The Fatal Flaw in Performance Reviews No One Ever Talks About...

Project Social: Popularity

One of the early goals of project social was to see how different themes drove more visits and comments. My project social partner Dave Ryan and I are occasionally (OK, frequently) baffled by which posts get lots of traffic, which receive the most comments and which are comparatively ignored.

Which makes it interesting to take stock at the beginning of a new year to see which posts were the most popular overall and compare these to the ones we thought were the best.  It turns out that personal preference is rarely a reliable indicator of popularity.

To demonstrate this point, Dave, Lyn and I are taking this opportunity to review our blog stats and find out which posts were the most viewed, the most commented and also list our personal favorite posts.

Lessons learned:

• People like trends, lists and carnivals. 
• Sometimes you strike a chord. 
• Sometimes you don't.
• That's all I've got.

Without further adieu, here are the top Working Girl posts of all time and be sure to check out what Dave and Lyn have to say over at HR Official and HR Bacon Hut.  It's like a little carnival! 

Top 5 Most Viewed: 
#1: Project Social: The Dark Side of HR - A hard-hitting look at the dark underbelly of HR, mahahahaha!!!
#2: The Top Talent Management Trends of 2011 - Find out if any of my predictions actually came true...
#3: Business Is About Community - A heart warming story of community in action at the workplace
#4: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective 5-Year-Olds - Now a best selling business book (just kidding)
#5: Top 10 Tips for Managers - This post is pretty much what it sounds like

Top 5 Highest Commented:
#1 January 5 Carnival of HR: Reflections, Resolutions, Predictions and Rants - A great new year line up of HR goodness from your favorite HR bloggers!
#2 Project Social: Let's Clique - Inaugural project social post
#3 The Top Talent Management Trends of 2011 
#4 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective 5-Year-Olds
#5 On Leadership and Stinky Fish - Sorry, you just have to read it if you want to know what leaders and stinky fish have in common 

My Personal Favorites:
#1 Let's Not Overdo This Qualifications Things - Companies should focus more on problem solving skills than formal qualifications because after 6 months it's a wash what you did before.  (This advice obviously doesn't apply to brain surgeons.)
#2 Teamwork or Talent? - Why it's a crock to say that teams are more important than high performing individuals
#3 Well, You Can Always Pull a Tinkerbell - Before becoming a catty Peter Pan groupie Tinkerbell nearly destroyed Fairyland and then saved it with her amazing leadership skills and resourcefulness
#4 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective 5-Year-Olds
#5 I Want to Work for Diddy - An early post that explains everything you need to know about effective talent management

Top 5 Talent Management Trends in 2011

Here are five of my favorite talent management trends to help you get excited about 2011. Why? Because these trends promise change, growth and opportunity.

Trend #1: Creative talent acquisition strategies - In response to talent scarcity companies will continue to pursue creative strategies to acquire top talent such as contractors, remote workers, retirees, part-time workers. As a result, the workforce will grow increasingly culturally diverse, global, virtual, connected, and multi-generational. Needless to say, traditional top-down hierarchical management styles and one-size-fits-all approaches to talent management won't cut it with the modern workforce.

Trend #2: Focus on engagement - Few top performers consider themselves highly engaged and as many as 1 in 5 are actively looking for new opportunities. This isn’t surprising given that the workforce has undergone both a cognitive and a demographic shift while talent management practices lag behind. Given ample evidence that companies with highly engaged employees outperform companies with neutrally or negatively engaged employees, over the next few years we'll see more companies adopt - not just talk about - best practices such as closer scrutiny of manager quality, continuous feedback, talent mining and mobility, workforce segmentation, employee recognition programs and differentiated pay.

Trend #3: Technology’s finally starting to deliver on its promises from the 80s - I've been waiting a long time to say that! Modern talent management solution capabilities include talent profiles, faceted search, talent pooling, goal alignment, embedded multi-dimensional workforce analysis, mobile device access and collaboration tools. These solutions help business people work together across borders and time zones; accurately assess workforce costs, capabilities and capacity; align work to business objectives; and optimize deployment of a highly diverse workforce.

