The Corporate Death of the Synergistic Team?

Row Henson, in her session at our Fusion Strategy Council, and in her keynote presentation at OHUG this week, presented various research and statistics that have been common knowledge in the talent management arena for some time. However, one in particular made me ponder the reasons why…“only 20% of employees do what they do best at work” (Buckingham).

Hmm, so companies are consumed by the hot topics of employee engagement and retention; they strive to tie employee goals and performance to corporate goals; they pre-screen to ensure they get the best-fit new hires with less likelihood of quick turnover; and yet, the vast majority of employees are not enabled to do what they are best at doing! What’s that all about?

I have my theories – Subjective? Admittedly! Biased? Maybe! Argumentative? Most definitely! Valid? You tell me!

Firstly, I admit I pondered this only from the perspective of individual contributors, and with a particular bias on large corporations as opposed to, say, start-ups. So, yes, it’s a subjective, biased opinion but, hey, this is a blog not a thesis.

As an enterprise grows and automates its processes, employees seem to be increasingly pigeon-holed into strictly defined roles and responsibilities, with little or no allowance for personal preferences or abilities.

Is that because it’s easier to hire to a formula? …because it’s easier to interpret measurements and analysis if you have a large pool of comparisons? …or simply that resources have been so severely stripped that this simplistic approach takes less thought and effort?

When employees are straight-jacketed into formulaic roles that don’t take sufficient advantage of individual strengths and weaknesses, or likes and dislikes, is it any surprise that their abilities are not used effectively? Some of their strengths may be under-utilized, while they struggle to perform other tasks for which a peer may be better suited.

What if managers have the freedom to build a team in which each member takes on a heavier percentage of tasks that are most suited to their individual characteristics? What if the combination of the individual roles and personalities together can fulfill the needs of the team? A synergistic team – a mutually advantageous conjunction where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts!

On the flip-side, if job roles are too rigidly defined and applied to multiple individuals, each team member is forced to perform the same tasks in parallel with their peers. In this model, employees are silo’d vertically. Each may have their own subject area of responsibility but, to do their job, they all learn the same tools, attend the same meetings, follow the same processes, and even experience the same errors or problems (instead of benefiting from others’ experiences).

The cynic in me believes this is all about making life easier for senior execs, in a corporate environment where size precludes them having any personal knowledge of the individuals (or caring that they don’t!) – but at what hidden cost? Sure, it simplifies metrics, objective setting, and measuring performance at the highest level of the corporation – it’s so much easier to compare apples to apples – but how much untapped ability is being wasted, and how much effort is being duplicated?

In How to Build a High Engagement Workplace, Marcus Buckingham recommends that managers find ways for people to do what they do best. Of course, we have to be realistic about this, but at least this warrants serious consideration. As Buckingham acknowledges: “it may not be possible for everyone to be in a role which uses their strengths all the time“, although he continues “but managers can get better at identifying these talents, and providing opportunities for people to exercise these talents and to grow in them.” However, IMHO, I believe that in large corporations this responsibility goes beyond the managers, who are often hampered by corporate job descriptions and policies that effectively hand-cuff them from adopting a more flexible approach to their individual teams.

Am I an old cynic?…or are we witnessing the corporate death of the synergistic team?

…and what about the detrimental effect on employee engagement and employee retention? I throw those in because it’s always easier to get attention when you relate the issue back to a hot topic or two!

Latest HR Carnival is posted

Evil HR Lady has posted the 26th Carnival of HR where she makes a case that she should be fired.  To that I say “not gonna happen“. 

Check it out, lots of great posts.

Wine me, dine me, make me write bad checks

While the title belongs to Dad, the story is all my own. 

As most of you know we are having our OHUG user conference this week in Las Vegas.  What you might not have known, was that this also Ravi’s birth week and since workplace worth is gauged by birthday celebrations, the team made a point to take him to dinner and celebrate. 

Now, being overcharged is not note worthy in Las Vegas, I was not really surprised to be charged $30 to have a bowl of oatmeal and a coffee delivered to my room.  Inflation is a reality these days.  Even the airlines are charging for luggage.  Cost of oil, low value of the dollar, unemployment rates, casinos need to protect their profits somehow.  I get it.  

