With the Easter break fast approaching it’s hardly surprising that most of us are wondering ‘where did the new year go?’ For those fortunate few who are still settling into 2006, welcome to the start of another exciting year. We at Talent Solutions are definitely wondering what happened to the start of 2006. The pace of work has been blinding as organisations dust off their ‘To Do Lists’ and start focusing on some major people development initiatives.

The interest this year continues to be on leadership and change. There has been no reprieve from companies, recruiters and business commentators all lamenting the scarcity of high quality candidates. With an ever tightening labour market and little relief in sight, most companies are endeavouring to harness the potential of the talent they already have. Clearly, staff retention is the burning issue second only to candidate attraction. Many company initiatives are designed to get beyond the ‘say and stay’ to the ever important ‘strive’ in terms of staff engagement (apologies to Hewitt).

To this end, we have been inundated with interest from a wide variety of areas. In January and February I presented on the topic of Emotional Intelligence and Leadership to several groups of senior leaders at the Australian Defence Force in both Sydney and Canberra. These sessions were so well received that we have been invited back later in the year. We also delivered a very popular half-day session on Intelligent leadership™ at the Asia-Pacific Leadership & People Development Summit in Sydney last month. Finally, one of the four major banks has asked us to present a series of sessions on Emotional Intelligence in April.

In our experience, the field of Emotional Intelligence has certainly moved past the assessment phase (and the exaggerated claims made by some earlier promoters) and is well and truly into the stage of developing the essential abilities that underpin high performance. Finally this field of research is finding practical application as opposed to ‘flavour of the month’ reception in many organisations. Nowhere is this more important than in the area of leadership and change management.

Several companies in the insurance and finance sectors have engaged us to help them address the needs of senior leaders in implementing organisation-wide change. They have recognised the important role that leadership and team effectiveness play in navigating change. A major logistics organisation has also engaged us to work with their national distribution facility in Victoria to develop leadership capability from the senior management team to front-line supervisors. Finally, long term clients in the recruitment sector have sought our executive coaching expertise as they tackle the challenges of motivating their consultants during a period of intense candidate competition and internal changes.

Our assessment services continue to provide ongoing support to a range of organisations as they rise to the challenge of identifying the right talent for their needs. We have added several new additions to our range of best-in-breed assessment tools, including the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal. Careful, analytical reasoning is an important part of most management roles, this latest tool helps organisations differentiate high performers from those who might struggle in senior roles.

For those readers who are currently embarking (or about to embark) on a major change initiative, the following article may provide ideas on how some companies are addressing these challenges. We have recently developed a highly flexible approach to developing change management capability for leaders at all levels. In addition, we offer a brief update on a recent in-house Intelligent Selling™ accreditation for those interested in building internal capability to develop EI abilities within your sales force. This program has now gained widespread appeal across several industries including the pharmaceutical and financial services sectors. Finally, we have included an example of a government organisation and a major change initiative we have been involved in to develop the leadership capability of their senior managers.

Michael Collins
Managing Director