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Making a market in talent

McKinsey Quarterly put out a great article about two years ago called "Making a Market in Talent."  Before the Oracles, SAPs, and Taleos of the world were heavily marketing the link between recruiting and succession, McKinsey was somewhat esoterically talking about the need to create internal talent markets to "pull" rather than "push" talent around the organization.

Reading Slywotzky's timeless book, Value Migration, I have been reminded of the McKinsey article. 

Slywotzky spends a chapter of the book talking about Merck in the 1980s and the way in which they focused development resources and accelerated time to market through internal competition. Increased government regulation was skyrocketing R&D costs while also shortening product lifecycles, and so Merck's abililty to be first to market with blockbuster drugs gave them a huge competitive advantage.

In Slywotzky's words...

"Vagelos created cross-functional teams around the most promising and important products... As an incentive, teams had to "compete" for resources (both people and dollars) throughout the organization, forcing project managers to "sell" and functional managers to "buy" into the hottest projects...

This free market allocated resources in a way that normal budgeting couldn't.  Focus was automatic.  People wanted to be part of a blockbuster team." (page 142)

So what if your organization broke down any and all barriers to internal movement and empowered employees and managers to seek each other out through well executed internal talent marketplaces?

What might happen to the hard-nosed, streamrolling manager who scoffs at employee development plans and consistently de-motivates his (or her) people? And if he is held accountable for performance, how might the talent drain from his department accelerate the process of ushering him out of the company?

And on the other end of the continuum, what might become of the entrepreneurial, inspiring, and people focused leader and her (or his) promising new start-up unit, once employees started to catch wind of the fact that she was looking for more talented people?

If people and talent are what drive our organizations and economies this day in age, I can't help but think that true internal talent markets would have a massive impact on performance, while also giving disillusioned and disengaged employees mobility options that don't involve leaving the organization.

What is learning agility...truly?

I am starting to see the term "learning agility" thrown around by some talent management technology vendors and even a few clients that are trying to mature in their succession planning capabilities.

The very basic idea, as I know it, is that a person's openness to new ideas and situations and ability to learn quickly is indicative of their potential to move into more complex roles. Higher level roles tend to be more generalist in nature and require an ability to pick up and apply new concepts on-the-fly.  Thus, they say, the importance of learning agility for succession planning.

Let's get one thing clear, however. Learning agility is only really useful as a label or a sound bite - as an easy way of conveying what I just mentioned. 

Beyond that, it poops out in its importance because it fails to explain anything that can't be explained by other factors that we have already been measuring for a very long time.  I bet you can guess what those are... that's right... cognitive ability and personality!

Call it openness, curiosity, gumption, moxie, brains, smarts, learning agility, mental horsepower, genius, whatever.  Just know that if you want to measure it, measuring it directly via proven and universally accepted cognitive ability tests and personality inventories is the most reliable way to go.

 

A world full of bad mission statements

Much has been made of core values and vision statements in the past, even though most do nothing but collect dust as good intentions.

The other breed of bad mission statements are those that convey nothing at all. 

Like this one I spotted on a neighbor's keycard while lunching the other day:

"To create competitive advantage by building a strong team"

I have to give the folks that came up with this kudos for putting the mission statement somewhere so unforgettable, and for being brave enough to tackle a mission statement under such severe space limitations.  But they certainly receive a "needs development" in communicating something 1) genuine and inspiring; and 2) specific enough to spur  aligned action.

Fast Company's article on AOL's woes last month expressed similar sentiments.

"At the simplest level, AOL's troubles in the past couple of years are the story of a business without a vision and therefore without guiding principles to clarify which risks are worth taking -- and which are worth sticking to. Back in its heyday, AOL's mission statement hung on a plaque in the lobby in Dulles, in shiny silver lettering that read, to build a global medium as central to people's lives as the telephone or television... and even more valuable. By 2000, that vision had been accomplished, and no next-stage aspiration had risen to replace it. AOL did finally convene a committee to write a new mission statement in 2006. They came up with this gem: "To serve the world's most engaged community." It is a creed that could just as well suit a Hardee's."

