Much has been written and said, in articles and symposia, about the necessity of investing in and holding on talent, the major asset in today’s wars of competition. Much time and energy on the part of management is devoted to nurturing talented workers, who account for but a tiny fraction of total employees. Counterintuitively and for the sake of debate, I want to surmise here that those firms wanting to invest in human capital, in order to be competitive on domestic and foreign markets, should invest in managing non-talented people, because that’s where the actual success factor lies. In fact, if you increased by 1% the average productivity of the rank-and-file, the company, as well as the national economy, would be greatly favorably affected. It would be a significant breakthrough. I would thus leave behind us all the debate about how to manage talent, or about whether talent should be about self-management, why talented people exhibit nomadic, and often ungrateful, if not downright traitorous, behaviors etc.

  I think HR managers should work side by side with staff managers, to systematically scout for talent, and design incentive systems to uncover pools of “tacit knowledge”. These activities must have the sponsorship of top management, and should possibly focus on a thorny issue, directly linked to talent management, which is the management of envy, the most widespread capital sin within companies.

  But what really makes the difference is the productivity and morale of rank-and-file personnel. Working on talents is certainly more interesting and stimulating, but I suspect that it is an easy way to win over the CEO and/or others that would like to think that hiring regular people is not an investment, but only a cost. Sadly but true, many consider personnel a commodity, as the personnel director of a major bank said in a recent symposium on HR management.  

  Hard and difficult as it is, the important thing for HR managers is to intervene on that part of the company’s Gauss curve where the indifferent, the cynical, the contrarians are positioned. The forgotten and downtrodden, if you will. If managers think that nothing can be done about this group of people, then this is likely to turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, by which these people will become ever less productive and ultimately unemployable. And somebody, either the tax-payer or the consumer or both, will have to pick up the tab. Perhaps, in the so highly praised HR scorecard, we’d better insert an “employability” entry. This would express clearly the fundamental mission of HR managers: to turn employees into employables.