What If Every Employee Had a Talent Agent?
Everyone knows that talented employees can make or break a business. But nurturing that talent is not so commonplace, although it should be standard practice.
The entertainment industry is familiar with the concept of a talent agent, the person who not only finds promising jobs for clients, but also defends, supports, and promotes their interests. Sometimes, the position responsibilities overlap with that of a client’s manager, the person who oversees the client’s daily business affairs. But beyond those tasks, the talent agent/manager advises and counsels the individual on professional matters, long-term plans, and personal decisions that may affect the person’s career.
However, agents do not always guide actors, singers, directors, distributors, and screen writers well — perhaps choosing the wrong song to sing or play, the wrong role or screenplay to act in, or the wrong director to partner with. Consequently, as so often happens, even if a person is very talented, passionate, skilled, and knowledgeable, without expert guidance (and, of course, luck), the chance of success remains low.
The Need for Talent Agents in the Business World
If the concept of talent agents was applied to the corporate arena, the impact would prove advantageous for both the employer and employee, as well as all stakeholders. The reality of the modern workplace is that the majority of employees navigate their careers without well-thought-out guidance or a plan individualised for their needs and desires. Although many organisations invest in “career development programmes,” the effort is mostly generic, with the needs of the company taking priority. Deadlines are pending, clients are demanding, and employees are overworked, leaving little time to conduct a true focus on the employee’s performance (or, lack of it). Often, managers’ needs are first and foremost, with managers relying on subordinate performance to reflect well on their own careers, pushing them further up the corporate ladder.
The role of manager, whether in a profit or non-profit environment, has eroded in recent years. Its original function implied that the person was responsible for taking care of people in the manager’s department. In a way, a manager’s job was to act like a talent agent for subordinates, ensuring that employees performed a role best-suited for their individual success, as well as that of the organisation to optimise performance. Today’s managers are often too busy to “manage” the overall function of the individual employee and simply “oversee” what the employee produces, whether a product or service. To regain a genuine manager-employee relationship, organisations must focus on increasing value for all stakeholders — shareholders, leadership, employees, and the community at large.
So, the question ultimately becomes: If every employee had a talent agent, would it significantly increase shareholder value, as well as value for all stakeholders, enough so to make a difference?
The Cost of Ignoring the Possibilities
But, the naysayers are already asking, at what price do we implement such a concept? Critics would be quick to argue that an organisation, especially a large global entity, could not possibly assign every employee a personal agent. As a compromise, they are likely to propose doing so only for the leadership team or high potentials in the organisation — the individuals who “matter.”
Wasted resources, in terms of time and money, are the result from hiring and retaining inefficient, ineffective, and underperforming employees. Continual training of new hires to replace the failed employees is an expensive proposition in terms of potential lost money, lagging productivity, the risk of low-quality products and services, customer dissatisfaction, peer resentment, and overworked high-performing employees. Along with myriad other negative repercussions, the bottom line is unnecessary damage that chips away from the company results more and more as time goes on.
Paths to Success
For the talent agent approach to be successful, managers need to be creative. Positive results do not come only by throwing money/carrots at people, such as generous reward programmes or budgets for training programmes that sound encouraging but only offer a general effort to boost employees’ know-how and skills. Whatever steps are undertaken to promote the concept would not require large financial investments to nudge the mind and thinking of managers.
Instead, the approach demands some form of collaborative creative thinking — perhaps expanding the scope and responsibilities of mentorship or coaching programmes, or actually including the term “act like an agent” in the position description of managers. By giving managers more responsibility and accountability — and leadership must emphasise accountability — to help others to succeed, and not just themselves, the entire workforce could rise to the occasion.
Managers would benefit by asking their subordinates two questions:
- What do you want to do?
- What do you do well?
The answers, when combined, should be able to point the employee’s job duties in the right direction. It’s simple common sense: By matching the individual employee with the task best-suited to that person’s skills and know-how, everybody wins.
The Bottom Line
In fact, the process described above is what successful talent agents perform. They do not send actors to an orchestra’s audition, or vice versa. The approach is not about simply getting the job done or achieving the company’s goals. It’s about getting the optimal job done with the focus on maximum value generation for all stakeholders while doing its best to meet the needs and desires of both the organisation and the individual. In the meantime, consumers and shareholders stand to gain as well, thereby boosting the organisation’s long-term viability and performance sustainability.