Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Development and Learning in Organizations: An International Journal, Volume 29, Issue 5

Organizations struggle to maintain a healthy balance between external hires and internal promotion within their leadership pipeline. Many report having to go out into the marketplace for key leadership positions as their internal talent is not ready. This imbalance is addressed by Steve Newhall who shares some shocking, but commonplace, statistics on how much internal talent is potentially wasted (pages 3-6). However, he goes on to provide sound advice on how L&D professionals can contribute to shift this lopsidedness. He explores how you can ensure there is synergy between your talent development and succession planning processes and provides 5 top tips to get you thinking.

When talking about talent development, I am often asked by clients how they can better support the “70 per cent” element of the 70:20:10 model. Diane Bandow and Jospeh Gerweck provide us with an excellent summary of one method - “communities of practice” (pages 7-9). The article summarizes best practice from organizations and with one case reporting a conservative ROI of 1,014 per cent, it’s certainly one not to miss.

Whether 70, 20 or 10, L&D interventions are more usually associated with the “soft” side of organizational performance. In an article looking at what he calls an “Art and Science” approach to dealing with the changing business environment, Harold Schroeder proposes that people-related issues get in the way more often than technological problems (pages 10-12). Although this might be music to our ears, he also informs us that users of “big data” were twice as likely to be top performers in their industry. As a profession, how many would say we are lagging behind in the world of analytics?

In “Professionalizing public service delivery” (pages 22-24), we are asked to consider how technologies are further blurring the distinction between the amateur and the professional, providing new opportunities for them to work productively together. Crowd-sourced science projects sit alongside open-source software projects and consumer involvement in product development. As the article points out, might this blurring contribute to a shift away from top-down to more collaborative, peer-coordinated ways of working in all our organizations?

One arena where technology has been widely used to support an organization’s learning strategy is the Learning Management System (LMS) and Prerna Lal brings us up-to-date with the shift away from traditional LMS to “cloud-based” systems (pages 13-15). Her evidence from 18 organizations is summarized into six benefits to be gained from a move into the cloud: from cost-flexibility through to systems integration.

Bringing us back down to earth, Jim Simpson, Mike Schraeder, and Martha Borowski offer a succinct reminder of the importance of timing in development or training initiatives (pages 16-18). We might have solid evidence of the need and have designed a potentially effective intervention. However, if we don’t strategically link the timing of the training with real opportunities to apply it and offer timely reward and recognition of increased capability, we will almost certainly dilute any impact.

Another useful reminder of some of the basics is provided in “Succeeding with organizational change” (pages 19-21). With the vast majority of change initiatives failing to achieve much change at all, perhaps it is time to revisit the theory and assess its current validity and/or check whether it is actually being applied in practice.

“Improving team performance: Does Belbin role diversity really matter?” (pages 25-27) challenges the widely accepted belief that team composition and role diversity have a significant effect on team performance. In a computer simulation running for four consecutive quarters, it was found that role complementarity did not end in better financial results. An interesting set of results well worth reading.

On the other hand, we know that higher levels of engagement do have a direct link to the bottom line. In “Making people want to come to work” (pages 28-30) we hear about a recent study in Australia that looked at the mediating effect of meaningful work on the relationship between transformational leadership and work engagement.

So, whether you are currently working on talent or technology, art or science, soft skills or hard skills, I hope we have provided you with food for thought.

Anne Gimson

Anne Gimson is the Editor of DLO, based at Strategic Developments International Ltd, Abergavenny, UK. E-mail: anne.gimson@googlemail.com