Social Valorization Theory

I am working with some colleagues on a research project that will rely on Social Role Valorization Theory or SRV. A good overview of the theory can be found at:  http://www.srvip.org/overview_SRV_Osburn.pdf

I was not familiar with the concept. A few useful quotes:

The application of empirical knowledge to the shaping of the current or potential social roles of a party (i.e., person, group, or class) -- primarily by means of enhancement of the party’s competencies & image -- so that these are, as much as possible, positively valued in the eyes of the perceivers  (Wolfensberger & Thomas, 2005).

all sorts of good things that other people are able to convey are almost automatically
apt to be accorded to a person who holds societally valued roles, at least within the resources and norms of his/her society... To mention only a few major examples, they include being accorded dignity, respect, acceptance; a sense of belonging; an education, and the development and exercise of one’s capacities; a voice in the affairs of one’s community and society; opportunities to participate; a decent material standard of living; an at least normative place to live; and opportunities for work and self-support. 

Devalued individuals, groups, and classes are far more likely than other members
of society to be treated badly, and to be subjected to a systematic -- and possibly lifelong -- pattern of such negative experiences as the following.
1. Being perceived and interpreted as “deviant,” due to their negatively-valued differentness.
The latter could consist of physical or functional impairments, low competence, a particular ethnic identity, certain behaviors or associations, skin color, and many others.
2. Being rejected by community, society, and even family and services.
3. Being cast into negative social roles, some of which can be severely negative, such as “subhuman,” “menace,” and “burden on society.”

Being put and kept at a social or physical distance, the latter most. Also, when a person holds valued social roles, attributes of theirs that might  otherwise be viewed negatively are much more apt to be put up with, or overlooked, or “dismissed” as relatively unimportant.

The article goes on to talk about action steps to work with groups on increasing their social recognition.

It's an interesting theory, and I tend to concur with it. I shared with my group a couple of quotes from Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments that share the same conclusions (albeit from a couple of hundred years ago and using slightly different language):

Our obsequiousness to our superiors more frequently arises from our admiration for the advantages of their situation, than from any private expectations of benefit from their good–will. Their benefits can extend but to a few; but their fortunes interest almost every body. We are eager to assist them in completing a system of happiness that approaches so near to perfection; and we desire to serve them for their own sake, without any other recompense but the vanity or the honour of obliging them.”

The poor man, on the contrary, is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that it either places him out of the sight of mankind, or, that if they take any notice of him, they have, however, scarce any fellow–feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers. He is mortified upon both accounts; for though to be overlooked, and to be disapproved of, are things entirely different, yet as obscurity covers us from the daylight of honour and approbation, to feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope, and disappoints the most ardent desire, of human nature. The poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel.

http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2620#lf1648_label_116


What I liked about the superior passage is the idea that we have a natural inclination to serve those who are in the valued classes/groups. I thought it nicely echoes Osburn’s statement, “all sorts of good things that other people are able to convey are almost automatically apt to be accorded to a person who holds societally valued roles, at least within the resources and norms of his/her society” (or really, Osburn echoes Smith and other thinkers). We give willingly to the valued even if they have done nothing to earn it, and likewise, the poverty quote shows how the needs of the non-valued classes are completely ignored.

Wolfensberger, W., & Thomas, S. (2005). Introductory Social Role Valorization workshop training package. Syracuse, NY: Training Institute for Human Service Planning, Leadership and Change Agentry (Syracuse University). 

Marine Corps to Add 'Spiritual Fitness' to Professional Education

The Marine Corps is adding "spiritual fitness" to professional development.

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/10/18/corps-to-add-spiritual-fitness-to-professional-education.html

Spiritual does not necessarily mean religious, Scott clarified. He breaks spiritual fitness into three parts: personal faith, personal values, and moral living and decision-making.

"A moral compass doesn't just come from a faith foundation; it's not enough to make a decision based on what is legally right or wrong," Scott said. "Chaplains will help Marines discover that compass for themselves -- that center of gravity that comes from their own upbringing, personal experiences, and religious teaching."

I did a really interesting interview with Rev. Frank Macht at Dartmouth Hitchcock Health System, and he talked quite a bit about the non-religious nature of spiritual care. I'm becoming more convinced this is an important thing - for the workplace, and for life.  

lessons from fast food for managing HCOs

In the October issue of the HBR is an article about how Cheryl Bachelder, CEO of Popeye's, a fast food chicken chain, mostly in the South, has been trying to turn around the organization.

https://hbr.org/2016/10/the-ceo-of-popeyes-on-treating-franchisees-as-the-most-important-customers

I've been talking to my students in my management class about the relationship between hospitals and other healthcare organizations (HCOs) and their clinical staff. What is interesting and relevant for our discussion is how, when the company was failing, the CEO refocused corporate efforts not on the end customers (the people buying the chicken), but on the franchisees that own most of the restaurants. The idea was if she could fix the relationship between the company and its franchisees, the franchisees would fix the customer issues. It's a lot like how a hospital CEO really needs to focus on making the docs happy so that the docs will make the patients happy.

