Waste of Talent !

Recognising the wastes of Talent can be one of the greatest opportunities for organisation to improve performance. This is food for thought and I want to dissect the issues pertaining to this phenomenon

How is the organisation changing the rules of their expectations ? Is organisation looking for new ways to accomplish more with fewer resources ? With all the challenges, how does the organisation view the capabilites of employees ? Does it see the waste of people's abilities as part of the solution?

If people are mostly conducting business as usual,improvements will be limited.New strategies are hindered by misaligned efforts.A small portion of people are engaged to drive success.So why then do workplaces waste talent and abilities to such a large degree ?

In many organisations, the typical work roles are still relatively narrow in scope and focus on precise tasks instead of what people could contribute.In addition,leadership structures are designed to keep power and authority to a few, with everyone else having little of either.Beyond the mindset of leadership,processes need to be created to channel more of what people can deliver in a work day.

A pragmatic approach to put a structure across lean priniciples will help organisations appreciate the types of abilities that are commonly wasted while providing many of the processes that direct these abilities.
Let us look at the hidden causes ( much like the hidden factory in manufacturing) that will decipher how we can prevent waste of Talent

1. Work roles limit people by design ; Most people can do so much more!
Organisations put people in cross functional problem-solving teams and find many employees possess tremendous leadership skills that have gone unnoticed when they spend most of their time making products or handling goods with little interaction. It's not just a matter of rare abilities that could be uncovered, but that a significant number of people can lead,generate ideas,make decisions & perform other roles.
2. Power is limited to only a few people
The comfort of assigning power to a few is deeply ingrained and restricts much of the talent or abilities that could make a significant difference.With so much wasted ability,it becomes obvious that this situation provides some benefit to those in leadership roles.why?Managers often believe that they are in leadership roles because they think better,solve problems better and have more ability than those they lead.
3. People are reluctant to do more work
Have we asked this basic question "why do people/employees not participate more fully in most endeavors"? A familier response could be "people do not want to do any more than they are paid for in their jobs" -The discretionery effort in HR Parlance.A prevalent assumption exists that people could do more ,but they don't want to do more.In fairness some of this is true.Another notion is that
managers feel if they are the part of some problem solving exercise,they invariably would end up
solving it at their discretionery effort and time(with or without the help of reportees)...and workload would increase
4.Channeling abilities creates new work
People are generally afraid of doing something new often because they are afraid of failing.Beyond problems with common attitudes,many workplaces lack the processes needed to manage the output of people's abilities.The problem with allowing people to contribute more is that those activities create more activities and even more activities
5.There is no assigned cost to people working at lower capacity
The massive waste of people's abilities means that most organisations achieve only a fraction of what they could accomplish.The acceptance of this situation is notably reflected in the lack of any reference to or concern about the unused capacity of the workforce.Most assets of the business are assessed in terms of capacity ,such as building or equipment utilisation. However management teams rarely discuss the percentage of peoples abilities being utilised each day.

The spirit of Lean is based on the vision that each worker is greater than the sum of his or her tasks and is capable of solving systemic problems of the organisation ,generating improved methods of operating, and working with other people in ways that generate better results over time.

Sd/-
Roohul Haq