Writing about Life in the digital age

How inclusive or exclusive should organizations be when developing their employees’ talents? In a world of unlimited resources, organizations would surely invest in everyone. After all, as Henry Ford is credited as saying, “the only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.” In the real world, however, limited budgets force organizations to be much more selective, which explains the growing interest in high potential (HiPo) identification. An employee’s potential sets the upper limits of his or her development range — the more potential they have, the quicker and cheaper it is to develop them.

Scientific studies have long suggested that investing in the right people will maximize organizations’ returns. In line with Pareto’s principle, these studies show that across a wide range of tasks, industries, and organizations, a small proportion of the workforce tends to drive a large proportion of organizational results, such that:

One of the key roles any leader plays is finding ways to motivate your team to reach your organization's goals. But the secret to motivating people is, wait for it .....that you can't do it. I have studied this issue by talking to and working with thousands of people over many years and the one thing everyone can agree on is that you can't motivate someone to do what they don't want to do.

What you need to do instead is find out what people want and then show them how they can get it. Motivation is intrinsic. People get excited about pursuing a goal when it's in their own self-interest. As a leader, the trick is to see if you can find an alignment between what your people want and what will help grow the organization. The upside is that if you can tap into the underlying desires people have, you will get amazing performances in return from them.