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O P I N I O N
Building your people
Do you want to survive the next year, the next recession, and the ongoing reset of the workplace, the marketplace, and the recruiting space?
A s leaders, it’s our job to seek out facts and then decide the best course of action.
Facts: ❚ ❚ To be in business, we need both talent and clients. ❚ ❚ To have clients rave about us, we need great talent that is fully engaged. ❚ ❚ For most firms, it’s harder to find or replace a great employee than it is a great client. ❚ ❚ Talent represents virtually all of our production ca- pacity and innovation potential. With this being the case, why do most leaders spend more time on the client-side of our business? Answer: It comes easier to us and it’s what’s incentivized. To win today and moving forward, however, we need to do more than only what’s familiar and has been ingrained. THE INSIDE GAME. One of the areas often overlooked in our present mode is how much easier business strategy integration and strategic planning
implementation would be if we equally invested on the talent-side of our business. Investing in our people is harder than investing in a client, as is measuring the immediate results. The “We pay them,” or “I trained myself,” and the “No overhead” mantras still linger, but understanding the value of employee engagement and better training and development has now become the norm. Executing on that, however, can be a different story. It takes more than just great projects, perks, and pay to engage top talent over the course of a career. And training employees to produce only projects and profit will eventually fall short. Our best talent is both interested in and inspired by more.
Peter Atherton
See PETER ATHERTON, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER July 15, 2019, ISSUE 1304
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