Where does the talent lie?

I was working once for a pretty big organisation, who wanted to start a blog. This was about ten years ago, so for a lot of people blogging was kind of new.

Despite the fact that I was working there, and had been blogging for a while, and actually had a bit of a reputation (admittedly outside the organisation), the decision was made to pay a communications consultant to come in and set the blog up, write the posts and so on.

The money spent on this project could have been saved by getting me to do it. It also might have been done better by me. It certainly would have cheered me up to be doing something I found genuinely exciting and engaging as part of my day job.

How many times does this happen in your organisation? The problem is that nobody knows what anyone knows. People finder tools on the intranet rarely tell you what skills and interests people have. You just know their job title and which team they work in.

There are lots of ways around this problem, but here are two.

First, have a more networky way of finding people in the organisation. Get people talking about their interests and passions, and to list the stuff they are good at. That will surface talents and skills you never knew your people had.

Second, when you need help with something, ask for it. Have a way of communicating across the whole organisation to say (to use my example above) “we want to start a blog, who can help?”.

So often a new project is handed to a manager to run, who then looks for someone in their but of the org chart to deliver it, regardless of whether they have the attributes to do it well or not. Easier, surely, to broadcast a request throughout the organisation to identify the best person for the job?