Grooming Your Next Star Players

During these turbulent times, many companies have downsized, rightsized and even closed down. However, the big challenge here is how to continuously show positive results under unfavorable market conditions of falling demands due to shrinking purchasing power and/or postponement of consumer spending. Those companies still surviving would want to retain their best talents or what Dr. R. Palan, Chairman of SMR Technologies Berhad, terms as "A" players. On the other hand, these "A" players are very mobile and tend to jump ship at the slightest sign of trouble. So, what should a company do under such circumstances?

Faced with this dilemma, a company should be paying attention to the "B" players who have been supporting the star players. Fortunately, this group of "B" players forms the majority, about 80% of the total staff strength of an organization. It is to the advantage of a company to grow its bench strength by growing these supporting actors and grooming them into the next wave of company stars.

A practical approach is to seek out those employees who possess the potential to become high impact performers by assessing and matching their personal attitudes against company's core values or competencies. A person's attitude is manifested by his/her behavioral actions. Past behaviors are accurate predictor of future actions. Employees showing a close match are the future stars of the company and should be given the development opportunities to enhance their technical competence.

It is my belief that a company wishing and wanting to survive under these challenging business conditions is to transform its conventional job-based HR functions into a competency-based HR management. Such action would be the best investment it ever made.





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