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What differentiates one company from the other when talents consider their job alternatives? How can there be created challenges and opportunities for the high potentials of generation y?

As Sandbox’ representative in London, I had the great pleasure to give a speech and to join a panel discussion about these hot issues on the annual CWC Conference “Future Talent in Oil and Gas 2008”.

At this conference, the HR directors of the major oil and gas companies discussed about the sector’s talent shortage and how to counter it. Closer and more interactive partnerships with universities, as well as the “brushing up” of technical careers were among the suggested answers.

To the pleasure of Sandbox, one major need had come up which has not been fulfilled in the market place so far and which Sandbox aims to facilitate: “behavioural innovation”. The problem of most organizations today, it seems, is that their leadership programs include around 10% highly ambitious future leaders which have the actual capabilities needed to lead; and around 90% which might have the ambition but not necessarily the capabilities to go ahead.

How can you get these 10% to share their capabilities with their “worse-performing” peers? Well, they have to learn it, they have to be trained to do it. However, probably not only by the old-paradigmers from generation x, but also by the best gen y-peers of other industries, other areas, other professions.

If you take a look at the thoughts of Christopher Lomas at the gen y consultancy naked generations (who facilitated a great workshop about gen y at this conference), you will see why this shift is necessary: the old management paradigms under which generation x have operated are outdated; new leadership models are emerging around generation y. And who could teach or rather share these insights and models better than those who have already employed them in practice?

And who do you think is more probable to show and share those new capabilities (such as “collaborative leadership”): is it a line manager who is operating within the old paradigms of their organization (and whom you might meet in your “company network”), or, let’s say, rather a politician, who always had to establish coalitions, who always had to convince people to vote for him, and who always had to build up a valuable political network?

What makes us so convinced about our network is not only that a diversity of great people comes together and shares ideas about projects, leadership, and so forth; above all, we are convinced that many of these ideas and their implementation would not have been evolved or facilitated within the “traditional paradigms” of most institutions.