Trend #4: HR’s about the business - It always was, but now that costs have been cut as far as they can there’s a new focus on value creation. HR professionals have a unique opportunity to help drive share price with improved workforce insight, alignment and optimization and it will be interesting to see how they take advantage of this opportunity. Modern HR solutions can help but aren't a substitute for strategic thinking and execution - the solution needs to fit the strategy, not the other way around.

Trend #5: Global's the new black - According to a recent Towers Watson study Creating a Sustainable Rewards and Talent Model companies are focused on creating globally consistent talent and rewards strategies in order to improve efficiency and alignment while reducing costs and risks. Global consistency will require companies to identify talent programs and critical talent pools across borders; standardize job profiles, compensation plans and competencies; and define a global performance and rewards process. At the same time, companies must remain locally flexible in order to stay competitive and compliant in each region. In other words, global companies need to get better at managing both globally and locally.

Wishing you a very talented new year!

Are High Performers the Worst Managers?

I once wrote a post on The Peter Principle, which discussed a study finding that it's better to promote at random than promote high performers.

At the time I was of the opinion that most people would prefer a competent manager to someone selected at random or because they have an executive sponsor. Upon mature reflection, however, I've partially changed my mind.

Talent management puts a great deal of focus on what influences people in non-management roles but too little attention is paid to what drives manager behavior. Since talent management can't succeed without skilled management, this strikes me as a glaring oversight.

Imagine an intelligent, efficient person who consistently delivers excellent quality work. Better yet, not only does this person have deep skills in her own area, she also has broad knowledge of her colleague's work and is respected by customers and colleagues alike.

Now let's promote her to team lead. Let's even avoid the pitfall of making new managers keep doing their old jobs and back fill her vacated position.

Unfortunately, if we now just turn her loose to find her own way, she probably won't be a very good manager. The reason is that people tend to fall back on what has worked for them in the past.

Think about it. Here you have someone very competent, very focused on their own success and slightly insecure about their new challenge. The first thing they're probably going to do is get in everyone's hair telling them how everything should be done, particularly the poor person who's now doing their old job.

But that, while annoying to some, is not the worst possible outcome. After all, the work will still get done and probably done pretty well. Over time we may lose a few competent people who dislike being micromanaged but we shouldn't see too many ripples at the top of the organization.

The bigger risk is to the long-term health of the organization because managers who succeed by being better than everyone may be reluctant to hire or encourage people who know more or perform better than them.

Of course, promoting high performers without any sort of coaching is not the only recipe for flawed management. Martha Finney has a thought-provoking post over at SmartBlog that discusses how people promoted during the last war for talent are still making trouble today by squeezing out the best people.

Generally speaking, people are promoted based on at least one of three things:

1) individual performance
2) management or executive sponsorship
3) they have 'management experience'

Notice that not one of these focuses on key leadership skills such as mentoring, communicating, trusting others, helping others be successful, etc. Even the management experience criteria only values the experience, not the skill.

The result? Flawed management. And by extension, flawed talent management.

This post featured in the August Leadership Carnival: http://jasonseiden.com/leadership-carnival-fail-style/

Is Attrition a Key Component of Retention?

My company's product has a really cool embedded analytics framework that lets you slice and dice whatever data you have in the system. So, for example, you could look at a report that shows performance rating, then view your high performers by various criteria, say, salary quartile and hiring source.

This ad hoc ability to drill into the data allows you to root around answering questions that occur to you spontaneously, i.e., where do we get our best people?

It's kind of fun to play with and you start to find intriguing patterns, such as several low performers who used to be outstanding perfomers, all reporting to the same manager. Hmmn, could that be a management problem...?

Of course, the answers aren't always in the data, but the potential red flags are there for the asking. Once you spot a red flag you can find out more to determine whether you need to take action.

