TalentedApps Turns Two!

It’s been two years today since Meg, Mark, and Amy began this blog. While the first year was about us finding our voice and building up our readership, this second year has been a bit more about us drilling deeper into the areas that we see as key in organizations achieving strategic impact from their talent.

This second year also found us building relationships with the rest of the HR, Talent, and Enterprise blogging community. That has been personally rewarding for each of us as well as a terrific way to help get our thinking to a broader audience. We are honored to be part of such an incredibly gifted group of contributors committed to the improvement of this craft.

Our mission continues to be to help create change by improving the awareness and knowledge of our community, in an entertaining and informative way, of how to better achieve your goals through talent. Our thanks go out to our readership, friends, colleagues, and family for their support. We look forward to the upcoming years working together on this mission.

Graphic by Vivian Wong

The New HR Carnival is here!

Ben Eubanks has done a terrific job of collecting and assembling a brand new set of HR blog posts covering a wide range of topics. To top it off, he also enlisted the help of Allen Robinson in the creation of an official HR Carnival logo!

Here’s a excellent opportunity for you to sample a variety of ideas, thinking, and opinions from a diverse set of excellent minds. It will save you time as well as help you discover a blog you might not have known about before.

Be sure to check out the carnival! In addition, take on Ben’s challenge and share what you’ve found with others!

What is a reasonable time to competence?

Without a doubt acquiring a new skill is hard.  It takes time, practice and a willingness to fail.  I do not want to suggest that you should only attempt those things that you already know or do well.  That is just silly.

You should challenge yourself every day to try new things and learn new skills, just remember that some skills might not be within reach for you.    You might gain a basic level of competence after a lot of hard work but for some things you will never be outstanding.

This is a universal truth [always remember you are unique, just like everyone else].

So what happens when you are not gaining a job critical competency?  When you find yourself unable to get to an appropriate level of competence in a reasonable amount of time (as evidenced by lackluster performance feedback)  you should probably take a step back and regroup moment.

I’d like to say again, that if you do not have a good job fit you will not be top Talent.

Putting it another way, when you have a bad job fit you are probably getting labeled as a “poor performer”.  If you find yourself in a second performance discussion where the topic is does not meet expectations* I think it’s time to take a serious look at the question of job fit.

Instead of going down the mental path of inadequacy and low self esteem, take a moment and find your strengths (you can get help doing this for approx $14, well worth the investment) and then have a hard look at your job.  Is the job you are doing playing to your strengths (I’m going to take a wild guess that there might be a mismatch)?

Now comes the brave part.

Instead of just having yet another discussion with your boss about your lack of competence, do the adult thing and work with her to see if there is a better way to define your job to play to your strengths.

If this is not possible, you probably need to start thinking about getting a different role somewhere else.

If you don’t take action, you are probably going to live forever in the bottom left box of the Talent 9-box, and I promise you that is not the zip code in which you want to reside.

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*Also be on the look out for does not meet feedback hidden under a meets expectations rating, this happens more than I care to acknowledge.

Asking for help

These last two weeks I’ve been asking for a lot of help.  I thought it might be a good idea to give some tips on the subject, for those of you who might find the process troubling or intimidating.

Here are a few tips I’ve learned that can increase the probability of getting the help you need to succeed.

1. Getting help is a bit of a numbers game.  Be willing to ask for help early and often.  Recognize that people do not often say “no” they just fail to come through.   This is part of the process and is nothing to be discouraged about.  It is also nothing to hold against people.  Best to assume that they would help you if they could and that their lack of help reflects upon the fact that you might have asked the wrong thing to the wrong person.
2. Target your requests.  Do not ask a large group as your only strategy.  This *might* work but it probably won’t.  Better to split up what you need and distribute it out as specific requests to one or two people at a time.  Make the request specific and direct to an individual and they are much more likely to know what you need from them and are often more able to help you.
3. It works the best when you ask people to do something they are good at.  This will mean it doesn’t require a lot from them, and it gives you a large benefit.  This is another example of leveraging strengths.
4. Be thankful.  When you get help remember to let people know you are grateful and that they made a difference in your life.
5. Be helpful yourself. Giving back helping others with things that you know and are good at, is the best way to have people wanting to help you when you need it most.

The interesting thing about helping others is that it reflects well upon you and it makes you feel good.  On the other hand, getting help from others also feels really great.

