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Those who take their business or leadership role seriously know that life is much easier and business is much more successful with real talent in your team. The CEO’s of two of the most successful businesses in corporate history, Steve Jobs at Apple and Jack Welch at GE, were both very vocal about having A players on your team. Often, I’m asked to write or speak about acquiring top talent. That stands to reason, it’s what my company, Hyperion Executive Search does, help companies find the very best talent. But we also help clients to retain that top talent.

Finding and acquiring talent can be costly (although it should always be seen and treated as an investment not a cost), so it’s bizarre that some companies devote so much time to acquiring talent, then don’t know what to do with ‘it’, or how to manage ‘it’ and subsequently lose ‘it’. A bit like constantly filling a bucket with a hole in. Now that is an expensive business.

To maximise your investment in talented individuals your company needs to put in place a range of measures and processes, starting with on-boarding and induction. These are critical, but I wanted to speak more about retention of existing talent. At Hyperion we provide a range of services and consultancy aimed at helping businesses to retain and maximise the impact of talented employees, but here are some of the key considerations.  Like many of the most important practices in business they are not rocket science, but they are often overlooked.

I base my comments on nearly two decades of interviewing and consulting with talented candidates.  I’ve approached or been approached by many hundreds of candidates, maybe thousands. There are many factors why some people stay put, even when approached with a strong opportunity, and why some want to jump ship. I’ve found though that if one or more of these key three elements is missing, then you have a potential leaver.

You may or may not be surprised to hear that money is very seldom the key driver for talented people to want to leave. A factor yes, but rarely the most important one.

So, what are the three key factors that talented people want and need to be happy, and therefore be driven to stay in your business?

AUTONOMY

Good people do not want to be micro-managed or inhibited from being creative in their job. You will often see comments that most people leave a job directly because of their immediate boss. Of course, that can be true, but it can also be true that the ‘boss’ is just acting within or carrying out the company culture. It’s easy to blame one individual, but it’s the company culture that allows that manager to operate in that way. People expect to be managed, to be accountable, to have parameters and guidelines, but they also want the ability to get on with the job. They want to use the talent you employed them for, to be creative, to find solutions, in short, they want autonomy in their role to grow, achieve and prove their worth, to you and to themselves.

CHALLENGE

In the same vein good people want to be challenged. Not only do they want the autonomy to do their job, they want new challenges and situations to deal with and to learn from. Greater levels of responsibility or special projects in addition to their day to day activities. A greater challenge doesn’t just mean upping their targets or workload, it means new things to stretch their abilities and creativity and to demonstrate their value. It is accepted that this is usually whilst also maintaining performance in their current role, but ultimately leads to promotion or new opportunities in the business. In short they want an opportunity to grow and to shine.

RECOGNITION

Recognition and reward can and does come in many ways; salary and financial reward are an important part of the mix. Don’t though expect to retain your superstars forever if you just throw money at them. If that’s all that’s on offer, they can find that elsewhere easily enough, or they’ll choose to sacrifice some income for the autonomy and challenges we’ve discussed. We have helped many, many good candidates to move over the years where a decrease in salary has been happily accepted for a more rewarding and challenging environment. Rewards and recognition are a huge topic in themselves, but a whole raft of options are available and many if not most are free, or low cost to the business. How much does a thank you or pat on the back cost?

In short talented people stay where their talents are recognised, rewarded, nurtured, developed and encouraged. Not rocket science at all is it? But so very few companies have a culture or processes to make sure this happens, and that is why so many have a hole in their talent bucket.

As the clean energy transition grows, there is increasingly a skills and talent gap. This is an article I had published in Smart Cities World (link to the original below).

Throughout my time in the clean energy sector there has always been talk of scarcity of supply; first it was silicon, then in the boom times of solar development it was solar PV modules themselves. More recently we read of the potential scarcity of Lithium, a core ingredient for Lithium-ion and related batteries, driven by the significant growth in energy storage and EV Vehicles. Now we have scare stories about the scarcity of electricity at certain times of the day, if we all plug in our EV’s to charge. But what about the scarcity of talent?

Clearly as the clean energy transition grows, there is increasingly a skills and talent gap, one which is seldom talked about. Demand is very much outstripping supply. That might be a good thing, in the short term, for headhunters like us, but for the growth of the sector as a whole it is something that will significantly hinder the growth of companies and the smart energy and cities sector as a whole.