It was while I was slicing and dicing succession plan data that it hit me in a very visual way: At some point, even a high potential will reach the limit of what he or she can achieve at their current company - after all, there is only one CEO.

I was looking at the two possible successors to the CEO. One of them was the 'top candidate' and the other was, for lack of a better term, 'the spare.' The top candidate was ready to assume the CEO mantle within a year and therein lay the first problem: the CEO wasn't planning to go anywhere that soon.

I then drilled curiously into the successor apparents for the CEO successor and discovered that the top candidate was 'ready now' with a medium retention risk. Not necessarily a problem if she likes her current job but it might be a good idea to watch that to make sure she doesn't get too tired of waiting. The second candidate, however, was flagged with a high risk of separation.

Gee, I wonder why?

Maybe because if you're the second runner up for a position that isn't changing hands any time soon, you may have reached the end of your career at a particular company. Technically speaking, you're not a high potential any more, although probably no one will put it to you in such uncomfortable terms. You may start to feel... itchy.

So, what should the company do? This person has been tagged as a high potential and assigned to at least one succession plan. Presumably some investment has been made in this individual as well in terms of training, mentoring, etc., and they also probably have a fair amount of valuable intellectual property in their heads.

But does it really make sense to throw more rewards or titles or what have you at a restless executive so they stay in their current job? And is that what's best for them?

Or does it make more sense to let them go graciously if they find another company that offers them a new challenge? And quietly make sure their successor is ready to step up.

And let's not forget about everyone else. Career development is a bit of a ponzi scheme, after all - barring wild growth, it only works if people at the top periodically move out of the way. In fact, in a sense attrition may be key to retention because it helps companies retain the people who haven't yet reached the end of their career tether.

Now, I'm not saying experienced leaders should be squeezed out of the way to make room for young up and comers - shudder - I'm just saying companies may work too hard to retain people who might be better off elsewhere.

In other words, if you have a blockade at the top of the succession chain you might want to revisit a few assumptions and make sure you're prepared for some turnover.

The 'I' in Team

"There's no 'i' in team."

I've never liked that phrase because I think it sells teams short by devaluing its members.

Successful teamwork requires collaboration, which means putting team success ahead of your own agenda.

But a key measure of team success is throughput. Efficient throughput depends on effective leadership and each team member doing his or her job efficiently, reliably, accurately and on time.

So, there may not be a small 'i' in team but there is a big 'I'. As in, 'Don't worry, guys, I have it covered.'

Always Available, Always Broken

'Always Available, Always Broken' is the name of an article I read recently in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

According to a study of people working in the IT branch throughout Germany, there is a level of stress permeating the entire industry that can negatively impact health and productivity.

There are several predictable culprits, for example:

• Fewer people having to do more work due to the current economic situation.
• The expectation that one is available round the clock via several different types of media.
• The ever changing nature of information technology, resulting in an overwhelmed feeling.

And one culprit that may surprise you: performance management, in particular goals.

The study cites 'new management techniques' involving the rollout of goals and frequent performance reviews. Sound familiar?

But wait, we like performance management and we sort of like goals. And frequent performance reviews are a plus for the employee, in fact some bold thinkers have even referred to timely and constructive feedback as part of employee compensation now that there's no money.

Plus, we all know that Generation Y loves regular reviews because they can't wait a whole year for feedback.

However, the researches who conducted this study warns that this can lead employees to feel like they have to permanently prove their right to be employed. And that can be unnecessarily - as in not value adding - stressful.

Because it creates a feeling of control and insecurity rather than trust.

And the results?

Well, for one thing, more people come to work when sick, which is not good for productivity or general workplace health. Or the national health care bill, come to mention it.

And of course team work tends to get shot to hell in this kind of paranoid, suspicious atmosphere.

But more importantly, highly qualified workers, who are expected to be pretty scarce in just a few years, are being systematically burned out.

This definitely raises some interesting questions about the level of stress of employees in other countries that have a less generous social net and vacation policy than Germany. Not to mention the possible social cost of stress related illnesses over the next decade.

