This is the retention, management and leadership, of talent. Headcount reduction, cost cuttings, reorganisations have already led to a significant loss of organisational knowledge and wisdom. It’s evident that a critical focus of the organisation has to be survival today – but it cannot be at the cost of the leadership health of the company in the future.

It is critical that today’s leaders continue to create, protect and provide the enabling, flexible, challenging and adaptable environment that enables talent – especially ‘the Clevers’ – to flourish. Do read this article – it gives some useful guidelines on how to lead and get the best out these talented, clever people. If all you provide is a siege mentality they will respond by taking their talents elsewhere. You can’t afford to lose them. Because how will you replace them?

Hiring is down. Training and development budgets have to be justified in terms of immediate return on investment. Many graduate trainee programmes have been shelved or postponed. So protect and develop the talents and leadership you already have.

Reading this article also reminded me of the complementary and fundamental challenge that we are engaged in – actually ensuring that leaders do develop and learn. This was expounded so well in the seminal work of Chris Argyris published in the Harvard Business Review in 1991 ‘Teaching Smart People how to Learn’. While Goffee and Jones show us that organisations need to combine a demonstration of high affinity/empathy for the Clevers with clear discipline, we have to make sure that we are also providing a learning environment where talented people are encouraged to admit to uncertainty and failure and to learn to learn from it. Then we will be ready for the future upturn.