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In 2003 Advertising Women of New York voted Cindy Advertising Woman of the Year. Cindy resigned as chairman of BBH US in 2005, after sixteen years with the agency, in order to focus on finding something different to do for the next chapter of her career.

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The New Talent Paradigm

Written on
Mar 28, 2007 
Author
Cindy Gallop  |
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The New Talent Paradigm

Rick Boyko, managing director of Adcenter, Virginia Commonwealth University’s pioneering graduate school for advertising, touched on this in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on March 14, when he answered the question, ‘A lack of talent seems to be something that many on Madison Avenue these days are talking about. How does the industry rate its ability to lure new executives with different skill sets?’, with ‘You have hit on the key issue that everyone is talking about — the agencies, the media buying firms and marketers….are all talking about the need for new talent. They are talking about talent that understands how to think differently; work more creatively; work collaboratively and to solve problems in new ways across a wide spectrum of media….The bigger issue is about how do they grow the talent they have; that is where the industry could use more focus, and more focus on educating its ranks.’

I couldn’t agree more — except that most conversations of this sort automatically segue into discussions about the need for training and implicit assumptions that existing employees are a benighted bunch who need to be forcibly dragged kicking and screaming into the brave new world they have no idea how to operate in. Whereas I would argue that activating the talent you already have access to within your own company is about taking a very different perspective.

In fact, Carol Hymowitz highlights this in an ‘In The Lead’ piece for the Wall Street Journal of March 19, writing, “Rather than worry so much about the war for talent in today’s tight job market, executives ought to focus on the waste of talent in their ranks. Many don’t spend nearly enough time making sure the people under them learn and grow on the job. Managers who focus on talent assign their employees to jobs that play to their strengths, make sure they have the resources they need to perform well, respect their opinions and push them to advance.”

Want to see the human soul on fire in your own workplace, to the benefit of your own business? Take a long hard look at that soul, see what its strengths are (yes, that’s right, look for strengths not weaknesses), make sure it’s in a role where it makes the most of those strengths, give it the freedom to do so, tell — and show — it you believe in it, and make it clear you expect it to go far. Then light blue touchpaper and stand well back.

You can’t afford not to. The March issue of the Harvard Business Review states, “Talent management: there’s no hotter topic in HBR’s portfolio, for the obviously, overwhelming reason that in the knowledge economy of the twenty-first century, talent will always be the scarcest of scarce resources. Above all others, it is what companies compete for, depend on, and succeed because of.”

So what are you overlooking in your own ranks? Before you hire that hot new outsider from that really sexy other industry, make sure you’ve looked at your current employees in a whole different way — particularly when it comes to attitude, spirit, personal proclivities and potential. That staff member in a currently conventional role — he/she could be the most wired person in their community on their own time, and just the person to spearhead your new interactive initiative because it’s what they have a personal passion for. That other person who’s doing fine where they are but you always hear great things about from the people who work for and around them — maybe they’re the fantastic talent manager and coach that you need to unlock the potential across the whole team, locally and ultimately globally.

And then maybe one day they’ll be on that stage at TED, telling their story with their soul on fire.





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