This is true whether the talent solution is home grown or outsourced. However, working with vendors all but guarantees a long task list for your team—usually it’s someone who already wears a lot of hats. That’s because vendors make money on services and solutions when they have a defined start and end date. Examples of these episodes range from providing recruiting assessments to training workshops or buying access to course catalogs or a tech tool. The bottom line is that these are all products that need to be deployed inside of a system and over time for impact to take place. Of course, it is up to people in your organization to create the right system conditions to ensure the product works. All of those before, during and after activities take a lot of bandwidth to implement—something that most companies hope to avoid when they outsource in the first place.
Lackluster outcomes bring on fatigue.
This constantly repeated cycle of 1—Buy or build a new talent solution, 2—Underestimate the system conditions (implementation lift) required for it to work, 3—Talent issues continue to persist, means that leaders get worn down and reluctant to try new ideas. When this happens, people become skeptical and future decision-making (even around obvious things) takes longer. Folks want to share the risk and responsibilities with others, which slows things down.
On one hand, pumping the brakes on this cycle isn’t a bad thing. However, the same talent issues that caused you to explore solutions in the first place are still very real. In Part 3 of this exploration, we’ll look at a few steps you can take.
