Talent Hates To Move

Yet hiring managers, VCs, and tech-focused talent agencies worship at the altar of the A-player, assuming that they need a fleet of superstars to build a great company.  And they’re willing to steal them, if necessary.  …   After all, exceptional employees aren’t just a little bit better than the average worker.  They’re 1,000 times better.  They’re more productive, more creative … more everything.  We should shower them with money and perks and do whatever it takes to keep them happy.  Right?
Wrong.  Companies are better served when they double down on cultivating in-house talent instead.  Sure, superstar workers exist.  And yes, they can be extremely productive and beneficial to a company’s bottom line.  But their stardom is frequently context-­specific, and it doesn’t always survive the transfer.  When Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg looked at the talent portability of 1,052 rock-star financial analysts, he found that about half did poorly in the year following their switch.  And those whose work suffered never recovered.
…
Star talent is partly innate, sure, but it’s also linked to specific teams and projects or just the culture of a company.  As Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, puts it:  “People’s performance is a function not just of their individual abilities but also of the systems in which they work.”  Talent, it seems, really hates to move around.
—    Bryan Gardiner
From the article:  “Forget Stars — Companies Do Best When They Grow Their Own Talent“
Appearing in:  Wired Magazine, dtd:  July 2016
The following is a link to the original article:  http://www.wired.com/2016/07/forget-stars-companies-best-grow-talent/
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