So for everyone who has helped me get this TED application completed (and you know who you are) I am so very grateful. Please do allow me to return the favor when you need access to one of my strengths, it’s the least I can do.

What a Treat! The Leadership Carnival is here!

Consider all the goodies you get from Dan’s Great Leadership blog regularly and then multiply that by 30.  That’s a full bag of candy!  Consider taking the day off just to eat read these treats …

including our own post referring back to Dan’s  Talent Management Challenge … oh my, I think I’ve gone into a sugar coma!

One of my Favorite Books. Free. This week.

I am huge fan of Jason Seiden’s How to Self Destruct.  I read it in July and found it to be funny, insightful, and speaking directly to me as an aspiring leader at Oracle.

Jason is weeks away from unveiling his next book, Super Staying Power (which I have pre-ordered).  In the meantime, he’s giving away as many How to Self Destruct books as he can until this Friday, November 6.

Check it out and get these books for your deserving leaders!

HR: Why Improve Your Analytical Intelligence?

Hey! Come back!

Before you roll your eyes on this one, start having flashbacks to terrible experiences with calculating standard deviations, or trying to wrap your head around multiple regression analysis, and then run screaming from this post, this is not about you trying to become an expert at statistics! Trust me!

It’s about you understanding how analytical tools and methods can help HR have an impact on applying talent to strategic success. Besides, no less than Josh Bersin said at the recent HR Technology Conference® 2009 Talent Management Analyst Panel, “Get used to it.” And that’s a good way to look at it. Too often, HR has been shut out of strategic input because of the perception that it doesn’t speak the language of analytics sufficiently to measure and understand the relationships between various parts of the business (e.g. Human Capital) and profit (or whatever financial result you wish.) Once you have that better understanding, it will enable you to make a stronger case for why HR can provide valuable input and leadership in business strategy and execution.

By now, we’ve had the importance of measuring pretty well pounded in, particularly in the context of Finance. Increasing your financial intelligence is key to participating more in driving strategic decision-making around applying talent to improve business results. Being able to show to senior management the link between what you know about your company’s talent to financial results entails both measuring talent in terms of levels of performance, competency, skills, connectedness, etc. as well as measuring relationships between those measures and the other parts of the business that drive financial performance. What do analytical skills have to do with measuring those parts and their relationships?

Measuring is not Counting

To help answer that question, let’s take an example from “How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business” by Douglas W. Hubbard. Picture the problem of measuring the population of fish in a lake; let’s say in order to know if a restocking effort was successful or not (a good ROI problem). A lot of people will say, “Drain the lake and count the fish.” They could then report there were exactly 22,573 fish and we’ll say that confirms the restocking investment was a success, although all the fish are now dead.

A better approach (certainly for the fish) entails using analytical methods to estimate the population of fish in the lake. If there is sufficient confidence in the estimate of the population before and after the restocking effort, you will be able to tell if the restocking effort was a success or not. Did you have to know every tiny detail of statistics to make a decision based on these estimates and the confidence level? No. How about to show the before and after picture to some “lake executive” who had to give the green light on the restocking effort? No. You just had to know enough about analytical methods to know that the application of them made sense in this case, and either determine you made the right call or get the point across to that executive.

As the authors of “The Differentiated Workforce: Transforming Talent into Strategic Impact” quoted a general manager, “I couldn’t do a regression analysis, but I knew what one was. And the results…made sense to me.” Further, they write, “Improved analytic literacy has a direct impact on the decision making at several levels in a typical HR organization…At the highest level, improved analytical literacy changes the perspective on the financial resources committed to HR…they consider a significant portion [of the HR budget] an investment.”

Principles of Uncertainty

HR labors under the false assumption that everybody else has “precise numbers” and there seems to be a perception that HR can’t come up with the “hard numbers.” The classic story is of the CEO asking the head of HR if they know the company’s headcount and the response is wishy-washy. The thinking is that people are either working for the company or they are not, so what’s the problem? What’s the count? Sure, in a company of a few hundred people, you might actually have a very precise figure. However, we know that depending on the industry, economic conditions, etc. as the number of employees gets larger, it gets a bit trickier to know the headcount with precision. There is a lot going on and even if you are using an HRMS system, the simple fact that humans are involved and entering transactions (or not), makes the number transient and constantly changing. In other words, one minute, you could see 59,268 and a minute later see 59,273.

