Guest Blog: The Talent Management Trap: Overfocus on A Players

By Patrick Carmichael, Senior HR Consultant, Saudi Aramco

Of course it makes sense to expend a higher percentage of resources on your A players. It's a smaller and well-defined group with the potential of higher returns on such investment. The "trap" is that many organizations go overboard and thereby reduce or eliminate resources for the B players.

For the most part, we fail to properly recognize our B players. They are our best managers. They are the guys who find the oil and gas, keep our refineries going, and manage our distribution lines. We lean on them, day in and day out. We can't run our company without them.

We also fail to define what constitutes a valuable B player which, if done correctly, would result in yet another well-defined group of valuable resources.

Personally, I define a B player as a consistently high-performing manager capable of performing well in multiple positions at the same level and who has a track record of developing his people, even if this means moving his best out of his organization so that they can gain the right experiences.

A program like CoachingOurselves plus a few sell-selected management/executive programs and targeted assignments could go a long way to addressing this issue.

CoachingOurselves offers a library of modules written by top management thinkers and used by management teams to guide and stimulate discussion and reflection using Henry Mintzberg's approach for natural development. Organizations use these to deliver focused and cost effective high end management and leadership development packages to their management population, both the "A" and "B" players, responding to a wide variety of needs; increasing engagement, continuous learning and growth, improved teamwork, breaking down silos, enhancing leadership and developing communityship.