|
The key to sustained competitive advantage
in any industry is not size, image, or technology. It's
talent, particularly at the leadership level. Your organization's
future depends on its ability to identify, retain, and prepare
a dependable "bench" -- its next generation of
leaders -- continuously.
How can your company meet this challenge?
Bench Strength offers a step-by-step
approach to building a powerful talent strategy that will
ensure the ongoing availability of potential leaders. Author
Robert Barner leads you through important decisions about
talent focus, including:
The Make or Buy Decision: Should
your talent strategy be focused primarily on developing
leadership from within, or on acquiring "ready-made"
leaders from other organizations?
The Capstone/Foundation Decision:
Should you concentrate development efforts on a few high-potential
individuals, or spread resources across a broader section
of your overall leadership bench?
The Stream or Pool Decision: Should
you identify successor candidates for specific leadership
positions, or retain pools of potential leaders who may
be qualified for any of a number of leadership positions
as they become available?
The Trade-up or Build-Out Decision:
Should you build bench strength by progressively "trading
up" from marginally performing managers to high performers,
or quickly expand the leadership talent base by hiring a
large group of potential managers simultaneously?
The Best-in-Industry or World Class Decision:
Is your best talent strategy to focus on your own industry,
or to look for cream-of-the-crop talent regardless of particular
industry experience?
Each pair of strategic options includes
clear examples and all-important "payoffs and pitfalls"
that will help you make the right decision based on the
organization's needs. Bench Strength also gives you
effective methods for monitoring how your company's talent
measures up against that of external candidates.
The book also reveals the Seven Principles
of Talent Deployment, which will help you align your strongest
players with your most critical and challenging needs. And
the author's "war games" approach to pre-testing
of talent strategies will put the organization in fine shape
to address both in-house "what-if" issues and
new developments in industry and market conditions.
Barner also advocates for the creation of
a new position in your organization, that of Chief Talent
Officer. A new and increasingly recognized strategy, the
hiring of a talent executive is a significant step with
lasting implications, and the author presents ten detailed
questions to ask CTO candidates to elicit vital information.
Leadership talent is a critical need of any organization.
Bench Strength provides a comprehensive, practical
approach and specific action steps for making smart decisions
and putting together a deep and versatile team -- for today
and for the future.
Robert Barner, Ph.D. is Vice President
of Management Development for Belo Corp., a media company
that encompasses newspapers, broadcast stations, cable networks,
and Internet services in major U.S. cities. He is also a
professor at Southern Methodist University's Department
of Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management. Dr. Barner
has more than 20 years of experience in organizational and
management development, and has worked throughout North
America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
|
