The Upcoming Talent Haemorrhage Crisis

Anti-Impression Management new practice: I wrote a book called “People Before Tech: Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” and you can find a discount for it at the bottom of this page, and we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- come talk to us.

Contrary to what I said last week there won’t be a recap of DOES here. Instead, go sign in and watch some of the videos, I wouldn’t do it justice.

On the negative side -and that’s almost always coming with me, we know that now- I was saying I hope I see very little “cape fatigue” - there was plenty, unfortunately. Even more unfortunate - there’s an imminent HumanDebt-related danger just around the corner judging by the signals of the past few weeks and even some of the discussions at DOES that happened “in the corridors” -aka DMs and smaller Slack channels-: talent loss.

I’ll admit this isn’t a topic I usually get involved in, because “attraction and retention” get too much air time as it is -and it’s one of my main gripes against HR that they focus on “personnel matters” or “resourcing” instead of the big topics that matter around high performance- but this one’s a biggie and it’s impossible to ignore.

If I see this right -and I am hoping I don’t and it will prove milder of a crisis than I think- then many companies will see a hefty proportion of their best people leave or at least look to leave within 6-12 months. Two main factors will have contributed and they seem unrelated but when you pop the hood they really aren’t.