The best companies have roughly the same percentage of star players as the rest, but they work differently with talent, according to research by global management consulting firm Bain & Company.
Bain performed organisational audits on 25 global companies, benchmarking their practices against those of best-in-class businesses. Bain also collaborated with the Economist Intelligence Unit to survey more than 300 senior executives from large companies worldwide, asking them to assess their workforce and describe their people management practices.
The findings, published in Harvard Business Review (HBR) included:
- On average, 15% of a company’s workforce are ‘A players’
- The amount of top talent doesn’t differ dramatically between the best-performing companies in Bain’s sample (top quartile) and the rest (average of remaining three quartiles)
- What makes a difference is how talent is deployed.
According to Michael Mankins, a partner in Bain & Co’s San Francisco office, the research revealed two distinct models for deploying talent: intentional nonegalitarianism and unintentional egalitarianism.
In his article in HBR on 3 February, ‘The best companies don’t have more stars – they cluster them together’, (http://bit.ly/2lclc4G), Mankins said the best companies used intentional nonegalitarianism – focusing stars on areas where they can have the biggest impact on performance. The remaining companies used unintentional egalitarianism to spread ‘A players’ evenly across all roles.
Mankins advised organisations to:
- Know who the stars are – who score highly on performance and potential
- Know where the ‘A players’ are (and could be) deployed. If they’re versatile, they could fill other critical roles for which talent is scarce
- Identify business-critical roles that would benefit most from star talent
- Treat star talent as a company resource
- Ensure business-critical roles get first dibs on star talent.
- Michael Mankins is co-author of Time, Talent, Energy, Harvard Business Review Press, March 2017