Name of weekly column: Sprog

This week's contributor: Gareth Chick, director, Spring Partnerships

Have you noticed that in economic downturns management metaphors disappear overnight? No one is talking about rationalization - it's just plain old cost cutting, and that means redundancies. The issue of course is how to do this and yet retain the good guys - the talent.

Managers who have been on the talent fasttrack in recent years are suddenly being asked to turn nasty and sack people. If they find it more convenient to believe that they are too good to hang around a company in decline, then they could be off. Of course if they then find that the executive recruitment market is also tough, they will have to stay but could become disillusioned and moribund. 

So CEOs and HR directors should look hard at their talent, grab hold of it and inspire it to stay and learn from the incredibly valuable experience they are just about to get. Someone once said everyone should take a company to the wall at least once just for the experience - the human cost makes this a ridiculous strategy to create proactively, however the current severe downturn makes cost cutting inevitable, and we may as well maximize the situation and grow our talent.

So the question we’ll pose to you is – how are you going to exploit tough times to grow your talent harder and faster than maybe you did in the good times?

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