In a 2014 article published in The Harvard Business Review, Netflix’ former Chief Talent Officer Patty McCord presented a number of key talent management tenets she adopted during her time at the company, which coincided with its whirlwind growth. Having started out as a DVD-by-mail rental service, Netflix is currently one of the market’s leading providers of streaming content. Alongside such American-style truisms as “Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults” and “Tell the Truth About Performance” McCord shares a number of genuinely worthwhile insights. Case in point: the issue of employees whose skills are extremely valuable to the company in a certain development phase but which lose their relevance as the company transitions to the next level. In that case, she argues, it’s better for both the company and the employee in question to let them go.
Many Dutch companies invest heavily in recruiting and attracting new talent and there is a growing body of literature on how to retain and motivate talented employees. However, in practice this priority often ends up falling by the wayside. Once the talent is on board, they are assigned to a specific department and the responsibility for their further development then lies with the department manager. Not surprisingly, this leads to a restrictive approach whereby their skill set is developed to best serve that specific setting, when in fact effective talent development extends beyond departmental boundaries and must be directed from the top. During my tenure at General Electric in the US, the company’s then CEO Jack Welch was personally involved in the development of high potentials and decided when it was time for them to be transferred to another business unit.
Granted, GE is a massive corporation with the kind of resources at its disposal that allow for such an approach. For smaller businesses, an effective approach to talent development must reflect McCord’s findings: you need to let the talent go after a certain amount of time, since they have learned as much as they could at your organisation and would do well to continue the growth curve elsewhere. However, virtually all HR directors have a hard time accepting this – which is why I keep telling them that identifying, attracting and developing talent in the current constellation is the responsibility of the board. Another Harvard Business Review article titled ‘People Before Strategy’ suggests that HR directors should be equal to CEOs and CFOs in the boardroom. This new-style HR director would focus on ‘casting’ the organisation, while the other responsibilities of current HR directors (including a growing focus on HR analytics) should fall within the remit of the CFO.
