Mission-Critical and High-Potential Talent Management

If your three most significant long-term investors asked your executive leadership team the following question "We realize that in the current business environment you are pressured with handling numerous immediate short-term challenges, but do you have any concerns about your organization's ability to differentiate itself on how you manage your top talent ... we are referring to the employees that are critical to strategic success and to medium-to-long-term business viability?" How would you respond?

Then after listening to your answer to the question above they asked, "if you formed a team comprised of external process innovation experts and a cross-functional sub-set of some of your top talent ... and they were challenged with formally analyzing the current state of each of the eight core processes listed below ... would they identify anything in the processes that: (a) provides unique access to a wide variety of top-notch talent markets; (b) is rare in nature and would be very difficult to understand how to replicate it; (c) would be costly to imitate it; and (d) is non-substitutable - nothing like it? What would be your response to their question?

What if they asked you, "when was the last time that you conducted such an analysis ... what were the conclusions of the analysis ... and what follow-up actions did you take?"

Core Processes - Mission-Critical and High-Potential Talent Management (examples):

Mission-Critical and High-Potential Employee Identification Process (positions linked to strategic success and medium-to-long-term business viability)

1. Attract Process

2. Acquire Process

3. Integrate Process

4. Retain Process

5. Assessment Process

6. Develop and Grow Process

7. Culture Improvement Process