If you find your organization similarly lacking vision and direction, do yourself a favor: be brave enough to write a mission statement worth believing in and acting upon.  In so doing, you'll inevitably also alienate some of those who don't share the vision (more on that here), but at least you'll know that you have the right people on the bus, and they won't just be along for the ride.

Competencies and old school performance management

In my last post, I made mention of the old vs new school approaches to performance management. 

While I believe the reasons for doing performance management are changing, what I don't intend to suggest is that the old school rationale underlying performance management has entirely faded. It certainly hasn't and, indeed, is still very valid.

If that's disappointing to hear, perhaps you'll find some consolation in the fact that new approaches to performance management are also making the old school stuff, such as the dreaded performance improvement plan, less painless and more effective overall.

Those of you who have read my blog won't be surprised to know that I'm referring largely to the use of competencies in performance management.

To illustrate, I'll use a recent example from my personal experience. 

Sound management wisdom

Things have been quiet on my blog over the last two weeks, in part because work has been busy and in part because I've had trouble wrapping up several posts.

In the meantime, however, I have been picking up some great articles that I want to share.

One talent management best practice is the idea of having non-managerial career paths that employees can explore if they don't have the desire, wherewithal, or competencies for strong leadership. But even if these career paths exist, people are sometimes still fooled into thinking they want to be managers.  So programs like those discussed in this HBR Editor's Blog article can be hugely beneficial. I've seen them in action and have participated in projects designed to this end.  Absolutely worth the investment.

Another good HBR Conversation Starter article here on fighting managerial incompetence through competency management-related practices.

President as CEO

PDI has built a very intriguing, viral site for rating US presidential candidates against a set of CEO level competencies.  Take a peek here -

http://www.nextnationalceo.com/

We tend to think that the only good way to evaluate a presidential candidate is based on political platform, and we balk at people who make "gut" decisions based solely on a candidate's character or demeanor.

Yet  we assess the rest of the world's qualifications in terms of skills and competencies.  Why the divide?  Is it meaningful?

Try your hand at looking at candidates through a different lens.

Making talent management meaningful

Jason Averbook and Mike Brennan of Knowledge Infusion have been posting some interesting thoughts lately on the need to think about industry context when embarking upon new talent management initiatives.

Whether speaking of the technology, the processes, your organization's competencies,  or the analytics you choose, etc., the need to move beyond cross-industry best practices and benchmarks is certainly acute.  I don't want to get too soap-boxy here - companies need to start somewhere, of course - but bringing talent management to a point where it has a true "strategic" impact on company performance (versus "strategic" meaning "greater impact than previously") requires a link to how the company creates value today and how it intends to create value in the future.

This is much more than adjusting practice to industry context.  It's knowing your organization's current business model - its approach to creating and capturing value vis a vis its competitors - and how that business model will be changing in the future, so well that you can mold your entire talent management strategy around it.

Michael Lewis's Moneyball has a quote from former space engineer turned baseball writer, Eric Walker, (pg 58) that illustrates this idea beautifully.

Analyzing baseball yields many numbers of interest and value.  Yet far and away - far, far and away - the most critical number in all of baseball is 3: the three outs that define an inning.  Until the third out, anything is possible; after it, nothing is.  Anything that increases the offense's chances of making an out is bad; anything that decreases it is good.  And what is on-base percentage? Simply yet exactly put, it is the probability of that the batter will not make an out. 

Kind of mind-boggling.  Conventional baseball wisdom put home runs and batting average much higher on the list.  But a more thoughtful analysis of how value is created by a baseball team shows that a player's ability to draw a walk is often more meaningful  to the team's success than his/her capacity for knocking one out of the park.

John Boudreau and Pete Ramstad's increasingly influential Beyond HR shows the power of thinking in terms of business model and specific, future-oriented strategies in their discussion of Boeing versus Airbus, as well (read it, it's fabulous).  Their analysis of how the future of the industry was viewed by each company yields insights around why Boeing went for the 787 Dreamliner and why Airbus invested in the A380, and subsequently, how this reality translated into two very different views of what talent pools and which competencies within those talent pools were critical to success.

