There Is No Talent Shortage In The Corporate World

Just a shortage of managers with their eyes open

If there’s one thing I’m tired of hearing, it’s the insistence that there is a shortage of talent in the business world. If you’re on LinkedIn or you read Forbes or Business Insider, or literally any business publication, I bet you’ve seen it not once, but multiple times each week for the past few years. Business leadership is apparently befuddled by the fact that they can’t find the talent they need. They have all this money and perks to throw at anyone if they could only find the right people.

I call a big, stinking pile of bullshit on that.

It’s yet another whine by clueless leaders and managers who are so blinded by their own bias that they couldn’t tell talent if it was Steve Jobs himself sitting across from them in a job interview. Here’s the truth: there is no shortage of talent, and there never was. There is, however, a huge pool of people with everything upper management is looking for, who are routinely overlooked because they don’t fit the mould of whoever gets to define what talent is.

Let’s start with what I see as the biggest issue: the fact that any kind of management position carries status with it. You can talk all you like about how you have a flat structure at your company, how everyone has an equal voice, but it’s just not true. No matter where you go there is a hierarchy, and because of how we work as a species, status within any hierarchy is important. As soon as you move up the hierarchy, you’re automatically seen as smarter, more insightful, and just plain better than any of the employees who don’t have that kind of status. That extends to anything you say or any opinion you have — it automatically holds more weight, regardless of how wrong or ill-informed it might be.

That’s a problem. It’s a problem because you now get to make decisions on hiring and firing, on who gets promoted and who gets opportunities. All of these happen based on your feelings and in most cases, very little justification. As I pointed out in a piece I did on how introverts are held back from management positions, research shows that most of the time those in charge of hiring and promotion defined merit in their own image, meaning that those seen as the most qualified interviewees were those that best resembled their interviewers.

It confirms what so many of us already expected: that promotions and opportunities aren’t based on quantifiable data or the results you produced, they are based on how someone above perceives you. That means a whole bunch of talent is being ignored purely because it doesn’t fit the profile of whoever gets to define what talent is. What happens when you do the opposite of that, when you actually start defining in a quantifiable sense what real success and results look like? Well, you get the Oakland A’s as seen in the movie Moneyball, where a team with a fraction of the payroll of even mid tier teams ends up with a record games won in a row because they picked up the talent others dismissed.

That particular story is telling, because it reveals so much about human nature. People reacted strongly to it, saying that it took the romance and excitement out of baseball and turned it into a boring, data mining exercise. Actually what it did was make baseball fair. No longer is a pitcher with the best stats benched because he throws funny. The guy who doesn’t hit huge home runs, but consistently gets on base is appropriately rewarded instead of being treated like a pariah. It’s no longer about who looks the best, who hits the ball a certain way, or who seems more confident than everyone else. It’s not about how a scout “feels” about someone. Now it’s purely about merit and performance — something we can all agree is actually an equal playing field.

Unfortunately such a scientific approach in the corporate world is non-existent. The function of talent scouts in baseball is given to management in business, where they get to designate employees as “high potential” or “low potential”. What is this based on exactly? It’s never based on any kind of measurable data; just like in baseball scouting, it’s based on the feelings of those higher up in the food chain. Because they’re higher up in the food chain, their opinion is respected and not challenged. There’s no accounting for any bias, so if you’re one of the blessed people who is not only good at your job, but says the right things and has the right kind of personality, you get labelled “high potential” (HiPo), and your career trajectory looks like a hockey stick.

For everyone else, you’re now a “low potential”, and you’re stuck toiling away in obscurity. Want a raise or a promotion? Well good luck. You’ll either have to work three times as hard as a HiPo to get recognised, or better yet, use whatever you’ve achieved to get yourself a better job elsewhere. If you really want to hate your life, just stay at the company hoping someone will one day recognise your work and realise that you’re actually a diamond in the rough. Here’s a hint — it won’t happen. This is why it’s such bullshit when business leaders say “we can’t find good talent.” Actually, there is plenty of talent right under your nose, but you’ve labelled them all LoPo’s, so instead of seeing that potential, all you see are a bunch of faceless drones that keep the company ticking over. Any one of them would kill for a good opportunity, but those opportunities are all hoarded and given to the HiPo’s.

This perpetuates a vicious (or if you’re a HiPo, virtuous) cycle. Someone gets designated HiPo. They get given opportunities, promotions and awards. You, the person who designated them a HiPo, pat yourself on the back and think “gees, I really picked that one.” The HiPo keeps working away, thinking that all their success has come down to their own hard work, and that everyone else must be less committed than they are. So when they inevitably move up the food chain and it’s their turn to start designating HiPo’s and LoPo’s, they’re likely going to pick out people just like them for special treatment, and will likely look down upon the people who aren’t like them. How could they not? They’ve been rewarded again and again for nothing more than being who they are.

When people are rewarded by the world for being who they are, they assume that that’s the correct way of things. It reminds me of the conversation between Varys and Tyrion about Danaerys towards the end of Game of Thrones:

“She’s a girl who walked into a fire with three stones and came out with three dragons. How can she not believe in destiny?”

“Perhaps that’s the problem. Her life has convinced her that she was sent here to save us all.”

This is the problem with the labeling of HiPo’s in the workplace, it’s nothing more than the creation of a self fulfilling prophecy. If you give anyone more opportunities than everyone else, they’re going to do better. They’ll build upon each opportunity and award, and get more awards and opportunities as a result. They’re going to assume that they’ve been given those opportunities justly, because they keep doing so well. They’ll feel that it’s all down to their hard work and unique abilities, because they just keep getting rewarded, when in reality, the playing field is completely uneven.

Meanwhile, back in the trenches, I’ve seen talented, hard working people taken for granted and held back because they’d been labelled a troublemaker or a LoPo, when instead they should have had opportunities thrown at them. The worst part is that the reasons they were given for being held back were always bullshit. “You’re too young to move up”. Meanwhile a HiPo around the same age has already been promoted twice within the space of a couple of years. “You haven’t been in the role long enough”, when another HiPo has been promoted after literally half the time in their role.

Management makes the mistake of thinking people don’t see this. It’s even worse when they try to do all this labeling of employees in secret, while on the outside trying to carry on the illusion that everyone is equal. Believe me, your employees know better, and the good ones despise it. If the money and conditions are good enough, they’ll stay a while. Give it enough time though, without further opportunities and recognition, they’ll be preparing their resume and looking for someone who actually sees them as a person with ability, rather than another drone.

It’s interesting to note how much hatred there is in the corporate world for forced rankings when it comes to employee performance evaluations. When you get rid of it and act as though it’s a wonderful thing, the reality is that you haven’t changed anything, you’ve just pushed it underground and out of plain sight. Every one of your employees is still being force ranked, being compared against everyone else and labelled. I wonder, how many of those in corporate management would welcome a system where they are designated HiPo or LoPo by all of the employees under them? I suspect it would cause mass panic, because they’d immediately realise how unjust it is that they would be labelled and defined — probably poorly, according to people’s feelings rather than facts and quantifiable data.

After all of this, the message is simple: leaders, stop asking yourselves (and business publications) stupid questions, and start looking at yourselves in the mirror. You have biases, and you’re letting those biases run rampant every day in regards to your employees. The next time you want to hold someone back because you don’t think they’re fit for a role or promotion, ask yourself if that’s just because they aren’t what you envisioned. They might do it far better than you can possibly imagine.