Talent Management

Identify High-Impact Roles and Support Key People for Better Results

Every organization says “people are our greatest asset,” but in practice, a small proportion of roles, people, and decisions drive most of the impact. That’s not cynicism; it’s the 80/20 Rule in talent management: roughly 20% of roles and individuals create 80% of value, risk, and culture.

When you apply Pareto thinking to talent management, you stop treating every position and process as equal. You focus on identifying and nurturing the critical few roles and people, building systems that attract and grow high-impact talent, and addressing the small number of people issues that cause most of your headaches.

The 80/20 Reality of Talent

In many businesses, a minority of roles (and the people in them) disproportionately affect outcomes:

• Key revenue-generating or customer-facing roles.
• Critical technical or operational positions.
• Leaders who shape culture and decision-making.
• “Connectors” who influence collaboration across teams.

At the same time, a small number of chronic underperformers or toxic influencers can drag down entire departments. Effective talent management is about being honest about these asymmetries and acting accordingly.

Step 1: Identify Your High-Impact Roles

Before focusing on individuals, clarify roles that are disproportionately important to strategy, value creation, and risk. This keeps you from over-indexing on charisma or popularity alone.

• Ask:
  • Which roles, if left vacant or done poorly, would cause serious damage?
  • Which roles contribute most directly to revenue, customer experience, or core operations?
  • Which roles shape critical decisions or culture?
• Examples: key account managers, senior engineers on core systems, product managers for flagship products, frontline supervisors, HR or people leaders.
• Real-life example: A mid-sized SaaS company realized that a handful of customer success managers handling top accounts had more impact on revenue stability than many internal roles. They reclassified these as critical roles, investing more in hiring, training, and retention there – with clear ROI.

8020 move: Create a list of your 10–20% highest-impact roles. Prioritize them in hiring, development, succession planning, and retention efforts.

Step 2: Spot and Support High-Leverage People

Within and beyond those roles, some individuals consistently raise the performance of those around them: they solve problems, mentor others, model values, and innovate. These “force multipliers” are your talent 20%.

• Look for people who:
  • Deliver strong results over time.
  • Are sought out by others for advice or help.
  • Improve morale and collaboration.
  • Proactively improve processes or products.
• Talk to managers and peers to identify unsung heroes, not just obvious stars.
• Real-life example: A quiet senior developer wasn’t the loudest voice in meetings but was the go-to person for tricky issues and mentoring juniors. Once leadership recognized his outsized influence, they gave him more formal support and a clear growth path, which helped retain him and leverage his impact more intentionally.

8020 move: Make an explicit list of your top-impact people at each level and ask: what are we doing to keep, grow, and learn from them?

Step 3: Build 80/20 Development Paths

You can’t offer every development opportunity to everyone at once, and you don’t need to. Focused growth plans for your critical roles and high-potential people produce disproportionate benefits for the whole organization.

• For key roles and people, define:
  • Top 3–5 skills or experiences that would unlock the next level of impact.
  • Concrete steps: stretch assignments, mentoring, courses, rotations.
  • Support and feedback processes.
• Don’t ignore others, but accept that depth of development will vary with role impact.
• Real-life example: An operations leader created a “critical roles academy” for team leads in core logistics positions: quarterly workshops, cross-site visits, and mentorship. This relatively small program significantly improved performance and reduced turnover where it mattered most.

8020 move: Start by designing targeted development for your critical 10–20% of roles and people. Let the learnings and practices from those programs later cascade to the wider organization.

Step 4: Address the Small Number of High-Cost People Issues

A few problematic behaviors – chronic underperformance, toxicity, unreliability – can sap morale, slow execution, and drive away good people. Leaders often avoid these because they’re uncomfortable, but dealing with them is one of the highest-leverage things you can do.

• Identify recurring patterns: missed deadlines, disruptive behavior, disrespect, resistance to feedback.
• Have clear, documented expectations and feedback conversations.
• Provide support and chances to improve, but be willing to make hard calls if things don’t change.
• Real-life example: A “brilliant jerk” in a sales team brought in revenue but created chaos and fear. After repeated coaching attempts failed, leadership chose to let him go. In the months that followed, the team’s overall performance improved and turnover decreased – illustrating how removing one toxic node can unlock the potential of many others.

8020 move: Make a list of your top 5–10 recurring people problems and create specific plans to address them. The improvement in culture and performance can be dramatic.

Step 5: Design Simple, High-Impact Talent Systems

Talent management doesn’t need to be buried in complex processes. A few well-designed systems around hiring, feedback, and growth often produce most of the benefits of more elaborate setups.

• Hiring: clear role scorecards for critical positions, structured interviews, realistic job previews.
• Performance: regular 1:1s, simple goals, and lightweight reviews focused on strengths and growth, not just ratings.
• Succession: identify potential successors for key roles and give them opportunities to learn.
• Real-life example: A growing startup moved from ad hoc hiring to using brief role scorecards and structured interviews for its highest-impact roles. Even this modest change improved hire quality and reduced misfits significantly – without adding heavy bureaucracy.

8020 move: Start by improving your talent systems where they intersect with your highest-impact roles. Avoid over-designing policies for edge cases; optimize for the vital few areas that shape most of your talent outcomes.

Talent Management as Strategic 80/20

Effective talent management is not about treating everyone identically; it’s about being fair, transparent, and strategic about where you invest more. The 80/20 Rule gives you a lens to see where your attention matters most: crucial roles, high-leverage people, targeted development, addressing chronic problems, and building a few simple systems that support all of that.

Do those things steadily, and your organization becomes far better at attracting, growing, and keeping the people who drive most of your mission forward – while reducing the drag from the small number of persistent talent issues that quietly hold you back.