Fast Focus
	The best-run agencies use talent management as a competitive advantage.
	Focusing on growing talent is a necessity since most brokerage owners are in their mid-50s, and many have no perpetuation plan.

Makes Yours A Talent Agency

The biggest issue facing our business is lack of talent. Put lip service aside. It's time to make talent your priority.

By  Rob Lieblein

Recently the coffee powerhouse Starbucks took a drastic step toward quality. The company that started and rode the coffee craze for years had seen its stock price and its cachet slipping. So founder Howard Schultz retook the helm and shortly decided to retrain all of the firm’s 135,000 employees. In one night. By closing every one of the store’s 7,100 outlets on the same Tuesday evening in February. Did it work? It certainly got a lot of PR. Whether or not it resulted in better coffee, I hope it accomplished two things for the company: a refocus on the fundamentals and an enhancement of company culture among employees. If so, Starbucks will be better for it.

Why am I so concerned about a coffee company? Am I that hooked? No. I can quit at any time. (Really. No need for an intervention.)

My point: I’ve been recently discussing culture being a key differentiator between firms and talking about collaboration being an essential tool to add energy to your team’s efforts. The third leg of this stool is talent management, and doing this effectively requires doing the spadework around those other two areas—culture and collaboration. Then you can turn people management into your competitive advantage.

In my consultations with agencies, I see amazing differences in the level of talent, and it’s not always a function of agency size. Some firms just seem to have pulled all their people from a mold, while at others I meet dynamic individuals at every position in the firm. The depth of talent runs the gamut from deep bench to no bench. (And what’s a bench?) Enthusiasm and engagement are visible traits and especially necessary when tackling new markets or strategic alliances or long-range planning.

In the March 2008 issue of Leader’s Edge, I wrote about an agency that uses the principles of The Collaborative Way to distinguish itself and its employees and to keep them focused on the fundamentals. That’s one approach, and other great firms do it differently. I’ve seen commonalities, however, and one similar theme is that the best-run agencies use talent management as their key competitive advantage. As a matter of fact, one consulting firm, Development Dimensions International (DDI), exclusively sells talent-management services. Its business model calls for helping a client develop, identify and execute appropriate talent strategies. DDI helps companies review their talent readiness, optimize management talent and fast-track employees with high potential.

If you take this approach, you’ll be putting talent management out there as a key strategic initiative. It will become ingrained in your firm as part of the daily business and culture, and it will become an essential part of your competitive advantage and long-term success.

Show Me the Talent

The term “talent management” is certainly not new. Performers have been called “the talent” by backstage people for years. So why not identify your “performers” in that way as well? Need I remind you that the insurance business is, at its core, a people business? It’s our strongest, perhaps our only, asset. When we put our people out on stage in front of prospective clients, we’d do well to ensure they are well rehearsed pros.

Talent management should simply encompass your entire approach toward fielding a team: recruitment, development, promotion and retention. It should be a well-thought-out element of your strategic plan and tied to both short- and long-term goals. Unfortunately, many owners and CEOs view recruiting and hiring as short-term solutions. While that’s certainly a part of the equation, true talent management focuses on developing leadership depth for both current needs and future challenges.

Consulting firm DDI believes that successful talent management is much broader than succession planning. It encompasses a range of activities that will aid your competitive advantage, including:

· Connecting your corporate strategy with the quality and quantity of leadership required to execute it;

· Driving leadership accountability for the cultural strategies that support business goals (essentially covering the “fundamentals”);

· Identifying employees with the highest leadership potential early in their careers;