From a talent management perspective, if you are a senior leader, you have to treat your employees as if they were your customers. It's an interesting perspective. 

Nobel for contract theory

The Nobel Prize for Economic Science was given for the development of contract theory. Here's a good summary of what contract theory is and how it applies to healthcare:

https://www.ohe.org/news/contract-theory-nobel-offerings-health-economics

Relevant to talent management.

NNEAHE and CHHS host conference

I had the chance to moderate a panel for a joint conference we hosted yesterday at UNH. The College of Health and Human Services and the Northern New England Association of Healthcare Executives produced "Shaping the Future: Leadership and Public Policy in Healthcare". It was a great conference and we had a very nice turnout of NNEAHE members, as well as students, faculty, and staff.

I moderated the panel, Talent Management for Bench Strength Development, and I have to say it was a really great experience. I had three excellent executives to work with: Kevin Callahan, CEO of Exeter Health Resources; Samantha O'Neill, VP of HR for the Elliot Health System; and Warren West, CEO of Littleton Regional Healthcare and North Country Healthcare.

This was my first time moderating a panel like this, and the my panelists were giving me a hard time because they said my questions sounded like they were written by an academic. But they were great, and rolled with my exam-like questions. I wasn't able to get them all to say "Googleyness", but it still went well.

We recorded the event and we'll be publishing it on the Health Leader Forge next week, so you can listen for yourself when it comes out. Looking forward to doing it again next year.

power of listening

As I go along doing interviews with senior leaders, one of the things that comes up in one way or another is the need to be a good listener. Many of the senior leaders I talk with make explicit mention of this skill. Listening, rather than directing. Listening is the key to leading, rather than managing.

yay! we got a hit!

My co-author Lee Bewley and I just received an acceptance for our paper, Mentorship Mediated by Life-Career Seasons: An Analysis of a multi-dimensional model of mentoring among career groups of United States Army Officers.

It will be in an on-line, open-access journal so I'll definitely post a link here when it comes out.

RWL #6

this week's RWL newsletter reproduced here:

Happy Friday! Here are this weeks recommendations for your reading, watching, and listening pleasure!

Read

What: in the HBR, To Get More Out of Social Media, Think Like an Anthropologist by Susan Fournier, John Quelch, and Bob Rietveld

Why: I've been thinking a lot about listening. It comes up frequently when I talk to executives about leadership. In this article, listening is applied at the macro/market level. According to the authors, "Social listening promises the Holy Grail in business: superior understanding of customers." What is "social listening"? The essence is customers/consumers/patients are online talking about your firm and your firm's products - whatever those might be. In a sense, your users are giving you unfiltered access to their feelings about your product. So you should listen (or read) what they are saying. But... you should listen like an anthropologist: "Anthropologists and the culturally sensitive analysts who think like them specialize in meaning management. Their function is to take complex bits of data and develop a higher-order sense of them." It is a qualitative approach to research that I am fond of - the authors' point is this approach keeps the data grounded in its context, and does not purify it in a way that quantitative approaches often do.

https://hbr.org/2016/08/to-get-more-out-of-social-media-think-like-an-anthropologist​

(you should be able to get 4 free articles each month from the HBR even if you are not a subscriber)


Watch

What: MakerBot and Robohand | 3D Printing Mechanical Hands

Why: This is a short, inspiring video about a South African carpenter who, after losing his fingers in a work-related accident, set out to make his own artificial hand. In collaboration with an American puppet maker, they together developed a low-cost, 3-D printable prosthesis that is changing people's lives. It's really an amazing story of technology and innovation.

https://youtu.be/WT3772yhr0o​


Listen

What: The latest Health Leader Forge interview was with John Fernandez, the President and CEO of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Why: Mass Eye and Ear is a world famous specialty hospital focused on ophthalmology and otolaryngology. During the interview, John surprised me by recommending the One Minute Manager. He recommends the book because it has some basic advice - give people feedback and follow up (here's that listening theme again). According to John, this is a fundamental management task, and it's one that even senior executives don't always remember. Along with planning, feedback and follow up were central themes we came back to repeatedly throughout the interview.

http://healthleaderforge.blogspot.com/2016/08/john-r-fernandez-president-and-chief.html


OK – those are my suggestions for this week. If you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here:https://tinyletter.com/markbonica

notes on recruiting from "Winning the War for Talent"

I just finished reading Mandy Johnson's Winning the War for Talent. I wish I had read this when I was a hiring manager. Even though I worked in the federal government and had very little control over most of the variables she talks about, her tips on screening for attitude are insightful.