While planning the event, [of course, done by Vivian*] we found we needed to have the cake delivered from a nearby bakery.  The restaurant (which I would never name) was kind enough to receive the cake and bring it over with candles after dinner, so we could all sing.  They then took it back and cut and served it with a very nice presentation, that included a rectangle plate and a cute chocolate squiggle design on the extra white space.  We all exclaimed at how great everything was and proceeded to enjoy a very nice cake.

After receiving (and closing one eye to sign) the bill, we all went back to our hotel, very satisfied with our pleasant evening.  We were thankful to Ravi for growing a year older and to OHUG for bringing us all together to celebrate.  On the way home, I began to puzzle about how our tab could be so large and decided to look more closely at the bill.  It was then that I found we were charged $15.00 EACH for that cake.   Not for the cake itself (we paid that separately), nor for delivery (we absolutely paid for that as well).  Nope, that charge was just to cut and plate the cake.

Not only did this restaurant rip us off for cake cutting services, turns out they also performed magic.  When Vivian asked them for the rest of the cake to take home, they said [with a straight face] that it was all gone.  Really?  You cut a square cake in 11 equal pieces?! 

I guess I should look at this that $165 + tax is a small price to pay to be reminded of caveat emptor.  I fully recognize I should have thought to ask about a fee.  I also believe that they should have mentioned a charge when we arranged to have the cake delivered.  In the end, it’s all fair I guess, since I got a chance to share my story on the blog. 

More proof that web 2.0 really does break down barriers.

_______________________________________________

*thanks again Vivian — you rock! 

Amy to interview Mark at OHUG

Yes, that’s right.  Get your tickets now!  Amy will go where no Holistic Detective has gone before – the depths of Mark’s brain.

 

Holistic Talent Management

• Monday, June 23rd
• 1-2pm
• Mirage Hotel, Antigua A
• Las Vegas

 

Firsts and Worsts

I’ve been finding myself reading a lot of blogs these days.  What I find interesting, is what kind of posts I respond to.  I find the conversations on “firsts” and “worsts” fun, they make me smile and remember and then they make me glad I’m past it.

Laurie recently posted a worst interview and Gretchen posted a look back at her first Onboarding experience in a “real” job.  Then yesterday, a collegue asked me the age old question, “tell me again how exactly did you get into Tech, Meg?“, which I’m sure he intended to be a compliment, on just how wise I am in the ways of my job, and thus a blog post was born.

Let me first say, that I have been receiving a formal paycheck since the age of fourteen and have had all kinds of horrible (and some not so horrible) jobs prior to (and during) college.  Like most I didn’t think they really “counted”, since they were not “real” jobs.  They were ways to make money. 

After college, is when you get a real job. 

I had it all planned out.  I would go to college, I would get a great job, I would live happily ever after.  So it was some shock at the end of my college experience that I realized I hadn’t actually figured out *how* I would get a job.  Nor did I know what kind of job I wanted (turns out that they weren’t putting fresh college grads in charge, who knew?).   In a panic, I started to consider the options that would allow me to delay paying back my student loans, grad school? peace corp? while also pursuing the campus recruiting process. 

Most of my interviews were unmemorable (I’m sure for all involved), but one had me talking to someone who stepped out every 5 minutes on his [at the time still novel and quite large] mobile phone as he was “expecting a call to close some funding”.   I left the interview unimpressed and not completely clear as to what they did anyway.  I did make it to the second round with that company, which required both an aptitude and a personality test.  Being just out of college, I didn’t really find that odd, but I will note I have never had to do either since.

After some time passed, I started to catch on to the idea of being a candidate and while I did get more rejections then I had ever experienced in my entire life, I also started getting a few offers, most for jobs like insurance sales, a “manager” position at Lady Footlocker and an offer to do “sales support” for a Manufacturing ERP startup (of course at the time it was not ERP yet, it was MRP II but I digress).

In the meantime, I had found a summer study abroad that I really wanted to do.  It was some ten countries in six weeks studying the European Union and the Euro.  Now this was exactly what I wanted to do (travel and geek out studying European economics), and I needed to figure out how to find a job offer that would let me start in September vs. June.

Yes, I’ll say it again, I chose my career based upon which job would wait for me to come back from a trip to Europe. 