At utility scale, we have an ageing electricity generation and distribution network, managed by a hugely talented and experienced number of engineers. Significant numbers of which are at, or fast approaching retirement age. In a recent report, ‘Engineering 2017’*, it is suggested in the UK there is, conservatively, a 20,000-annual shortfall in graduates in engineering disciplines. That’s an annual shortfall. Not only are we not seeing enough graduates though, decades of hands-on practical experience is disappearing rapidly.

On top of this many parts of the smart energy sector are very nascent. Yes, batteries have been around for a very long time, but the energy storage sector, as we see and understand it today, is just a few years old. The same can be said of the e-mobility sector.

As for the digitisation of the energy supply, or the ‘internet of energy’, we’re making it up as we go along. There is no experienced talent pool. To exacerbate this problem, the demand for the new breed of coders, software architects and fully IT literate electrical engineers, doesn’t just come from the energy sector, or MaaS (Mobility as a service). These same individuals are in demand from Fintech, medical devices, and finance and banking, among others. It takes more than a dress down policy and bean bags to attract them.

The challenge must be met head on and quickly. The industry, in my opinion, must focus in three key areas.

Firstly, we need to encourage more children and those at school age into STEM subjects, then into engineering and computational subjects through higher education and into university. The industry needs to engage fully with the whole education system to make sure we get the raw talent we need.

Having a government that doesn’t politically interfere with education and curriculum would be a great start. In many of the most successful countries, such as Singapore and Finland, education is separated from the political sphere. We could do with the same for energy, but that’s another story. At least we need consistency and strong engagement between industry and educational establishments, and not just by the large corporations, but also SMEs and start-ups which are the backbone of the energy transformation.

Secondly, companies need to be far more prepared to look at transferable skills, and to be prepared to invest in training. This can be difficult, particularly for SME’s and start-ups. Time and resource are very tight, and the industry moves at break-neck speed. But if everyone is chasing the same very small talent pool, we’re creating a big problem, not least Premier League salaries and a transient workforce as an example.

My company, Hyperion Executive Search, have helped many companies, in the UK, US and Germany to find exceptional talent in allied industries, as well as directly from competitors. For example, it’s not a great leap for candidates from a solar background to adapt to the energy storage or e-mobility sectors.

People who have been involved in traditional lighting, HVAC, BMS or UPS companies, have the raw experience and capability to adapt to new digital and interconnected versions of the same. We always recruit as much for cultural fit, and the ‘soundness’ of the individual, as much as the skills and experiences they have. Companies need to show some patience at times, and recruit for the long term, not the potential instant fix.

Thirdly, as an industry, we really need to address diversity. In an already limited pool of talent, whether by accident or design, we limit our options by not recruiting or encouraging candidates from all genders, ethnicities and sections of society.

It’s shocking when we look at the lack of diversity in the people we place into new roles. Certainly not by our design, and not by design of our clients, but because of lack of alternatives.

I don’t believe in positive discrimination, the best person for the job should always be recruited, regardless of their age, gender, religion or sexual orientation. But I do believe we have a lot to do to encourage more diversity in the workforce. This starts with engaging with children at school, but we have to find a way to engage with all sections of society at all stages of their careers. Otherwise we not only limit the pool of talent, but we limit our potential as businesses and as an industry. Diversity is good for innovation, for learning and for growth.

These are exciting times in the smart energy world, there is so much potential, innovation and opportunity happening all around us. We can’t afford to be stifled as businesses or a sector by the lack of talent, or a lack of willingness to actively broaden our horizons in regard to our people.

David Hunt is managing partner of clean energy executive search specialists Hyperion Executive Search. He has been in the clean energy sector since 2007 and held posts on the Policy Board of the UK Renewable Energy Association (REA), chaired the Pan-European Energy Storage Alliance and sits on the Low Carbon Economy Board for the Liverpool City LEP. He also spent seven years as director of an award winning multi-technology renewable energy company, before setting up Hyperion in 2014.

*Engineering 2017 report www.engineeringuk.com/media/1355/enguk-report-2017.pdf

https://smartcitiesworld.net/opinions/never-mind-the-lithium-what-about-the-talent-asks-david-hunt