“The sky is falling!” Chicken Little shrieked. When it comes to business forecasting, you don’t need Doppler radar to know more storms are ahead. Even though the business horizon looks ominous, it isn’t enough to simply sound the alarms. Before clouds gathered, Noah was busy building the ark.
Today’s most enlightened leaders are busily preparing to address several critical workforce issues with the combined potential to wreak as much havoc as a perfect storm, Katrina, and a tsunami. There are 78 million working baby boomers and every 8 minutes, one of them retires. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates there will be a shortage of 10 million workers by 2010. The National Institute for Literacy found that under-skilled workers are costing industry $60 billion per year.
Training cannot solve problems caused by ineffective systems, organizational development, coaching, recruiting, or placement. The best strategy for achieving and sustaining top performance is a competent workforce that is motivated to perform and will remain loyal because they enjoy working for their employer. In some cases, when employees lack performance skills, training is a key talent management strategy. However, Bob Pike frequently reminds clients “if performance is the question, training is only one of six answers.”
In many cases, employees are in the wrong job. Then, no matter how much money is spent on training, systems, coaching, or organizational development, the employee is not going to be able to sustain top performance.
EQ Mentor points out some additional workforce issues:
- Turnover costs U.S. business $140 billion annually
- A lack of personal growth causes dissatisfaction for 39 percent of executives
- Improved leadership development is needed by 80 percent of organizations
- Emotional intelligence accounts for 90 percent of the difference between average and top performance.
- Chinese people with the highest IQ represent 25 percent of the population. That’s more than the total population of North America.
- The top 10 jobs in demand in 2010 didn’t even exist in 2004.
Planning ahead for your organization can help ensure smooth transitions through baby boomer retirements and worker shortages…make sure you don’t have your head in the clouds when the sky falls in.
This article was re-uploaded from our internal archive.
