Barrier:
Identifying and using excellent talent within the organisation .

Leadership and management always seem to struggle with effective delegation, myself included. That was until I was sold on the concept of personality profiling of candidates using a management template to predict future alignment. Of course personality profiling has been around since the early 1900's but the degree to which profiling can predict future behaviours, attitudes and current values has improved markedly in the last 20 years or so. The typical management lament of "where can I find someone who thinks just like me" can now be answered. The benefits of finding someone aligned enables effective delegation and makes a nonsense of the personnel limits any one manager can manage or supervise. Liberated workplaces thus enabled complete more work, more effectively in shorter time and grow.

We probably need to go back and relook at what 'talent' actually means and what we expect of that talent to accomplish. Rigid hierarchies suffocate organizational talent where a thick layer of middle-management sludge blocks any hint of grass root talent from surfacing. The continuous building of empires and insecurity among the middle layer keeps this attitude alive in organizations and essentially keeps 'talent' out. Give people the opportunity to choose their projects, work, roles, what gives them joy and let them experiment with how they can have an impact. Hand over the reigns and let them call the shots. Tailor roles around the 'talent' and not just fit people into pre-designed org chart boxes and generic job descriptions that kill their unique talents and creativity.

This is precisely the kind of Barrier we tried to address with our just-in-time teams hack: http://www.managementexchange.com/hack/just-time-teams

It's a new org design - flatter, more decentralized, less siloed and political - a new approach to performance reviews to promote team work and collaboration, and a reframing of what career advancement really is.