• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 23, 2011

I’m confused by the ad industry talent crisis panel discussion organized by Havas' Arnold Worldwide during this morning’s session of the Cannes Media Lions. The talent management gurus from places like McKinsey and Spencer Stuart are saying that things like paying higher compensation and spending more money on training people are actually antithetical to retaining good talent and motivating them to be better.

That’s a problem for agencies, they say, because Madison Avenue historically has spent too much energy focusing on compensation and training as methods for motivating and retaining talent.

Moreover, Spencer Stuart media chief Grant Duncan thinks that’s compounded by the fact that agencies typically lag in another crucial area of talent recruitment and motivation: leadership. He said they historically have had a “Napoleonic” approach that is a turn-off to the way younger generations of employees view their roles in organizations.

“You’re talking about a generation that leaves and breaths open systems, collective collaborative approaches,” he said, adding that the “power leadership thing” is “quite antithetical.”

But the panelist who seems to make most sense to me is Alexis Nasard, the chief commercial officer at Heineken, who doesn’t think the crisis is nearly as complex as some of the industry thinkers seem to be over-thinking about.

“Talent is contagious,” he said, repeating, “Talent is contagious. When you have the best, it attracts the best. When you have people who are admired who join certain outfits, other people want to join them. It is a virtuous circle.”

And before you ask the next obvious question, Nasard answers it for you: “How do I get it started? Typically, you need to lean forward to get the virtual circle started.”

Nasard offered other valuable tips for agency organizations, including “engaging the client in the process,” and especially enabling new or young talent to gain access to senior people on the client side to help them “demystify the process.”

Back to over-thinking, Nasard recalled how his own organization – typical of many big, corporate ones – would field massive employee surveys to gain insights about the cultural issues that might be impeding performance. He described them as humongous questionnaires with “799 questions” that were sent to thousands of people, and which would take so much time to complete and tabulate that by the time they were completed, the organization needed to go back into the field and do it all over again.

“I didn’t find those very useful or very actionable,” Nasard said, explaining that he asked his HR team to go back and zero in on only a handful of “very concrete” questions – three to be exact – that led to the greatest insights about developing and retaining great talent:

Do I get to do what I’m best at?

Is my work important for the company?

Does my manager care about me?

“If the answer to these questions is, ‘no,’ then people are going to complain about their salary, their bonus…,” he said, offering the flip-side scenario: “If the answer is, ‘yes,’ then you’d be surprised at how unmaterialistic people can be.”