The Specialist Pipeline: Winning the War for Specialist Talent, by Leadership Pipeline Institute CEO Kent Jonasen is now available. The book is published with Forbes Books, the exclusive business book publishing imprint of Forbes, and is available on Amazon today.
Pulling from his ten years of experience in human resources executive roles and fourteen years work with a larger number of organizations implementing the Leadership Pipeline and Specialist Pipeline concept, Kent Jonasen identifies the lack of focus on specialists versus leaders and the absence of a specialist architecture to present real business challenges.
The Specialist Pipeline is Jonasen’s warning that neglecting to create clear career paths and development programs for specialists – like those enjoyed by other leaders – will make attracting top, specialized talent nearly impossible for many organizations. And while most organizations recognize the importance of specialists, few do the work to support them properly. In an increasingly knowledge-based business environment that encourages the breakdown of hierarchies, having a pipeline of capable leaders and managers isn’t the imperative it used to be. In fact, this pipeline risks creating redundancies that compromise agile decision-making.
Companies seeking to break down hierarchies and create more agile organizations must integrate specialists more effectively into their broader organizational structures. To accomplish this, Jonasen puts forth a clear solution in his new book, detailing how companies can “create an enduring specialist architecture that enables the entire organization to work with and talk about people matters in a consistent way.”
The architecture needs to set common standards for both performance and potential, differentiated by a layer of management. It should also establish language and processes to identify problems, address those problems, and exploit opportunities effectively while providing data for important decision making, he said.
