By Marc Effron and Miriam Ort

Through our corporate and consulting experience, we have identified four talent-building barriers that organizations create for themselves and then regularly stumble over. These barriers explain why line executives’ exhortations and HR’s actions to build talent are not translating into increased talent quality and depth.

Creating Needless Complexity

When you consider the simple intent behind most talent processes, it can be challenging to understand why a line manager experiences so much complexity. A simple process like setting goals often becomes a multipage, headache-inducing exercise and in doing so puts a huge barrier in the way of increasing organizations’ performance.

Where organizations go wrong is that they fail to balance complexity with value as they build these processes. It is not that the additional components layered on — from highly detailed competency models to the extra hundred questions on an engagement survey — are technically wrong. Many have sound behavioral science to support their inclusion. Read more…