Branding Your Company through Your Talent
May 2009
What differentiates great companies and great
teams? People—always. The corporate graveyard is littered with the remains of
companies that had access to capital, patents, technology, and a host of other
resources that allowed for success, yet success never materialized or evaporated
all too quickly.
by Corbette
Doyle
On the flipside, what has differentiated companies like Southwest and Google,
firms that have achieved levels of success only dreamed of by their competitors?
People—but not just any people. Both firms are ruthless about ensuring the people
they recruit, retain, and promote not only "fit" in the corporate culture, they
live it.
Identifying Your Brand
The first step, then, in building a successful organization filled with high
performers is to identify your organization's leadership brand—that "shared
identity among your organization's leaders that differentiates what they can
do from what your rival's leaders can do."1 Once
you are able to articulate that, you can begin to identify the competencies,
skills, and traits needed at each level of the organization to enhance that
identity. Too many companies select generic competencies that sound good or
reflect the organization they wish they had. Not that an aspirational component
of your talent selection strategy is inappropriate, just that you can't succeed
by hiring people simply because they fit an arbitrary yardstick.
There are three opportunities, in particular, to use your talent strategy
to differentiate and enhance your organization:
- Hire the right people.
- Evaluate your people against this leadership brand.
- Give them feedback to ensure they not only stay on track, but they understand
how to maximize their performance.
Get the Right People on the Bus
As Jim Collins made clear in Good to Great,
the critical first step for a leader is to get the right people in the right
seats. Once you've identified the overall competencies that define success in
your organization, delineate the specific abilities you need for each job. An
individual's ability reflects innate traits (what we're born with), behavioral
style and attitude (what we do with what we have), and experience (what we know
and have done).
For most positions, we seek a magical combination of all three. Unfortunately,
many of us rely unduly on our own "magical" ability to discern these characteristics
through an informal interviewing process. Unfortunately, few of us are as adept
at objectively evaluating talent as we think we are. Individuals we find appealing
because of their looks, their sense of humor, or the college they attended easily
sway most of us. That's not necessarily bias—just human nature. To avoid falling
prey to the trap of collegiality over competence, it's vital to build objectivity
into the process.
Some firms do this with heavily validated employment screening tests as a
first step. For organizations that hire thousands a year, testing may be a necessary
component of the process. For smaller organizations or for more senior positions,
a three-step process may be in order.
First, develop a behavioral interview process that includes an array of questions
designed to elicit details about how the individual has—or would—respond in
a situation that mirrors competencies needed for the job you are screening for.
Can individuals fake their response? Sure, but it still beats asking someone
about their strengths and weaknesses. Second, to increase the likelihood of
weeding out the bluffers and to enhance the objectivity of the process, use
multiple interviewers who bring diverse perspectives to the table. Third, have
all the interviewers rate the candidates against the relevant brand competencies
for this position. Use the resulting reviews as a basis for evaluating the top
candidates. The people selected through a process like this are more likely
to strengthen your firm's culture and effectiveness.
Evaluating the Talent We Have
It's not enough to get the right people in the organization. You also have
to get the wrong ones out and move the right ones up. Though the most difficult
decision for many leaders, it's critical to move an individual out if they are
underperforming, have a bad attitude, or are simply the wrong person for the
job or the company. Objective, consistent performance evaluations minimize the
need to terminate people (during normal periods of job security and opportunity)
because many will leave when they fail to get positive reviews, raises, or promotions.
Just remember, the earlier someone is in their career, the more the disservice
we do them when we fail to tell them how they are performing relative to the
competencies needed to succeed in the organization.
The performance evaluation process should, therefore, reflect the competencies
required to live the leadership brand. Develop objective performance criteria
that reflects the specific ways those desired attributes apply to each position.
Don't just delineate the expected performance (e.g., a 3 on a scale of 1 to
5), but specify what a "1" looks like and what outstanding performance looks
like. Then objectively evaluate each person against this rubric.
Use a similar process to identify and evaluate candidates for promotion,
many of whom will be compared to external candidates. If you get this process
right, however, you are likely to find more and more of your positions are filled
with internal candidates because you have created a replicable process for "growing
your own."
What about those people who live your brand, but don't seem to deliver the
desired results? Take a step back, perhaps consult with the individual, and
determine if the problem is the position rather than the person, i.e., you have
the right person in the wrong seat. Someone who leads massive community fundraisers,
for example, may be more suited to a role in sales than to their job as an underwriter
or account manager.
Feed-Forward
Feedback is a gift we give employees and that other people give us, as both
Executive Coach Marshall Goldsmith and former GE & Goldman Learning Chief Stephen
Kerr point out in their books (What Got You Here
Won't Get You There and Reward Systems,
respectively). Unfortunately, most of us are pretty stingy when it comes to
giving feedback. It costs too much in the way of time, effort, or risk of rejection
from the recipient of our "gift." That's why most of us save up all of our feedback
for that much-dreaded annual review process. That's assuming we even give individuals
a formal review. Too many of us find a way to avoid the process entirely or
give HR the minimum we can get away with—like a grade on the infamous five-point
scale. Then, there's the real coward's way out: write up a review, post it to
the online system, and hope the person never bothers to log on and read it.
If they do, and they don't like it, avoid their questions—if, that is, your
goal is to drive some of your best talent away.
How did we get to this point? Instead of a "grade" that carries all of the
negative weight most of us credit our high school years with, we should be looking
at feedback like the yellow lines on the road after night has fallen. Without
those lines, it's almost impossible to drive a straight line. With them, it's
a breeze.
There's hope that the incoming millennial generation (Gen Y) will bring a
new wave of feedback receptivity into the workplace, as Harvard generational
expert, Tamara Erickson, discusses in her
blog.
For the newest generation in our midst, a request for feedback often signals
a desire to learn more. Isn't that what we should all be doing? Imagine the
strength of an organization populated with individuals who align well with the
leadership brand we have built and who focus, day in and day out, on what they're
doing well and how they can improve.
And imagine trying to hire someone away from such a firm. They would have
mastered the recipe for the secret sauce, that competitive advantage that can't
be stolen or replicated. Now imagine how much fun it would be to work there.
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