In today´s World, especially in the more developed economies, services related industries account for most of the Gross Domestic Product. Manufacturing, mining, agriculture, fishing and farming usually account for less than 50% of the GDP all of them combined while services represents more than half of the economy.
One of the more important differences between services and other components of the GDP is that in the latter you have (fixed) assets, like factories, land and so on, that have a value in itself. In the Services sector there are not important fixed assets. The main resource is the people. So, to have talented people should be one of the most, if not the most, important objective of companies in those industries. And yet, it looks like that corporations do not behave like this. Human Resources are not seen as “assets” but as “cost” and, hence, from time to time, especially in difficult times, they massively terminate hundreds or thousands of jobs.
This is not a place to discuss about the ethics or morals behind the massive layoffs communicated regularly to Stock Exchanges around the globe. But the point is, if most of the companies in developed economies are in the service sector, and human capital is their most important asset, does it make sense to treat people as numbers, as costs?
Definitively not for a leader. For a leader knows that he and his project is as good as the team involved in full brain and heart in it. And to build a team is good but not enough. What you want is to create a talented team. It is not an easy task, but a great leader in a winning project must be able to attract talent, to nurture it, to make it grow, to let it fly high and to reward it. In return, that talent will bring brains, ideas, motivation, emotions, leadership, creativity, all what it is required to make dreams come true. But all this, this recipe for success is based on one simple assumption: talent belongs to human beings, so only if you treat humans as what they are and not as numbers or costs, you will be able to get what talent brings on the table