Talent Development: The Overlooked Competitive Advantage 

“Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”

–Sir Richard Branson

Are your employees planning on walking out the door, or ‘quiet quitting’ while continuing to pick up their paychecks? Employee discontent while improving is still significantly present. According to a recent Workhuman survey, 36% of employees are planning on changing jobs in 2023. These numbers are better than they’ve been over the past few years, but they’re still worrying—especially if you’re a manager trying to build a team.

Lack of professional development is one of the key reasons for the exodus. When employees aren’t mentored or given opportunities to acquire new skills, they see no path to promotion. They feel like their organizations are not willing to make the investment in their success. Nobody wants to go to a dead-end job. So, employees become frustrated, disenfranchised, demotivated–and often feeling like they have few alternatives, they leave. 

When Leaders Don’t Train Employees

Despite the retention challenges many corporations are seeing, leaders often hesitate to invest in professional development for their employees. Commonly, they worry that offering advanced training is a waste of resources. Once your workforce acquires better skills, many execs fear, they’ll just use them to jump to a better-paid position elsewhere. Sure, it’s possible they’ll leave once they’ve gotten new skills, but without them, they’re almost sure to start looking.

In fact, lack of professional development leads to an erosion of employees’ loyalty to their employer, and makes it more likely they’ll head out the door. Many leaders are trapped in a vicious circle, struggling with their inability to build an effective team that stays together long enough to get meaningful results–but hesitating to invest in that team so they feel valued enough to stay.

With many leaders holding back on professional development, there’s an opportunity for forward-thinking managers to grow a workforce that’s more skilled, more productive, and more loyal to the organization. In fact, they’re a strong argument to be made that managers have an obligation to develop their teams. That’s what great leadership is all about.

Watch Harvard Professor Ranjay Gulati discuss how great coaches identify and develop talent in this video.

Unleashing Your Team’s Untapped Potential

Talent development is a no-lose proposition because it allows you to harness some of your employees’ unrealized productivity. In a 2017 study highlighted in Harvard Business Review of over 14,500 workers, 85% reported they aren’t working at 100% of their potential. Of those underachievers, 16% said they aren’t even using 50% of their potential at their current job. That’s a lot of unused potential going to waste. Enhancing your professional-development program helps turn your team into top-drawer contributors that drive success–and make you look great.

Imagine you’re a middle manager who supervises a dozen employees. What would the effect be if each of them got 5% better? Or 10%? Now think about the impact if all middle managers in an organization skilled up their individual teams by the same amount. The impact would be dramatic.

What is Talent Development? 

Talent development--the work of growing talent--is an ongoing cycle of attracting, developing, and retaining quality employees. It’s the process of meeting your organization’s need for human capital.

A skilled leader needs to excel at every stage of this cycle, from understanding what the best prospective hires want and then offering it. Once hired, the leader develops those employees into even more productive and multi-skilled contributors, while also designing leadership-development and promotion-track opportunities that make talented people want to stick around. 

Because if every employee quits after a few months, your organization is doomed. 

Read how the Society of Human Resources thinks about developing employees.

Who Needs to Develop Talent?

In an ideal workplace, everyone would make time to help those around them develop and improve. Even colleagues should make the effort to share what they know, whether it’s how to use a software tool or how to navigate a difficult boss’s demands. 

Once you’re a manager, talent development is truly the most important thing you do. Showing you’re willing to invest time and energy in their success makes your team members trust you and want to give their all to achieve team goals.