In any event, it sounds like somebody's missing the boat on talent management. If done correctly, one doesn't expect big German men to cower in a corner weeping or laughing hysterically during a simple job satisfaction survey.

(This is why I always say you should talk to people, you don't get nearly as much depth from an online survey.)

What do you think, when does performance management turn into unhealthy micromanagement?

I Want to Work for Diddy

I dislike most reality TV but I found myself getting sucked into 'I Want to Work For Diddy' because of its unexpected insight into HR topics.

The basic premise is that they pull a bunch of people together who admit they don't want to do any real work and one token achiever, then give them impossible and annoying tasks to perform as a team. People get voted off until one finally gets to work for Diddy.

I was watching this at the gym one day and found myself in complete sympathy with the overbearing team lead, who was also the only one on the team who was capable of getting anything done. She was also pretty open and obnoxious in her critique of the other people on the team but then again, they really weren't very good.

Not surprisingly, when it came time to vote someone off, the team voted unanimously against her because they didn't like her.

At first I thought this was kind of dumb because without her the others didn't stand a chance of buying a pack of cigarettes for Diddy and coming back with the correct change but then I thought about it a bit more carefully.

It's clear that their decision to vote her off the team was an emotional one, which is a good reminder to all of us that even if you think you're better than everyone else, it isn't wise to flaunt it.

But there is a subtle logic to voting her off the team that reveals itself if you think about the probable outcome of not voting her off the team: over time it would become more and more apparent that she was the one getting the work done. Her competence actually represented a threat to the collective, which protected its members from being negatively singled out with its uniform incompetence.

My respect for the dum-dums rose when I realized this.

What can managers learn from this, besides 'don't be a jerk or people won't work for you'?

Don't expect people to make decisions that promote the greater good of their employer if it conflicts with their own greater good. Smart companies bring everyone's greater good into alignment.

That, my friends, is talent management.

Diddy apparently realized this as well, because his factotum (a hard-faced girl who used to be his PA) ended up keeping the competent girl in the running, kicking the worst of the losers off, giving the competent girl a pretty stinging lecture about her unbearable personality and telling the other losers they better straighten up or get lost.

And that, my friends, is performance management.

Talent MANAGEment

A cynical person might describe Pay for Performance like this: Management pretends to have a bevy of rewards that are earmarked for top performers and employees pretend that their daily activities are aligned with corporate goals and that their performance was instrumental in helping the company meet them.

But I'm not cynical. Let's face it, it's human to want to put your best foot forward and 'Pay for Performance' has a much better ring than 'Punish Medicrity' or 'We Have No Money This Year But Thanks For All Your Hard Work.'

When I started blogging on human resources topics about a year ago the market was depressingly oriented toward automated talent management solutions, as if to supplement poor management rather than improve it. Kind of like treating the symptoms rather than looking for a cure.

What not many people seemed to realize is this: The key player in making performance management process successful is the manager, not the process.

A good manager is more than someone with decent social skills who does an acceptable job of consolidating team metrics. Heck, anyone can do that. A good manager:

...is someone who makes employees feel important and valued.
...motivates people to either take on more responsibility or else be satisfied with the responsibility they have, as needed.
...makes employees believe they are rewarded in accordance to their contributions, which is especially important when times are tough and there are no promotions or raises to be had.

In other words, a good manager is equally versed in the art of mentoring employees and stringing them along.

And with respect to the current economic situation, if you only have a tiny merit budget, you need even better managers. Kind of like you have to spend more on flattering clothes if you're overweight - if you're skinny you can look great in any old thing but if you like to hit the cake you need better clothes.

From a corporate point of view the quality of managers is the single most important thing you can get right.

Think about it: This is the person you are counting on to coax the best possible work out of average performers, motivate or identify and eliminate underachievers, and retain the loyalty and channel the creative energy of top performers.

And it goes without saying that managers also need and deserve good managers.

The good news is that today I see ample evidence that the attention of HR professionals is starting to shift to the manager. Every HR blog I visit seems to have something to say about the importance of good management. Which is great but it's only the first step.

