The State of Organizations 2023 - Flipbook - Page 81
and to develop inclusion and retention strategies for
those who are underrepresented.
Build a deep bench
With retention and short-term attraction strategies
set, CEOs, chief HR officers, and other senior leaders
will want to create a deep bench of talent to meet
organizations’ longer-term talent needs. A CEO will
need to work with others across the organization to
develop a five-year workforce projection linked to
the company’s value-creation agenda. Which skills
are most critical for delivering on the company’s
strategy, and what would happen if people with these
skills weren’t available? With this information in hand,
the CEO can build a workforce plan that quantifies
skill needs and outlines potential pathways to find
the right people—for instance, traditional hiring and
capability building, as well as nontraditional options
(such as apprenticeships and role redesign). The
CEO can also use this workforce plan to prioritize
investments in the development or curation of
multimodal learning, ecosystem partnerships
focused on up- or reskilling, or other means to elevate
mission-critical roles and build foundational skills
across the organization.
Investing in leadership
If talent is the lifeblood of organizations, leaders
are the heartbeat. They are the ones who keep
ideas, people, and workstreams moving and who
enable an organization to achieve breakthrough
performance. Leaders are a heterogeneous bunch,
working at different levels and affecting different
areas of the organization. But their collective
influence matters. McKinsey research shows that
an organization is 2.4 times more likely to achieve
performance targets if it has a focus on developing
leaders and that transformations are more than
five times more likely to succeed if leaders model
the desired behavioral changes.7
Organizations tend to underinvest in leadership
development, often aren’t clear about which
mindsets and behaviors they should focus on
building in new leaders, and rarely (if ever) measure
the impact of leadership development programs.
Consider that only 33 percent of C-suite executives
in a McKinsey survey say their capability-building
programs always or often achieve business
impact, and 45 percent say they don’t have a
clear plan for building high-priority capabilities.8
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