Why Companies Today Need To Be Cultivators, Not Collectors

A paradigm shift for future-ready organizations

Early in my career, a manager introduced me to the concept of hiring A-players. “Weed out everyone else,” he said. “Maybe let in a couple of B-players, but that’s it.” Over time, I’ve watched these coveted candidates go by many names: top talent, superstars, rockstars, and even ninjas. They seemed to be in perpetually short supply. I also saw hire after “hipo” hire turn out to be a terrible match — costing countless amounts of time, money, and frustration. At the same time, leaders scratched their heads, then pulled their hair, unable to understand why their organization lacked diversity.
 

In 2015, a study by CEB found that 75% of executives said their companies would likely face critical skill gaps in the near future. Seven years later, a study by Manpower Group (2022) revealed gloomy results: three out of four leaders said their teams still didn’t have the skills they needed to achieve their goals.  

As I explore in my new book, LEAD TOGETHER: Stop Squirreling Away Power and Build a Better Team, organizations today lack people power: the capacity to get things done, especially in the midst of constant change and uncertainty. In the meantime, employees also feel that their personal power is lacking. In the same CEB study, researchers found that 70% of employees felt dissatisfied with the amount of learning and growth opportunities at their companies.

So companies need more capacity to get things done, and employees want to grow their personal capacity. How do we finally shrink the gap between what everyone wants and our reality? One solution I propose in LEAD TOGETHER — a book that’s grounded in psychology and laden with tools from my own experience as a leader (all told in the form of a squirrely, page-turning story) — is to embrace a paradigm shift.

It’s time to stop acting like “talent collectors” and begin acting like “cultivators.” Instead of looking at “top talent” as something we collect from a finite crop, we have to cultivate an infinite field.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to help thousands of organizations become skill cultivators while growing my own company to over 150 diverse employees with less than 2% turnover, an average hiring speed of five weeks, and over 90% client and employee satisfaction scores. Below are two cultivation strategies that I’ve seen make the biggest impact:

1. Remove Unnecessary Barriers to Entry

One of the biggest obstacles companies face is a limitation of their own making. All too often, in their hiring, promotion, and employee development processes, leaders create unnecessary barriers to entry. They block people from taking on roles or learning opportunities that could greatly benefit both the individuals and their companies. Not only does this practice hold back diversity, it also severely limits the organization’s available pool of capable candidates. Use the checklist below to reduce your own organization’s barriers to access:

• Qualifications: To limit shrinking our pool, we only require qualifications that are needed to perform a role well.


• On-the-job training: To expand our hiring pool, we provide on-the-job training and learning time so that candidates don’t need to have all skills right away.


• Invitation: To encourage more people to apply, we state that perfect qualifications aren’t expected and we welcome anyone who might be interested in participating in our hiring process.


• Assessment: To avoid perpetuating societal inequities and improve our hiring effectiveness, we assess observable skills and knowledge rather than stand-ins for these capabilities (such as years of experience, past titles, specific degrees, and graduation from specific universities).


• Decision-making: To reduce bias, we use at least two decision-makers and a tiebreaker or give veto power when making hiring, promotion, or compensation decisions.


• Opportunities: To expand our internal pool, when a new role or project opportunity is available, we make sure everyone knows about it and has enough time to apply.

2. Always Be Developing

When we reduce unnecessary barriers to entry, we immediately expand the number and diversity of people who can take on new roles and responsibilities. But to keep growing that people power, we also need to make deliberate development part of everyday life at work. After all, not only do we need people to develop the skills that we know we’ll need in the future, but we also need them to develop skills we don’t even know we’ll need. We need to learn a lot, and we need to learn quickly. Use the checklist below to enhance your organization’s development opportunities:

• Learning time: To ensure we are building capacity, we carve out and protect time for learning that’s separate from doing tasks


• Nudges: To automate learning moments, we build nudges into our rituals (e.g., monthly team retrospectives, quarterly career growth conversations, and feedback prompts in one-on-ones).


• Roles: To facilitate ongoing learning, we designate some roles (e.g., managers, peer coaches) to support people’s development.


• Training: To keep skill-building top of mind and accessible, we offer many different types of training opportunities (e.g., job shadowing, workshops, hackathons).


• Learn-outs: To encourage a culture of learning and teaching, we build opportunities for people to share things they’ve learned.


• Pre-training: To expand our hiring pool even further, we provide training to people (internally and externally) who may be interested in applying for roles in the future.

If your organization is trapped in a perpetual talent, time, or resource crunch, it can be tempting to leave the work of cultivating skills for some time “later.” But of course, without doing this work, later never comes. The good news is that even small investments will have big returns. And by letting go of a collector mentality and refocusing your energy on becoming a cultivator instead, you won’t simply contribute to building a more successful company, but also a more just and flourishing world.

Author Bio

Tania Luna, author of LEAD TOGETHER: Stop Squirreling Away Power and Build a Better Team, is an entrepreneur, psychology researcher, and writer. She has founded and grown multiple companies, including Scarlet Spark, a nonprofit that creates human-friendly workplaces for organizations that help animals, and LifeLabs Learning, a leadership development company. Her other books include The Leader Lab: How to Become a Great Manager, Faster and Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable & Engineer the Unexpected. She is also the co-host of the podcast, Talk Psych to Me and a TED speaker on the power of perspective. Across her work, Tania strives to inspire interconnectedness among all living beings, humans included.