The next step is answering this question:

How can companies do a better job assessing and developing the skills of their managers?

The best review I ever had

I've written several posts about how a good manager puts the 'manage' into performance management. I think we can all agree that the manager plays an important role but what does that actually mean when push comes to shove?

If there were a cut and dried formula for good management someone would bottle and sell it. There isn't. While there are definitely some wise guiding princples, different styles and techniques work best for different people.

Here are two examples of management techniques that worked well for me.

Technique 1: Constructive Feedback

When I first entered the workforce I was a process consultant with the company formerly known as Andersen Consulting (Accenture). Andersen did a lot of things right on the Human Capital Management front, from recruiting people who would be successful at Andersen to mentoring and training these people to letting them go graciously when the time came.

Because most of the work at a large consulting firm is project based, staff Androids like me would switch managers with each project. One of my first project managers was Joan and she gave me the best employee review I've ever had. This doesn't mean I got a stellar rating and huge raise, alas, it means her input was so constructive and honest that I keep it mind to this day.

I don't remember the specifics of the review. I received an adequate rating accompanied by some positive feedback about my hard work, discipline and quality output, yada, yada, yada. Then came the useful part that stuck with me.

'I've gotten some feedback about you that concerns me a little,' she said, after all the nice bits. She was quick to reassure me that it was nothing serious or career damaging, just something I might want to keep an eye on.

Apparently I had a habit of asking the same question over and over again in different ways until I got the answer I liked. Several people had noticed this and mentioned it to Joan.

'This isn't all bad,' said Joan. 'A good consultant and project manager needs to be tenacious. But you might want to tone it down a little.'

I leapt valiantly to my own defense: I was just seeking clarification. I was just trying to save everyone from making huge costly mistakes. I was just this and I was just that. Plus, whoever said that was clearly biased.

Joan stopped my outburst with an upheld hand and a suspiciously twitching mouth.

'Stop,' she said mildly. 'I know you have your reasons and I'm sure they are good ones. But here's the takeaway, Grasshopper (she didn't really say, 'Grasshopper'): If one person says something about you they may be biased and you may be able to shrug it off. If you get the same feedback from several people, however, take a mental note and watch yourself in action.'

This excellent advice has served me well over the years in team lead, project management and individual contributer roles. I feel fortunate that I ran into Joan and her constructive, personalized feedback early on in my career because subsequent performance reviews tended to be written by me. And I could never have given myself such great feedback.

Technique #2: Trust

It was a big week in the Munich office. Tom, the VP of Application Development was coming to town. There was a line up of people who wanted to meet with him, to apprise him of urgent situations as well as garner support for pet projects. I somehow scored a morning slot, and not right before lunch, either, so I was feeling pretty good.

Tom's claim to fame did not lie in his organizational genius, fiery temper, decisive decision making or skills on the golf course. He didn't even check his email on his Blackberry during our meeting, which was a bit disconcerting at first. He was soft spoken, polite and an excellent listener. He asked intelligent questions about my presentation and listened carefully to the answers.

At the end of our meeting, when a decision had to be made between A and B, he looked at me and said, 'I trust you. You make the call. It's OK if you make the wrong call, just make sure you have a good reason for making it.'

Then he shook my hand and thanked me for my preparation.

Incidentally, I made the right call.

Tom never came back to Munich so that was our first and last meeting. And yet, ten years later he stands out in my mind as one of the best managers I ever had.

Non-Monetary Benefits

Much of the recent literature around performance and talent management has focused on the importance of non-monetary benefits such as recognition and internal mobility. Non-monetary benefits reward performance, just like monetary benefits, but are good for the bottom line because they're often free.

Public recognition, promotions and even Starbuck's discount cards are all very well, blah, blah, blah, but I want to share with you an example of a real non-monetary benefit, the kind that costs nothing and ensures undying loyalty: the autographed picture.

