The whole world on your shoulders... Does delivering business excellence rely on too few people?

Do you feel organisations rely too heavily on too few people to deliver excellence?

Bill Gates once said "Take our 20 best people away, and I will tell you that Microsoft would become an unimportant company."

In April 2012 there was an article by Phillip Delves Broughton in the Financial Times entitled only a privileged few work with top talent, he went onto say that most people who work are average and companies on the whole have to deal with mainly B and C grade employees. His research lent on a paper by a professor from Harvard Business School that said 40% of people are not going to be good at innovating regardless of what they do, 5 % are born with the instinct which leaves 55% of adults who might have a chance of innovating in their roles.

If you ask the majority of FTSE100  companies a lot will say they probably invest more in the development of their 'Senior Managers' as a portion than they do with the rest of their workforce.  and if their HR/Talent teams had developed a matrix of their people and where they sit from a performance point of view it would be the minority sitting in the top right quadrant of high performers

So is it a fact that most of us are average achievers, never to hit the headlines of innovation, excellence and corporate recognition.. or does everyone have it in them to play a real part in the success of an organisation, or is it really about the way a lot of companies have structured themselves in the last 30 years that ensures it is only the top 20%  who can effect something in the company they work in. As Gary Hamel a prominent Management thinker said recently in the FT, 'the whole notion of leadership is discredited, we have organisations that demand too much of the few and far too little of the many so we disenfranchise most employees.'

A lot of people are talking about Engagement and how to achieve a happy workforce which is all good stuff but if your company structure is the barrier to enabling this, companies could be wasting a lot of their training/development budget for years to come and we will continue to see statistics about the majority of people being unhappy or unfulfilled in their jobs.