no longer effective in this knowledge economy characterized by high mobility of people from one organization to another and from one country to another made possible by globalization.

How then can organizations hire the right talents for their companies? Some organizations, in additions to other hiring methods, use headhunting to get the right talents. Different assessments and profiling, such as the one s mentioned earlier, can also be used. On the part of the employees, they should realize that whatever form of education or degree they claim to have, is only but a foundation. There’s the need for self development and skills acquisitions which is not available in most universities, except for few like the LBS.