Artificial intelligence is bringing a lot of speed to tasks and helping with mundane work. As we all become better at prompting the machine, we will uncover greater utility for it to propel our work. It will not be able to replace the human aspect of leadership though. One thing it won’t fix is watching 40% of new hires walk out the door within the first three or four years of employ. I was talking to an HR person from a very large international firm about this issue. Originally, there had been a plan to provide training for these new recruits, with a view to keeping them in the company and not having them wander off to competitors. In the end, they budgeted nothing for the training, so the whole idea collapsed. The early departure problem is still there though.
I suggested that the actual issue is with the young recruits’ supervisors and that this group needs some remedial training. I said “remedial” because they have to unlearn some bad thinking and bad habits. Most of these supervisors will be section heads and they have grown up in business in eras when candidates for employ were plentiful. If one left, no problem, you just hired in a replacement. That is no longer that easy, as a declining youth population throws up an increasing free agent mentality on the part of the young. They know they can easily get a job somewhere else, if they don’t feel they are appreciated enough or that the firm culture is the right fit. If the section heads don’t understand that point, then they are not adjusting their thinking about how to retain these vibrant and increasing sought after resources.
Confusion about the difference between managing and leading will also become a barrier to retention. Most Japanese leaders are actually managers. What is the difference? Leaders do three things in particular: (1) they set the direction for the team (2) they develop their people through coaching and feedback and (3) they make sure the processes run on time, on budget and at the quality standard required. Japanese managers find all of their time taken up with just number three on this list and unfortunately, they neglect number two to the detriment of the firm.
To make it even worse, poor time management and delegation skills will ensure that the supervisors won’t have enough time to coach their young charges, even if they were to recognise this was an important part of their work. Doubling down on the human dimension of leadership requires a lot of time. Feedback that isn’t positive will not suit the young and they will soon feel dissatisfied with their bosses. They want coaching and attention, but it will be a “leftover” activity, rather than a primary leadership time allocation.
Delegation is widely misunderstood in Japan. It is seen as shovelling the boss’s work on to the desk of an underling, as a way of reducing the boss workload. In fact, delegation is a powerful coaching tool. It enables younger staff to experience parts of the boss’s job and to build their skills as a springboard to taking on higher responsibility. Even the peak industry body the Keidanren is talking about promotion through capability, rather than time in the company. If we are in an era of individual capability driving promotion, then the ability to do parts of the boss’s job will help select certain people to rise to the next step in their career path.
We know that staff engagement is triggered when the staff feel the boss really cares about them. Busy bosses may not be able to communicate that because they are not putting in the time to make that feeing real. The boss’s communication skills may be underdeveloped and they may fail in that basic regard. They probably have never had leadership training. So far, they have been piecing it together by themselves, but have ended up with a partially completed puzzle and important skill sets have remained undeveloped. When there were candidates aplenty, it probably didn’t matter, but those days are far behind us. Supervisors who cannot allocate the time will be puzzled when the young up and depart and their pleas for replacements to HR are not yielding any fruit. The war for talent and especially the young and talented, will only become diabolical.
It is going to get worse. The hiring costs of an in demand and in short supply group of young people will go up and they will start to hit the radar of ravenous recruiters. Usually, the fees for placing the young are not worth the effort, but as recruiters become more desperate for revenues, they will lower their entry price points. The rising wage costs of the young will create a nexus of cross over that will work for the recruiters. The next stage will be recruiters luring the young out of their current firms like the Pied Piper and placing them with the competitors. They know that 40% of the population is ready to move and so this will become a happy hunting ground for recruiters - at your expense.
Companies need to train their supervisors to cope with this war for talent, which is rapidly becoming a zero-sum game of winners and losers. Those firms who don’t get it will be the training ground for their competitors new hires, as the young are getting pried out of their current company to go elsewhere.