Upon returning from my summer off, getting my stuff out of storage and beginning my first day at work I found out a few interesting “real world” realities

1. Startups, can have challenges in the area of workforce planning, and, when they miss their numbers are inclined to freeze hiring
2. Positions that you are hired for might not still exist when you start six months later
3. When you find yourself starting a new job, for which the actual position has been eliminated, it is good to be a fast learner and to project flexibilty — quickly
4. Tech guys are easy to bribe, if you are nice to them they will teach you survival skills for the fee of a few lunches (editors note, I suspect I had a bit of an edge being female here)

So, due to an adequate score on the aptitude test and the fact that I had a job offer in writing, they decided to place me in the support organization where I spent my first months doing QA for a new release. 

It took me a good six months to have any idea what the company actually did (native applications in Oracle forms and Sybase APT), what my job actually was (first and second line support) and how to gain the skills to do that job before they realized I didn’t have any skills (see bribes mentioned above).   

For the geeks reading this post, I will share my first technical training session to give you an idea just how poorly suited I was, to be fixing software bugs.  I was thrown out for being “difficult” and thus my black-market approach to knowledge acquisition was born.

Un-named trainer: Are you familiar with Unix?

Meg: No

Un-named trainer: Do you know vi?

Meg: No

Un-named trainer: You’re going to hate it.

Meg: Oh. (editors note, in fact I did not hate vi nor did I find it difficult)

Un-named trainer: ok, so you are going to go into vi and write this create table statement

Meg: why?

Un-named trainer: because you need a table

Meg: what for?

Un-named trainer: You’re just being difficult aren’t you.

 

And the rest they say, is history.  I will say, that having such a strange start to a career, has proven to be very helpful to me over time.  Jumping into jobs I’m not skilled to do, to meet challenges I have never done before, comes very easily to me.  Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail but I am never afraid to try.

The industry term for that is agility and it is a competency that I think is a good one to claim as your own. 

 

Mistakes Are Just the Icing on the Cake

I have friend who is a total foodie. He has no problem spending Sunday mornings sprawled on the couch watching a full week of recordings from the Food Network. One of my his favorite shows is Ace of Cakes, which follows the adventures of master pastry chef Duff Goldman and his posse of extreme cake makers at Charm City Cakes. My friend thinks the employees at this company have achieved career nirvana: the perfect blend of fun, imagination, inspiration, and sugar. For the uninitiated, each week Duff and his crack team of decorators create edible works of art. From corvettes and roller skates to bulldogs and baseball stadiums, no challenge is too big. Their motto: You dream it, we’ll bake it, you eat it! Unfortunately, even with good planning and near perfect execution accidents happen. Some mistakes are made by the staff, like spilling food dye on a finished cake; while other problems are completely out of their control, like traffic jams, potholes and the weather. Fortunately Duff, ever the master of cool, is rarely phased by these mishaps. In fact he expects things will go wrong from time to time and tells his staff not to dwell on the problem, but to concentrate on how to make things right. Not surprisingly, some of the most creative moments on the show happen when things do not go as planned.

Over the years I’ve made some pretty spectacular blunders myself – from sending out emails in a moment of anger, to deleting a semester’s worth of grades a week before graduation when I worked as the Assistant Registrar at a small graduate school outside of Boston. A mistake our IT department spent the better part of their weekend fixing. I’ve also had to deal with problems that were out of my control, things like shifting project priorities, organizational upheaval, technological meltdowns, and psychotic co-workers – but that’s a topic for another post.

When things go wrong often our first impulse is to fix the blame before we fix the problem; when our primary focus should always be to make things right. Once the problem is resolved we should also take time and reflect on the how and why of our mistake. Though this process can sometimes be a painful exercise, I believe our most profound learning experiences happen not when we succeed, but when we fail – and very few individuals, if any, have ever succeeded without making mistakes along the way. Perseverance, not perfection, leads to success. So if success is the cake we enjoy when things go right, then let the icing on the cake be the lessons we learn when we fail.

Moneyball in Cricket

In Moneyball – the author looks at the Rajasthan Royals (an Indian Professional League cricket team) and how the coach and captain took a statistics heavy approach to running the team..

Wait..you should be thinking, isn’t the Moneyball about the MLB’s Oakland team 8-/ .. yes, you are absolutely right. This is just a twist on the Moneyball theory applied to a completely different setting and a different game . 

Let me take you straight to the stats. Eight teams competed in the IPL tournament and the owners of the team bidded for players from a pool and at the end – following are the teams and how much they have spent.  The team which paid the highest was Kolkata – $6,022,500  and the team which paid the least was Rajasthan (Jaipur) – $2,925,000

Can you guess who the winner was?

