“What's a sundial in the shade?” Benjamin Franklin once asked. “Hide not your talents – they for use were made.” Yet that is exactly what organisations are doing. They pour millions of pounds into recruiting and developing them, yet they are still not getting the leaders they’ll need in the future.

It is tempting to blame demographics. Forrester Research estimates that between 50 per cent and 75 per cent of today's senior managers will be eligible for retirement in 2010. The US Census Bureau says that 78 million employees will reach retirement age in the next five to ten years but there are only 45 million people to replace them – a picture replicated across much of the developed world.

Although alarming, these statistics are nothing new and organisations will claim to have adapted, attracting recruits from different backgrounds and ethnic groups, in some cases even from other parts of the world. But large numbers of new people coming into an organisation today don’t necessarily translate into a sufficient number of leaders in the future.

The trouble is that the talent and diversity agendas don’t sit comfortably together. Diversity may be aimed at opening up opportunities for everyone, irrespective of their background, beliefs or ethnicity, but talent management is predicated on identifying and developing a small number of people. If anything, these two approaches are diverging: we want more diverse organisations but we also have an increasingly narrow definition of the attributes we want our future leaders to have.

The complex, fluid organisations of the future will need to bring these two ways of thinking together and manage a broader definition of talent on a much wider scale. To do this, they will have to change their focus from supply (a typical talent management programme starts here) to demand. How will the nature of work in their organisations change? What kind of skills and people will they need? The solution to a shortage of supply lies in a clearer definition of demand.

Fiona Czerniawska is director of the MCA Think-Tank

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