What talent in a company should be paid top rewards?
If the answer to this question is to have any value whatsoever, we have to clear our minds of mountains of self-serving business jargon and try to get to grips with what “talent” means.
Talent implies rarity. UK footballer Wayne Rooney is clearly talented. When he scores a spectacular goal, it confirms to us that only a handful out of the billions of people on the planet could do what he does. His individual performance and impact are easily identifiable — it takes place on the pitch for all to see and scrutinise afterwards in slow motion. If he left, the team performance would undoubtedly suffer. It is rational for Manchester United to pay him huge amounts of money.
High-flying corporate employees have been understandably very keen to label themselves as “talented”. If their skills were similarly rare, and the company depended on those skills, then it would be rational to reward them with extremely high pay as well.
But talent in a business context has never been properly defined. I would challenge anyone to explain what the original McKinsey definition in its landmark article “The War for Talent” actually means. The mass of the subsequent, meaningless literature sheds little further light.
The entire talent debate has had little to do with improving corporate performance, and much to do with furthering the interests of high-flying employees, not to mention the headhunters, consultants and the like whose livelihoods depend on them.
If nobody really understood what talent meant in a commercial context, how could it actually help the bottom line?
So here’s my take on this issue. The chances are that there is not one talented person in your organisation. There may be a large number of highly useful employees, able, resourceful and hard-working, but each and every one is very replaceable.
None is worth breaking the bank for, and that includes your chief executive, who, if you work for a large public company, will be vastly overpaid. A significant number of people could do what he does. And if you dispute that, good luck in proving your case. You’ll need it, because measuring individual contribution to a business organisation of a certain size is pretty much impossible.
The talented in business are the entrepreneurs who have the originality and courage to come up with a wholly new idea, and then fight through all the obstacles to bring that idea to the market. Those people are genuinely rare. Their contribution is also totally measurable. Their businesses wouldn’t exist without them: in other words, they are the cause of their own success. And, by definition, they are not employees.
Even if a company genuinely wanted to hold on to the talented entrepreneur so that it could use his talent, this would almost certainly be a thankless task.
A highly original mind is liable to rebel against the necessary conformity within an organisation. And it is very likely anyway that he would want to leave to maximise his own rewards for his ideas.
So what does a manager get from this much tighter definition of “talent”? Maybe just a dose of reality. You still have to motivate and organise your people, and recruit those who can help the organisation improve. But don’t for one minute believe they are rare.
If you believe that, you’re not looking hard enough. Or maybe you just want others to think the same about you.
