Effective leadership and talent sustainability in modern business world: Exploring the ideas of Pasmore (2010)

Author: Iloka Benneth  Chiemelie 

published: 15th of May 2014

Introduction

Increase in globalization and internationalization of firms now means that sustainability in the business process can only be made effective through quality management that understand as well as aligns corporate objectives with their individual goals. This will be explored and explained below.

Discussion 

In essence, by saying that the future of strategy is dependent on leadership, what is meant is that just like business strategies, leadership strategies are derived from careful analysis of present position of the company and its desired future. Thus, leadership strategy is meant to fill up open gaps between what is presently obtainable and future desires of the company (Pasmore, 2010). Thus, the “future” of the company depends on its ability to employ competent “leaders” that have the right skills, experience and commitment to push the company forward to its desired future position.

Existing literatures on leadership have pointed out that effective leadership is critical for survival of modern firms (Kaplan and Norton 1996; Lawson 2001). The reason behind such view is that the world is now globalized and firms don’t need to focus only on their local markets, instead they should seek ways to expand into foreign markets in order to increase and maintain their performance. Even when they decide to compete in their local markets, they should aware of potential new entrants and effects of FDIs on their competitiveness. Thus, modern firms need leaders that can effectively and strategically transform their market position in order to ensure sustainable business performance. Without such, they will join the long list of firms that “did try to survive but failed due to poor leadership.” Thus, such statement is in line with modern firms because the sustainability of a firm in the future depends on the quality of its present leadership system.

Pasmore (2010) develop a framework for defining the kind of leadership required in modern firm to include: quantity, quality, skills, behavior, collective capabilities and leadership culture. These skills align with modern business settings as companies need to look beyond producing goods and services that meets customers’ needs, and focus on meeting the entire needs of the stakeholders (Agrawal and  Knoeber 1996; Keasey and Wright 1993). For instance, Coca-Cola needs to meet consumers’ need for low sugar products, but they must also meet other requirements such as returns on investment (high sales), CSR (good corporate culture), demands of government and legal requirements (good corporate behavior) and so on. Since Coca-Cola is just a brand its ability to meet such needs are dependent on the people actually undertaking the business process, it becomes clear that they must employees the right volume of staffs (quantity), with necessary competence level (quality), experience (skills), attitude (behavior), creativity and approach (collective capabilities), and high commitment toward organizational citizenship (leadership culture). Thus, it is clear that these frameworks fits well within demands for a more reliable system in the modern business setting.

In accordance with Pasmore (2009), in order to talent to be made sustainable a number of factors need to be aligned and they are:

1.      Executive commitment and engagement;

2.      Learning and development;

3.      Career planning;

4.      Reward and recognition;

5.      Knowledge management;

6.      Performance management;

7.      Competency development and deployment;

8.      Sourcing and recruiting; and

9.      Leadership practice.

In order to ensure effective talent management, literatures (such as Boudreau and Ramstad, 2007; Huselid, Beatty and Becker, 2005; Axelrod et al., 2002; Frank et al., 2004; Michaels et al., 2001) have pointed out that the corporate environment should be such that allows employees to learn from every given activity, share ideas, explore new trends, and have full support of the management. Thus, the above framework can be said to fit in within that ideology because it calls for commitment and engagement of the management towards ensuring that employees are put through new learning and development programs that will perfect their career plan. Additionally, employees need to be rewarded for positive inputs in the productivity of the company, and such positive input can be enhanced through effective knowledge management and performance management that will help these employees to develop and improve on their competence level. Finally, the company need to source for reliable and competent new staffs that will share ideas with the existing and talented one, and also adopt effective leadership that will expand talent flow in the workforce in order to ensure that need talents are sustainable irrespective of employee’s turnover.

Conclusions

From the above analysis, it is now clear that leadership is no “a question of whether we should,” instead it is a question of “how should we.” This is because companies need to monitor their business environment at all time and this is made possible through effective management system. Thus, it can be concluded that the ideas and frameworks developed by Pasmore (2010) as discussed in this paper are in line with demands in modern business environment.

References

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Axelrod, B., Handfield-Jones, H. and Michaels, E. (2002) “A new game plan for C players”, Harvard Business Review, January, 81-88.

Boudreau, J.W. and Ramstad, P.M. (2007) Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital, Boston, MA, Harvard Business School Press.

Frank, F.D., Finnegan, R.P. and Taylor, C.R. (2004) “The Race for Talent: Retaining and engaging workers in the 21st century”, Human Resource Planning, 27(3), 12-25.

Huselid, M.A., Beatty, R.W. and Becker, B.E. (2005) “ ‘A Players’ or ‘A Positions’? The Strategic Logic of Workforce Management”, Harvard Business Review, December, 110-117.

KAPLAN, R.S., Norton, D.P. (1996). The Balanced Scorecard. Translating Strategy into Action, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Keasey, K., and Wright, M. (1993). Issues in corporate accountability and governance. Accounting and Business Research, 91a, 291–303.

LAWSON, B., Samson, D. (2001). Developing innovation capability in organisations: A dynamic capabilities approach. International Journal of Innovation Management, 5(3), 377-400.

Michaels, E., Handfield-Jones, H. and Axelrod, B. (2001) The War for Talent, Boston, Harvard Business School Press. 

Pasmore, W. (2009) ‘developing a leadership strategy: A critical ingredient for organizational success.’ Available at: http://www.ccl.org/leadership/pdf/research/LeadershipStrategy.pdf [Accessed on: 15/05/2014].