This is, ultimately, where HR really needs to go.  Not only will thoughtful alignment with strategy trump even the most sophisticated technology and industry-specific practices, but it's what will keep your HR department's ability to add strategic value from ever becoming commoditized.

Obliterating the Job Profile

Reflecting on the series of "Making Competencies Work" posts that I finished a couple of weeks ago, it dawned on me that, particularly with the hands-off and experimental approaches, I am essentially promoting the obliteration of the job profile. 

It seems strange, maybe even stupid, that I would advocate such an idea at this point in time.  ERPs and point solutions alike are finally coming to recognize the incredible value of helping customers build out robust employee and job profiles (including competency data), so that they can apply search/match functionality to the content. In so doing, they give companies greater visibility into their human capital, as well as empower automated career pathing and development planning.

Indeed, in the same way every performance management and 360 application in the market essentially consists of beefed up survey technology, likely every succession and development planning module on the planet is build around the basic structure seen below.

The problem with this framework is that the piece on the right gets stale quickly, given the pace of business, and is very difficult to manage dynamically given the current technology.  It's the same challenge I confront in the "Making Competencies Work" posts.

Instead, what I'm suggesting, I suppose, is that companies obliterate the job profile and start to rely on real-time analysis of their talent data instead. 

Whether trying to fill a new job requisition or planning the future leadership of your company, you're better off relying on what the system tells you about success in the role and what is known about the future of the organization and position than putting your faith into a job profile that was thrown together, perhaps haphazardly, at a different point in time, amid different realities.

So, instead of continuing to build out the job profile, what perhaps is needed is a rethinking of the model.  What would the next generation of talent management software look like if it we kept the person profile on the left but replaced the right hand side with a set of meaningful analytics?  Would we be one step closer to finally making optimal decisions about talent?

More important things in life

I have spent the last week observing the wonder of the natural dying process and mourning the loss of a wonderful man.  My father-in-law, after a two year struggle with a blood cancer called multiple myeloma, passed on late Wednesday night at the age of 61.

The cancer may have taken his life, but it certainly never robbed him of his spirit and relentless courage.  The year he spent in remission, he was determined to fully rebuild his strength and live life as normal, despite an ultimately sobering prognosis. He proved his ability to do so in September, easily completing a 100-mile bike trek only nine months after going through a painful and debilitating stem cell transplant.  It was a remarkable feat; one that demonstrated he would not be defeated.

His death serves as a good reminder that those things that can at times consume our interest and energy are largely inconsequential in light of life's grandeur.

At the same time, the stories and characteristics for which people like my father-in-law will be remembered bring to life these seemingly frivolous ideas (e.g., competencies and talent management).

In recalling what made my father-in-law such a wonderful husband, dad, friend, and boss, people won't first refer to his years of experience or extensive accomplishments. They won't cite certifications in effective parenting or mastery of the concepts in "Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus."

Rather, they'll speak of his remarkable integrity and personal fortitude, and remember his work ethic and sense of self-discipline.  They'll recall his patience and kindness, and the deep interest he took in others' lives, dreams, and accomplishments. And they'll continue to admire the wisdom, counsel, and gentle candor he humbly offered others throughout his life.

These are the "competencies" we try to measure and develop, to ensure that the qualities and values embodied by people like my father-in-law live on in the actions and values and others.

 

In Memoriam

Steven Goldthwait
May 18, 1946 - February 28, 2008

"'The time has come,' the Walrus said..."

Making competencies work

Despite all of their virtues, competencies are seldom deployed effectively within organizations to better manage talent. Competency management, for all intents and purposes, is a broken process. 

And despite all of the dialogue that takes place around competencies , both in corporate circles and among analysts and consultants (here, here, here, and here, for starters), the situation doesn't seem to get any better.

While acknowledging that this is a hugely complex problem, I'd like to stick my neck out to offer my opinion on what, specifically, is broken, as well as provide a few potential solutions. Clearly, this isn't a task that can be tackled in one post, so hang on for a bit of a long and bumpy ride.