When tackling critical talent shortages today, leaders face daunting paradoxes:

• Veteran employees have knowledge critical for future performance of the business, but firms often find it too costly, time consuming and difficult to transfer this expertise.
• Companies need to train and retain millennials to fill key knowledge intensive roles, but young employees view staying in one job too long as hurting their career prospects. They want to learn what they can and move on to other opportunities.
• Lots of leadership roles have become extremely demanding and hard to fill, but organizations don’t see the benefit of investing more resources in succession planning and leadership development.
• Many fields desperately need skilled, motivated workers, but those who are unemployed or underemployed don’t find these jobs attractive enough to pursue, e.g. sales, manufacturing, truck drivers, mechanics.

To design effective long-term solutions for developing and retaining skilled talent, executives must manage these contradictory conditions effectively. New research on the “paradoxes of leadership” suggests specific tactics you can use to tackle opposing goals.

1. Embrace the multiple and conflicting truths of today’s talent market.

Employees most likely to succeed in leadership roles today will be those who can embrace both the company’s commitment to bottom line performance and the need to nurture more demanding, highly-mobile talent. Recognize that many of your managers will champion one of these seemingly contradictory truths – the importance of profitability and controlling costs vs. the value of fostering talent development and retention.

Top management’s job is not to pick one or the other, but to continually make the tensions explicit to your team and to strive for balance between the two. And when you’re trying to develop emerging leaders, invest in people who can deal with these conflicting needs.

For example, Terri Kelly, CEO of W.L. Gore & Associates, makers of Gore-Tex fabric, says she expects her leaders to value inherently conflicting activities, such as the need for innovation, as well as operational efficiency, and to communicate their mutual importance to their teams. Kelly recognizes the need to be “consistently inconsistent” and to intentionally manage this inconsistency.

2. View resources not as scarce but as abundant and generative.

Skill shortages imply that talent resources are increasingly scarce, and thus a constraint. So applying them to one goal means sacrificing another one. This often generates conflict between managers who have different objectives.

Instead of viewing skilled talent as a constraint, view it as plentiful and even generative. This value-creating perspective can lead you to pursue more innovative strategies to expand the pie, such as collaborating with unusual partners, applying new technologies, or applying resources more productively by accessing them in more flexible time frames or locations.

For example, one major bank has legacy core processing systems that rely on Cobol programming skills, which are no longer available in the U.S. To address this skill shortage, the bank is now collaborating with large tech firms in India, who are still training Cobol programmers.

In another case, a software company struggled to hire technical sales staff with expertise in both accounting and the construction industry. So, instead of just hiring locally, the firm started thinking of this talent source nationally. They began hiring sales people around the country with the expertise needed and allowed them to work virtually.

3. Stop striving for stability and certainty about talent supplies. Emphasize experimentation and failure to implement a “coping with” strategy.

Applying traditional leadership development and retention strategies in a labor market where high-potentials are much less likely to stay with the firm fits the well-known definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

One CEO of a major professional services firm told me his company had abandoned the traditional “up-or-out” vertical career paths so common in his industry. They were now using more flexible “horizontal career paths.” This creates multiple career paths and different job opportunities for young staff, who can also declare that they want to be considered for more traditional vertical promotions into senior management roles.

To manage the conflicting tensions in today’s market for skilled talent, you must be willing to experiment and fail, trying innovative programs that may only be temporary “workable certainties,” likely to be changed in the future. These evolving solutions will be much more effective than seeking permanent solutions to the increasingly dynamic market for talent.

Contact me to explore ways I can help your executive team implement more creative solutions for dealing with critical skill shortages.