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73% of companies have decided that lying to their employees about their potential to advance is the right choice. Does their logic hold up? We present compelling reasons why more transparency – especially with your top talent — is always the right choice.

Every week a new headline emerges about the dismal state of employee engagement and what must be done to address it. Before you jump into action, consider this: it’s not true. Engagement is just fine and global averages tell us nothing.

Surprisingly few organizations can crisply explain their talent strategy or show the tangible links to company success. We offer below an approach for creating a simple, thorough and powerful plan for using talent to reach your business goals.

When we see organizations fail in their transformation efforts, we find that many of them have not asked and answered three fundamental questions about how to succeed in the transformed company:

1. Do people know what to do?
2. Do they know how to do it?
3. Do they want to do it?

Just like the rules for avoiding a bear attack in the wilderness, the rules for your company avoiding an attack from private equity bears are very clear. Just like those in the wilderness, these rules are often violated and the consequences can be deadly. clear and violated even more frequently.

While some HRBP’s consistently support talent management, others actively or passively block the talent agenda. Their resistance may be driven by control needs, jealously or outright lack of confidence in your abilities. That resistance can destroy any chance that your talent practices will deliver their intended business impact.

The hard truth about performance management is that its success – like most good things – requires challenging and sometimes unpleasant work.

This makes benchmarking your neighbors a risky proposition when you audit your HR strategy and practice.

Benchmarking stories provide false comfort even if they describe well-known companies and come from well respected sources.

We avoid assessing our talent practices for the same reasons that we avoid scheduling an annual physical exam. In both cases, it’s in your best interest to make sure that little aches don’t become big pains.