SALESTRAINING

Talent War Tales

Conventional wisdom can steer you wrong

by Paul Nolan

A lot has been written about the war for talent, much of it bad advice offered by consulting firms and management gurus, says Robert Sutton, author (most recently of the business best-seller The No Asshole Rule) and a highly regarded management guru himself. Sutton says if you want to win the talent wars, five lessons stand out:

1 Superstars are overrated – When superstars leave, there is little evidence that they do much damage to their firms.

2 Great systems are more important than great people – Even the most brilliant person is doomed to fail in a bad system, and seemingly mediocre people can become stars in a great system.

3 Create smaller rather than larger pay differences between “star” employees and everyone else – Jack Welch and others want you to throw most of your salary and bonus dollars to your stars, but many more articles on top management teams, baseball teams, academic departments, manufacturing organizations, etc. state that performance is better when there is smaller distance between the highest-paid and lowest-paid people.

4 The law of crappy people is probably a myth – Some executives and consulting firms believe that great people hire other great people, but mediocre people hire even worse people because they are threatened by competent people. There is little evidence to support this.

5 The no asshole rule helps – Generation X and Y employees simply won’t put up with nasty bosses and peers. One executive admitted that he changed his management style dramatically after figuring out that every time he or one of his colleagues drove someone out, it cost them about $100,000 (more for senior people) to replace that person.
 

Sutton’s blog is worth bookmarking – http://bobsutton.typepad.com
 

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View all online articles from the
July/August 2007 SalesForceXP magazine.

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