The Responsibility Dilemma

War on talent

In the current scenario, talent acquisition for any organization has become nothing short of a precision job. Every organization invests a considerable amount of time and effort in recruiting the best of resources in terms of education, experience, team player attitude, performance, and growth-oriented mindset. The selection process is literally an acid test through which the talent is hired by the organization for a specific role. In most cases, the prospective employee shows a lot of initiative, enthusiasm and go-getter attitude during the recruitment process. However, once he or she gets selected and comes on board, strangely enough, the gusto disappears within the first few weeks. It seems as if taking or delegating responsibility is pretty sensitive. Sir Winston Churchill said, “The price of greatness is responsibility.” Until and unless you are ready to shoulder the responsibility, you can never excel in your chosen field whatsoever. Organizations have a key role to play in inculcating the sense of responsibility among its people and teams and to do so, discussions on enabling transparency in the goals and performances of organizations are inevitable.

Organizations are a means, not an end

The rapid paradigm shift in the market and society is increasingly calling for a reform on the part of organizations as well. The ‘planned and controlled by management’ model no longer fits with the changing milieu and has to metamorphose to the ‘conceived and managed by the collective’ model to sustain.

Organizations must ensure that their employees, or in other words ‘talents’, get enough ‘space’ which is extremely crucial and essential to encourage their involvement in the organizational process and structure. Corporate red-tapism, on the other hand, should be minimized or completely done away with. You can’t really wait with an idea to get a go ahead in the next meeting and then wait again for ages to get that vetted by the hierarchy.

If you have a concrete idea that you believe can resolve an issue for a client to improve the process, you need to be able to decide and act swiftly. You have to act with intent and quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. That experience and knowledge should then be shared between teams. This requires organizations to delegate more responsibility to their staff. By doing so, the organization becomes a facility tool – a kind of a platform to let talent excel and thus leverage collective growth. But the question remains as to how you can transform a control/planning environment into a self-organized or rather self-controlled team.

In this new environment, you measure to learn, not to control.

A managed data platform

The foundation of outstanding performance lies in taking responsibility of knowing what something is being done for. A shared purpose or vision is good, but it is always difficult to organize your list of day to day activities. We must develop new means to ensure that employees and their teams can achieve their own goals and thus be able to make quick adjustments where necessary. The goals set by these teams are not just measuring tools, but also signal functions verifying you are on the right track.  Setting up a good personal and team dashboard is critical to developing your human resources and becoming more self-organized.

Reliable data and the means to translate that data into actionable insights, enabling teams to take appropriate action, is essential. That is possible through one standardized and managed data platform so that everyone has their own perspective on the relevant metrics in order to jointly control the performance of the organization.

It’s time to bid adieu to thick abstract management reports and make way for concrete, well-arranged and interactive Dashboards that are tailor-made for person(s) or team(s) coming on board. When ‘Talent’ gets access to the right tooling and data, responsibility comes along naturally.