If you had guessed Jaipur (Rajasthan Royals), you are absolutely on spot. The Jaipur team had won (11 of the 14 matches including the Finals) and have been crowned champions. There might be arguments about how some teams had to deal with injuries, players pulling out etc. but lets focus on the main question.. how did a team which had put the least money went the farthest?

Following is the quote from their captain:
“The 38-year-old coach and captain revealed the secret behind Rajasthan Royal’s brilliant run in the tournament. Having just four days with the squad before the start of the IPL, Warne said he along with performance coach Jeremy Snape and director of coaching Darren Berry worked day and night to get an idea of what his players were capable of. When we reached here we wanted a background of all the players through the local coaches, which unfortunately we didn’t get. We played two practice games straightaway and watched every player in detail as to how they approached the game, their shot making, running between the wickets, fitness and other aspects,”

In Jaipur’s case, the coach and captain had to deal with Talent on hand and identify the strengths and weaknesses and devise ways to put together a stronger team. The decision making for the captain was also easy as he knew well about their team members.

Isn’t this the situation we constantly face? We always don’t have the option of getting new talent, but we have to work with existing talent and identify and develop the necessary skillset to meet our objectives.

New HR Carnival is up

Check out “The super sexy HR carnival (#35)” on Jon Ingham’s “Strategic Human Capital Management (HCM)” blog. If you aren’t familiar with the idea, it’s a single post that gathers together and describes a wide variety (40+) of recent posts from different HR blogs. This is a terrific opportunity to sample a vast range of HR topics from distinctly diverse viewpoints. They are all entertaining and informative and help keep us all fresh in our thinking. You might find new blogs that you weren’t aware of that you’ll want to add to your RSS feed. Enjoy!

 

 

Evidence-based Management at XO Communications

A few weeks ago, David Haimes pointed out an article in CIO about XO Communications that serves multiple purposes for Talent Management. The article’s primary focus was about how XO Communications applied the lessons from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game in combining information from Social Network Analysis with business metrics to directly improve their IT department performance. Several findings and ways of using the information were reported, including some brought up here previously (which also showed how enterprise social networks could help in gathering and reporting the information.) But the other takeaway for us is that we can and should gather evidence, even on intangibles, and apply it in Talent Management. Articles like this are very helpful in showing *how* to do that.

 

Why is this important for Talent? Making better business decisions results in increased business success, and without real metrics and evidence, we are left with the increased risk of making the wrong decision (including making no decision) in areas around hard to measure things like whether employees are more productive if they are more connected. Once we go beyond measuring activities (e.g. number of reviews completed, number of candidates interviewed) we quickly arrive at intangibles (e.g. competencies, performance rating, engagement, contribution). With hard to measure tangibles and intangibles, we often end up left with basing our decisions on:

• Anecdote – “I heard of some more connected people being more productive.”
• Gut Feel/Intuition – “It just seems to me more connected people will be more productive.”
• Conventional Wisdom – “Everybody knows that more connected people are more productive.”

There’s nothing wrong about factoring those things in, but we should always be testing them against the evidence. In fact, the evidence itself can spark our intuition when it calls our current thinking and assumptions into question.

 

The article also serves as an example application of the principles of Evidence-Based Management (EBM). You can learn more about EBM at the Evidence Soup and Evidence-Based Management blogs and from the book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management. They provide a great explanation and background of how to use EBM to improve business success and this article provides an excellent example of the thinking that goes into using EBM. Talent Management will benefit greatly from this kind of thinking.

 

I suck as a Deck Project Manager

I recently posted about my deck building recruiting process. Well, we signed on the dotted line, got the building permit and homeowner’s association approval…and then…we were ready to start the project.

Except. Well, when are we starting, guys? There is no project plan! “Mark”, the account manager said that “Mike” the project manager would be calling me, then “Mark” would follow-up to make sure we talked. OK so I waited. No call from Mike or Mark.

 

I called the office. Next I got a call from “Joe” who is apparently not “Mike” but will be our project manager. He discussed his timeline. And said “weather permitting you should have a deck by Memorial Day”. This was really exciting, but puzzling, as Memorial Day was about three days after Joe’s planned start date. And the timeline included about three days for the concrete to set before starting to build. (It turns out Joe has no idea when Memorial Day is).

Joe promised to come and dig the holes on Tuesday. Didn’t show. Didn’t call. This is where I stepped in and became the project manager of the project manager. I waited until Thursday and then called the office. He got a little annoyed at this. I think that makes him look bad to his boss.

