Dear Business Owner or CEO,

Have you ever considered that there might be a way for you to identify a tangible opportunity to exploit your superior knowledge about “human capital” within your organization that could provide your company with a significant competitive advantage?

In early 2000 a large manufacturer realized that there were only a certain number of engineers that could fill the roles they needed for the products they were developing. They realized if they could hire these engineers before their competitors then their company would have a significant advantage over their competition. Their idea was to lock up key engineering talent vs. traditional workforce planning which only focused on filling vacancies.

Your organization may not be a large manufacturing company, but there are still lessons that can be learned and translated for the small to medium sized company.

Has your organization realized a similar talent pivot point to exploit?  Within each organization there are a handful of jobs that are pivotal. Performance and talent in these roles can move the strategic needle significantly over other roles. First you have to find out which roles in your organization can create your competitive advantage. These roles aren’t always leaders, sales or technology.

Over the next several posts we’ll be exploring ways for you to determine where your uncharted talent opportunities lie within your organization. But you can start by asking: Where does our strategy require that our talent and organization be better than our competitors to work?

I hope you’ll decide to start looking at your talent strategy in a different way. I’ll certainly be doing my best to get you to destroy the box you may currently be putting all your talent in. If it’s not comfortable to destroy the whole box, how about taking down a wall?