Your Company’s Growth Problem Is a Talent Problem

Critical business questions are almost always critical talent questions

A CXO really has only two levers to pull, money and talent. And money is the easy one. You send it somewhere and it goes there quietly, without opinions or mood swings. Talent is where the drama lives. People have seasons and reasons. In one season they want to work non stop, fuelled only by the vending machine’s coffee, and in another they want to disappear into a mountain with a masala chai. On a random Tuesday nothing makes sense, and another day, once they grasp the why they are ready to build a cathedral. Working with talent feels less like managing a balance sheet and more like tending a garden.

Over time, I realised there are three types of team members. First, there are the doers. Reliable and steady, but always in need of instructions. You tell them what to do and how to do it, and they get it done. But they drain you with all the supervision and handholding they require.

Then you have the experts. These folks take initiative. They have agency. They can run with ideas on their own and often improve them along the way. They just prefer staying in their lane. They love depth so much that switching lanes feels like betrayal. You can count on them, but you cannot always move them where the company needs them.

And finally, the multipliers. The rare ones. They have the initiative of experts but the flexibility of a curious child. You can throw them into backend one week and a customer call the next, and somehow they make it all better. They are the people who lift entire teams, not just deliver tasks. When you find them, you guard them like family silver.

Each of these three types shapes how the company meets the market, and if I fail to place them well or grow them well, growth slows down.

And the more I grow as a leader, the more obvious this becomes. If something is stuck, talent is stuck. If something is progressing, talent is pushing it. And that is exactly what the quote keeps whispering back to me, critical business questions are almost always critical talent questions.

# About the Book

Talent Wins by Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey is a practical look at why companies succeed when they treat talent as seriously as capital.

Buy the book: https://jjude.zlynks.me/talent-wins

This is part of 100 Ideas That Shaped Me from Books I Read