McKinsey Changes their Mind

In the McKinsey Quarterly 2008 #1, there is an article by Matthew Guthridge et al. called Making Talent a Strategic Priority.

They note that the original war for talent work "made a strong case for emphasizing recruitment and retention of a company's A players" then go on to say "what's much clearer today... is that organizations can't afford to neglect the contributions of other employees."

They go on to note criticism of the original recommendation to focus on A players. The criticism boils down to the fact that if you lavish attention on the top 20% you piss off the other 80%.

So McKinsey appears to have changed their mind on A players. Does this mean HR should now go to management and say, 'forget the A players, we're now being inclusive'?

There are good arguments for that but then someone will trot out the old arguments in favour of A players and those can still sound convincing. So what do we do?

The problem is that we are treating the problem as a simple choice (focus on A players or not) when the situation is more complex. When this issue comes up, rather than get into an argument over the pros and cons of each talent strategy HR should take the discussion to a different level by saying, "Let's look at the dynamics of this."

In fact, for HR, "Let's look at the dynamics of this" is always a pretty good opening line, even if you have no idea what you are going to say next.

One of the key dynamics here is that every time you focus on A players you piss off the B players so you need to judge every action in terms of the balance. You don' t want to give up on the concept of A players, but you do want to weigh every action and tune it so that the overall dynamic is optimal.

Helen Handfield-Jones, one of the original authors of the War for Talent, has since explained that the dynamic plays out differently in different sorts of job. She says her original focus was on the top 50-100 players in a large corporation. For this group you can and should push the A player focus harder than you would lower down in the ranks. It's a bit like professional hockey players in the NHL knowing they will be held to ruthlessly high standards whereas in the junior leagues you just want to give everyone a chance to play their best.

The key point is to lift the debate to a higher level of analysis and not get trapped in a nasty argument. If HR routinely shows they are able to bring the discussion to a higher, more systematic level they will have more impact on the organization.