It just so happens that my manager is related to one of my favorite actors and under her thoughtful direction he sent me an autographed picture of himself with some other girl. This is what he wrote:

'Just in case we don't get a chance to [censored], this picture will have to hold us until we find a window. I love you. You know that.'

THIS is what I'm talking about, people.

So, what does this mean for companies that want to put a stake in the ground around non-monetary benefits? No problem! Just include 'related to someone famous' on your manager job qualifications list and watch the non-monetary benefits start rolling in.

Think about all the money that can be saved on manager selection, training and accountability practices with this one simple strategy. Even if your managers totally suck, your top performers will cut them plenty of slack if they're Brad Pitt's younger brother or Penelope Cruz's mom.

In fact, this idea may revolutionize Talent Management as we know it. . .

Performance MANAGEMENT

When you get right down to it, Performance Management is about negotiation. Each side wants something. Management wants employees to work harder, work smarter, work more and moreover, really care about what they are doing so they’ll sacrifice their personal lives for the greater good of the company. Employees want more money, more recognition, more career opportunities, more flexibility, better benefits, more autonomy, more coaching, more stock, etc. They also want to feel like they are part of a team, something greater than themselves. And as in any negotiation, both sides tend to bluff a bit. Management pretends to have a bevy of rewards that are specifically earmarked for top performers and employees pretend that their daily activities are aligned with corporate goals and that their performance was instrumental in helping the company meet them.

Not that these things are never true but the point is that even when they aren’t true both sides politely pretend that they are. Let's face it, it's human to want to put your best foot forward and 'Pay for Performance' has a much better ring than 'Punish Medicrity' or 'We Have No Money This Year But Thanks For All Your Hard Work.'

But here is a revelation that should shake the foundations of how we think about Talent Management: The key player in making this process successful is the manager. A good manager is more than someone with decent social skills who does an acceptable job of consolidating team metrics. A good manager is someone who makes employees feel important and valued. A good manager motivates people to either take on more responsibility or else be satisfied with the responsibility they have, as needed. A good manager makes employees believe they have a career path and that they are rewarded in accordance to their contributions, which is especially important when times are tough and there are no promotions or raises to be had. In other words, a good manager is equally versed in the art of mentoring employees and stringing them along.

Put simply, a good manager is someone who is able to broadcast the message: “I am interested in you, I believe in you, and I am doing my best for you.” And be believed.

From a corporate point of view the quality of managers is the single most important thing you can get right. Think about it: This is the person you are counting on to coax the best possible work out of average performers, motivate or identify and eliminate underachievers, and retain the loyalty and channel the energy of top performers. If we believe that people are important, how can manager performance not be a vital component of business performance?

Talent Management places ample focus on upper management, as evidenced by the adoption of succession planning at upper levels, cascading goals, benchmarking tools, etc. And there is plenty of focus on individual contributors - in fact most of the top performance management solutions offer various ways to drive edicts from on high downward, then measure if everyone’s following them. And I don’t want to argue with these – at the moment – because I find what’s missing more interesting than quibbling about what’s there. And what’s missing in all of this Talent Management analysis is focus on the manager, who of all people in any company should arrest our attention.

And yet as we review the various talent management solutions we see that they are depressingly focused on automation rather than interaction. Even more depressingly, it seems that many companies are looking for software solutions to supplement poor management rather than improve it, rather like treating the symptoms rather than looking for a cure.

Personally, I am riveted by the manager and I don’t think HCM specialists can continue to ignore this fascinating character. Not all managers are equally interesting from an HCM perspective, however. Truly great leaders are born, not made. So arguably, the best thing HCM solutions can do for the great manager is try to stay out of the way. A poor manager can do untold damage and would make an interesting topic for HCM but most companies are smart enough to weed out terrible managers on their own once enough people have complained or quit.
That leaves us with the average manager, who in many cases is quite decent, means well and does relatively little harm. The average manager offers ample scope for driving additional business success and is therefore interesting from an HCM perspective.

How can Talent Management solutions do a better job helping companies assess and develop the skills of the average manager?