Talent IS abundant, so let’s try harder to find it

By Roger Philby
Founder, The Chemistry Group

I was once sent abroad by the Chief Operating Officer of a FTSE 100 organisation, to solve the problem of executive talent in one of their crown jewel assets; a company that was the oldest business in its region.

On arrival, I discovered the executive team were all expatriates, mostly white, and the sixth such team in seven years attempting to run what was the most important economic driver in the region. When I learnt that the business’s employees had developed a saying, ‘Dem be gone soon,’ I couldn’t help but smile.

The issue was glaringly obvious, although perhaps back then we weren’t so ready to call it out. The incompetent leadership wasn’t a commercial issue, it was cultural; one of structural racism.

In its long history, the company I found myself consulting on had never had an all-local leadership team. Whilst the employee base remained firmly from the region, leadership were, in the main, a conveyor belt of white, expatriate men, who flew in on private jets, postured, made little impact and eventually gave up - until the next private jet landed and the whole dance started again.

The job was clear; to create a talent strategy that put the very best leadership in place, a leadership that was local in origin, and crucially, a leadership that represented the population the business was there to serve. The talent scarcity the FTSE 100 company believed to be true did not exist and having written extensively on this concept, I’ll say it again: There is no such thing as (nor has there ever been) talent scarcity. There is only organisational stupidity, where intentionally or not, hiring and development systems work to narrow a talent pool to a small homogenous group.

When it comes to ensuring a more representative workforce, there are no excuses - and certainly not ones of talent scarcity. In 2019 research by the Office for Students (OfS) showed that Black and Asian students in the UK were more than twice as likely to go to university than their white counterparts. As the journalist and author Reni Eddo-Lodge writes, ‘as black children are far more likely to move into higher education, it’s spurious to suggest that this attainment gap is down to a lack of intelligence, talent, or aspiration.’

This particular business maintained there was no talent in the region that had the experience to run a company of its scale and complexity. Sound familiar? At the time, emigration - or brain drain - was leeching 10-40% of the locally skilled workforce to OECD countries. On the flipside, it meant that 60-90% of nationals were choosing to stay and work in their home nation, and thus, it was an argument I was unconvinced by. Nor did it justify the lack of representation at board level.

We worked with the folks at Spencer Stuart to initiate a local and global search for the national ethnic diaspora, the local education system to track and trace talent, US universities and British Universities, and interviewed alumni networks. Having defined What Great Looks Like (WGLL™) for each of the leadership roles, the CEO, a hugely inspirational and culturally aware leader, flew around the world to talk to, engage with potential candidates, and ultimately make hires.

Of course, the executive talent that were hired were hugely successful, transforming a business that won back market share from an aggressive competitor and turned the existing punitive relationships with regulators, the government and unions into relationships that were productive and co-operative. And, for the first time in its history, the company’s entire leadership team was local in origin.

Often when I share this story, questions about quotas arise, some considering them to be unfair – the opposite of meritocracy. And here I defer to Eddo-Lodge, who so persuasively says, ‘You’d have to be fooling yourself if you really think that the homogenous glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions got their purely through talent alone. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance.’

This is exactly what I mean when I say we have to try harder. My experience working with this company is a microcosm of the challenge leaders are facing today – what it takes to be inclusive. My advice? You need to rip up the current playbook. Ask yourself how many people do we have in our TA team focused on understanding and building relationships from minority communities? Positive discrimination is not about hiring people of colour at the expense of white people, it’s about reflecting the society an organisation serves – exactly what the FTSE 100 company had to do with its regional asset.

Inclusivity in your hiring is not a question of spending more money; it’s about thought and purposeful effort. We all, collectively, need to try harder, to create opportunities for everyone to be brilliant at work. Removing unconscious bias and identifying talent that organisations fail to notice is part of The Chemistry Group’s everyday work. It’s time for all businesses to make it part of theirs too.