Generally speaking, finding talent for a business is a bit easier than finding capital or innovative ideas. But if you do business in China the opposite is true, according to McKinsey Quarterly in a new report.
McKinsey researchers Kevin Lane and Florian Pollner note that China’s typically shallow managerial talent pool is getting even more shallow as China’s economy screams along and more businesses expand. According to a survey by AmChamber in Shanghai, 37 percent of the managers at U.S.-owned enterprises said that recruiting talent was their biggest problem. A separate McKinsey survey noted that 44 percent of respondents said that finding talented managers was the biggest barrier to their global ambitions.
The root of the problem is that for all of its tremendous growth, China still is a developing country without a long history of management training. The problems become more acute when the Chinese manager is required to deal with markets beyond his or her homeland.
Lane and Pollner offer these tips to find and keep talent:
- Integrate strategic management and talent planning. Factor strategy into talent needs.
- Know what you need and be prepared to revise. Once you study your personnel needs, make sure you factor in internal hires, job churn and promotions due to unexpected growth.
- Give talent a stronger and sharper focus. Don’t dump recruitment on the human resource department. Elevate recruitment to the level of other must-do tasks such as financial planning.
- Build strong and long pipelines. Start at the university level and add in-house training.
- Develop in-house. For a good example, look to Procter & Gamble, which has developed such talent-nurturing programs as the one thats let promising Chinese managers earn master degrees on the job.
- Go beyond the usual in seeking talent.
- Turn problems into pluses. This can be done by letting inexperienced managers grow by tackling immediate problems.
- Be comprehensive and consistent in efforts to integrate talent-spotting into normal operations.
