Taylor Simonton //March 10, 2014//
As we emerge from the longest recession in our nation’s history, America’s corporate boards of directors are hard at work navigating the challenges to achieve, growth, profitability, sustainability and trust.
Boards know that having the right team of executives is critical to a successful strategy; however, the talent pool of executives, who can help accomplish those goals, is declining for the first time in decades. At the same time, in many industries, more than half of a company’s expenses now relate to personnel. Those two reasons alone are motives for companies to develop strategies to ensure that they recruit and develop the best talent available.
The National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) is stepping up its efforts to research problems facing companies and their boardrooms and to develop solutions through its elite Blue Ribbon Commission (BRC) reports. Its most recent BRC report, Talent Development: A Boardroom Imperative, goes well beyond the traditional board disciplines of corporate governance, compliance, risk management and executive oversight to bring useful advice to address what is perhaps the most important criteria for a company’s success: getting the “right people on the bus.”
In an era where recession has prevented potential talent from being discovered and developed quickly and effectively, this BRC addresses the issue with its tested and proven methodology using peer-to-peer research channels within its national membership bench to dig deeper into this area of strategic imperative. This level of best practices R&D would be prohibitive for companies to identify and implement on their own.
Although the 28-page BRC report contains detail and tactics, its “Top 10 Imperatives for Effective Oversight of Talent Development” provides a great snapshot of where boards can start in their quest to ensure their companies are well positioned to create sustainable growth and competitive advantage:
“Since our chapter was formed a decade ago, the deep research and reporting conducted by NACD’s Blue Ribbon Commissions result in educational programming and publications that continuously benefit our directors in Colorado,” says Bill Heck, NACD-Colorado Chapter President and principal of the Harlon Group, a performance and compensation consultancy. “Talent management, in particular, is the latest area where our corporate boards must push the envelope and move ahead of the curve in support of finding the right people at all levels of management. This goes beyond CEO and other C-suite succession to include developing key players throughout the organization in this new era of global channels, social media and digitalization.”
This new report and its recommended methodologies to develop talent will increase the odds for success of Colorado companies as they compete for finding the agility and skills needed in the talent pool existing in today’s environment. In the final analysis, a company’s success depends on people.