Talent Alignment - Be Fierce, Be Deliberate

Your people are your future and your long-term success all rides on your time, focus and deployment of an employee recruitment, engagement, development and retention strategy. These are the people who with your help and guidance are the future professionals and leaders who will build the firm from generation to generation. Just as there are rainmakers there are leaders who become savvy developers of people - and these leaders are especially adept at building talent within a firm. They, and the ambitious firms they work for, understand the basic fact of life in business: the people you pay are more important than the people who pay you.

Why? Talent is a firms only sustainable source of competitive advantage. If you look at a great firm and ask, "Which came first, the talent or the client?" the talent cam first almost every time. The Construction industry achieve and maintain greatness by attracting and retaining talent who attract and retain clients and in turn, more new talent. Make sense?

What does this mean to you? The key to your firms continuing success is building talent. Not landing the biggest project or client - clients and projects can be stolen or lost. Not creating a new construction process or delivery methodology - it can be copied. Not being the first to expand into a new market - competitors can move there too. None of these advantages are sustainable, Talent is. It is what can create a Construction Companies enduring competitive edge!

Building this talent begins with the competition for top talent, which have never been fiercer. As more and more of the Construction industry they have to compete on brains, demand is exploding for the kind of skills and capabilities that power Construction Companies. In fact we would be willing to bet that in the time you spend in a single unproductive weekly meeting two things will happen: (1) One of your key clients (you can't afford to lose) will have dinner with a competitor; (2) one of your top employees (a future executive in the making) will accept another job or think seriously about doing so.

Take a few moments to think about your priorities last week, what steps did you take to stay in front and get ahead of these critical issues - that will have more of an impact on your business than anything else. Next week, modify your priorities and re-focus.