It's been some time since I've written about the importance of assisting your new leaders to integrate into your organization. This is so critical that if specific strategies are not employed, your new employee could fail within the first ninety days. That's because if they don't quickly gain the trust of employees and key stakeholders, it will be difficult to make changes and drive the business forward.

Five years ago, the Human Capital Institute collaborated with the large consulting firm Hewitt Human Capital Consulting and published the results of a comprehensive leadership survey entitled, the State of Talent Management, Today's Challenges, Tomorrow's Opportunities. The study revealed five looming workforce challenges, including the attraction and retention of skilled professionals, developing manager capability, retaining high performers, developing succession pool depth and addressing management and leadership talent.

When employers hear the term risk management, they more than likely think about identifying, assessing and prioritizing areas of financial risk arising out of such things as a business acquisition, major purchases, equipment failure and/or the crash of a major information technology support system.

Have you ever wondered what CEOs really want? What does a CEO expect from his/her organization, its senior team and the individual players? Generally it can be summed up in two words: creative alignment.

Over the next 10 years, 200,000 small business owners in Canada alone will turn 65 and want to retire. This number does not include their employees, mid to large businesses, corporations and public organizations. When you add all of those together this clearly becomes a critical issue with major impacts and ramifications.

As our workforce changes and becomes more diverse, the general thinking on talent and people resources is changing as well. While senior employees and managers are still essential to organizational success, there is now wide-spread recognition that improved performance depends on the acquisition, development, engagement and deployment of new talent.

There is an old saying that the higher the level of success a candidate achieves in their career, the more difficult it is for organizations to thoroughly assess their skills. Why is that? The answer is this: by the time a manager rises to a senior executive position, they are typically very good communicators. Good communicators are skilled at telling a stories, selling themselves and, on occasion, embellishing their skills. It’s just what they do.