Every time I called Joe, he was just “on his way” to my house. I may not be good at deck project management but I’m sure psychic about it.

So on Thursday, Joe promised to be there “by 11:00”. I was speaking to him at 10:54. He was an hour away. And he had an “hour or two” of work to finish up at his current site. I questioned him a bit on this and he said “Oh, right, so I’ll be there by noon then”. The math still doesn’t quite work but I figure this is a bigger issue than I can solve today. When he wasn’t at my house by 2:00, I called him again. A stranger answered his phone. Told me that Joe was on his way to my house! (really, I’m so psychic it’s amazing). I said “Oh he is? He left his phone behind?” Stranger: “uh…yeah…”

When Joe wasn’t at my house by 4:00, I was worried. I couldn’t call him. After all — he left his phone back at the other site! 😉 So I had to call the office and get him in trouble again. He arrived at 4:30. He dug the holes and said he’d be back on Friday to pour the concrete. Friday came and went with no Joe.

The following Monday was Memorial Day (Hmmm, where’s my deck?). It was on this day that we noticed Joe had cut two pipes for the sprinkler system causing sort of a geyser effect from the post holes. I called the irrigation guys to repair it. Now, remember, I know nothing about the deck building process so I figure the deck guys (if/when they show) can “work around this”.

Deck guys show on Tuesday. I explain the sprinkler issue; it will be repaired tomorrow morning. No, they can’t “work around” it. The concrete goes in those holes, all the way to the top of the hole. Oh, to the TOP? Hmmmm. So I sent them away.

Well, the real project manager (Joe), called and chewed me out for this. This is when we stopped being friends, I guess you could say. We had words.

They poured the concrete on Thursday. It needs to set for three days. So we should be ready to start by Monday, right? So far so good…Joe had his “guys” put in the foundation on Monday. But now they needed Joe to do the intricate cuts. I made lots of calls and got lots of excuses and he finally showed up that Thursday to do it. I can’t figure if this is Joe punishing me for our ‘disagreement’ or just another example of his poor scheduling abilities. Because of course I called him that day and said “I was just wondering…” and he cut me off and said “I’m ALMOST at your HOUSE!” (my psychic abilities are starting to get eerie now).

They worked half day Thursday and said they would easily finish by Friday. I thought this odd. It seemed like they had a ton more work to do, but what do I know? At 11am they told us they’d be done by 1:30 at the latest. Yet it turns out they had about seven more hours of work to do. How do they misjudge the work that is sitting right in front of them by that much? And I’m sure some poor woman has been calling them all day asking when they are digging her post holes and they are telling her “we’ll be there in an hour…”

So in the end, our deck was finished around 8pm on Friday. The only remaining issue is the pile of lumber they left in our yard. I called today to see if they wanted it. “Oh yes! The guys were planning to come pick that up today.” Again, I am psychic!

So the experience has me reflecting on my project management skills. It certainly wasn’t smooth, and I’m sure Joe pretty much never wants to see me again. Luckily we won’t be building decks together in the future.

I’m wondering what I could have done better. It strikes me that it’s hard managing a process that you know nothing about. I’ve only previously managed consultants, which is a job that I know how to do. Managing people with talents and skills and responsibilities that are entirely different from your own – that’s hard!

Should I have praised the wood-cutting skills instead of criticizing the communication skills? And is wood-cutting even a skill? I mean, I can’t do it but would he be insulted if I praised something that easy? Maybe “You guys picked out some really nice boards at the lumber yard. Thanks for taking such care in selecting them?” Or “thanks– you really poured that concrete fast” (but how fast is fast?) Or “thanks so much for cleaning up most of the stray nails last night”? I wonder if I would’ve had better results, that way? Problem is I have no way of distinguishing what’s “average” and what’s “exceptional” in their work process.

 

Or maybe because I knew it was a short-term project I didn’t really care about nurturing my relationship with Joe and instead just kept calling his boss and getting him in trouble to suit my own purposes? In which case maybe I’m just a jerk with no empathy? Hopefully Joe doesn’t pass the word on to the painters because that’s the next contractor I need to hire….

So….What are some tips for managing people with skills and talents different from those with which you are familiar? How do you praise them if you don’t know what’s “good”? How do you get them to do the job well if you don’t know how to do that job? And do you know any good house painters in Northwest Indiana?