This is not that different from the folks in Accounting keeping track of Receivables, the folks in Production keeping track of Inventory, or the folks in Development keeping track of Project Completion. In the case of Accounting and Finance, it gets even more interesting when it’s time to report; for instance, general accounting principles require the company to estimate the amount of Receivables that will be uncollectible and there isn’t any hard and fast equation for doing that. Different methods are used to estimate these values, some of them analytical.

The point, as Hubbard writes in his latest book, “The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It” is that measurement is better understood as the reduction of uncertainty about the value of something. Once you see it that way and gain enough analytic literacy to feel comfortable with the results from those tools and methods, you’ll be able to move forward more readily with driving and demonstrating positive impact on strategic business results.

Photo by The Michael

The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It

Need your help achieving my dream

Sure this dream is not really on a par with Martin Luther King Jr. or anything, but it’s still a dream.

I really want to get to a Ted Conference in person.  I mentioned this here and here.

Yes, I know this is totally out of my league, and yet I also know that this is something that will be life changing for me and overall a good idea.

Here is the why something like Ted is a uniquely good idea for me

• I love looking at things in a new way — most things I’ve seen recently that have really gotten me thinking have been from Ted
• I love the energy and thinking I do at conferences.  There is something in the process that really works for me.  I get most all my big ideas at conferences and it’s almost always the sum of a lot of little inputs vs. just one talk or presentation or person
• I love learning new stuff – I really thrive on gathering new ideas, facts, etc
• I use what I learn in action-oriented, creative ways.  I make connections others don’t and use those connections to do something specific, concrete and useful.
• I share what I learn.  I blog it, I talk about it I send emails that simultaneously blow peoples minds and bore them to tears.

Sure, all the above bullets probably cement my brand as a geek but I’m no longer in middle school and I think being a geek is cool.

Here’s what I’m not

Particularly well connected in a way that would get me to Ted and I’m also not the best essay writer.

Here’s what I’ve done.

1. Joined the Online Community
2. Started following the Ted twitter accounts here and here
3. Subscribed to the blog
4. Printed out the application and freaked out
5. Targeted the TedActive conference since a) it’s still open for 2010 registration and b) I suspect it’s a little more open to “unknowns”

Here’s what I need

1. Some good suggestions on how to best “stand out” with the questions below
2. Ideas on things I could do in addition to the list above
3. Someone(s) to review my profile and give me ideas to make it better, especially looking for things I’ve left off
4. An idea on how to pick references (I need two).   What kind of references would appeal to the people deciding Ted attendance?

Here is the application questions (remember I want suggestions that are true about me, I’m not looking for textbook perfect answers or anything just better ways to describe me)

1. If a friend were to describe your accomplishments in up to three sentences what would s/he say?
2. What other achievements would you like to share?
3. What are you passionate about (work, creative output, issues, communities…)
4. What do we need to know about you that we didn’t ask?
5. (Optional) Can you share a memorable anecdote from your life that will give us a further sense of what makes you tick?

Thanks in advance for helping with Team Meg!  Direct email responses are also welcome.

The new Carnival of HR is up at HR Bartender!

Make sure to take a tour of HRBartender’s Carnival of HR! Blogger Sharlyn Larby has assembled a tasty “Halloween Spirits” theme, categorizing a huge number of diverse posts from a wide sample of blogs by drink type (e.g. soda, hot beverage, mixed drinks, etc.)

This collection both saves you time by bringing together submitted posts into one place for you to quickly scan (Sharlyn introduces each with a brief description) as well as provides you with an opportunity to discover blogs you might not already know about.

In addition, Sharlyn has taken the effort to gather all the twitter accounts of the blog authors and put them into a TweepML list so that you can easily follow them all in one fell swoop. Thank you, HR Bartender!

Photo by Bisayan lady

You really like us!

Oh my goodness.  Our friends at FOT have done it again.  They have set a new challenge for Talent bloggers using scientific methods no doubt, and TalentedApps came into the top 30.

Those of you who remember our Cinderella story of yore, will know that we are especially excited that we didn’t have to beg friends and family to vote for us.  (instead we’ve just been begging them to read our stuff which frankly, seems fair…)

Do go check out our friends at FOT, as well as the rest of the rated blogs.  We at TalentedApps, are amazed and honored to be included with such a group.