She talks about evaluating an applicant's past history on three factors: attitude, skills and qualifications, and practical fit (p. 80).

I've spoken with a lot of executives for my podcast, and one of the things I try to ask about is how they go about selecting leaders. I've heard a mix of answers about how they select, but when I ask them what their hardest lesson learned was, it was almost always hiring the wrong person and/or waiting too long to get rid of a poor performer, often the person they shouldn't have hired.

Skills and qualifications refers to formal qualifications like licenses (if required). It also refers to things like the quality of school the person got their degree from (or if they have a degree). So pretty straight forward and relatively objective.

Practical fit sounds a bit squishier, and has to do with whether the person is a good fit for the organization. I just released an interview with John Fernandez, the President and CEO of Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, one of the world's leading specialty hospitals, and he talks about having a good fit for leaders in his C-suite. His comment is that at that level, it isn't about skills and qualifications (which are necessary, but to get to that level, everyone is skilled and well qualified). His focus was on a good fit for the team. Most of us are never going to work in the C-suite, so Johnson's focus is more about being a good fit for the organization's mission and culture. If you don't like to travel, you're probably not a good fit for a sales job with a big territory. If you don't like sitting behind a desk, you probably don't want to be an accountant.

These latter two are pretty simple. It's attitude that is much harder to judge and Johnson spends a lot more time talking about how to try to evaluate it objectively. All of the executives I have interviewed have talked about attitude in some way, shape, or form. Johnson talks about how most of us think we can articulate what attitude is, but often we don't really have objective criteria. I agree - operationalizing attitude is challenging, especially if you are trying to do it from a resume or CV.

She offers the following five measures of attitude:

measure                            operationalization
positive work ethic          job stability
                                         early workforce participation

perseverance                    job stability
                                         completion history (broadly measured - e.g., completed levels of schooling,                                           programs)

achievement                    pattern of demonstrated achievement

works well with              job stability
people                             community involvement

commitment                    job stability
                                        targeted cover letter
                                        speed of application
                                        targeted CV

Do you think she values job stability? One of her big themes is good recruitment doesn't just mean filling the job, but filling it with someone who will stay. So job stability is a good indicator of that. But it also is a good indicator for a host of other problems. Not particularly interesting in itself, but interesting to see how important it is. Some other items interested me. I once hired a woman based on her volunteer work. She was a Navy spouse so I knew she didn't necessarily always have the opportunity for meaningful work. But she took on the family support group leadership for an air craft carrier - a ship with 5,000 crew members. Her job was to help coordinate the families and help them work through problems when their husbands and wives were off on the ship somewhere and couldn't help. And she did that as a volunteer. She was a great employee when she was being paid. Early workforce participation is another interesting point. Learning the value of work early is probably a good trait, though I have to say I never thought to ask about that. Targeted CV and cover letter are obvious to me, but I guess not to everyone.

How would you operationalize attitude? I think it's an interesting exercise.

RWL #4

reposting here my weekly newsletter:

This week’s focus is on death and dying. I know, just in time for the weekend. But you can’t work in healthcare and not think about that topic. There is a grace in it, and part of our job as health leaders is to ensure that the people entrusted to our care are treated with dignity. This week's suggestions look at how we can help people at the end.

Read

What: From the WP, “Dying is hard. Death doulas want to help make it easier.”

Why: My father volunteered as the medical director for Home Healthcare Hospice and Community Services for many years as part of his mission as a Catholic physician. I used to see him head off into the woods of rural New Hampshire with his black bag to check on patients on the weekends like a character out of some 19^th century novel, except he was driving a pick-up rather than a buggy. As a former hospital administrator, I have seen my fair share of patients who passed while I was on duty over night, escorting their bodies to the morgue, but I’ve never sat with someone who was actively dying. As an economist, I read this article and thought about specialization, but also how utility maximization does not always mean more money. As the great economist Adam Smith said, “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/dying-is-hard-death-doulas-want-to-help-make-it-easier/2016/07/22/53d80f5c-24f7-11e6-8690-f14ca9de2972_story.html


Watch

What: Dr. BJ Miller “What Really Matters at the End of Life”

Why: Really, most TED Talks are self-recommending. But Miller's personal journey is fascinating. He runs an organization called The Zen Hospice Project, which he talks about in the video. You can read about him here.

https://www.ted.com/talks/bj_miller_what_really_matters_at_the_end_of_life


Listen

What: Health Leader Forge interview with the Rev. Frank Macht, Director of Chaplaincy, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center

Why: On the theme of death and dying, Frank and I had a great conversation about what it is like to be a hospital chaplain at one of the country’s top teaching hospitals. Frank’s story is really interesting as he traveled from Germany to San Francisco and all over the United States learning his trade, which is to journey with people who are in crisis. One of my favorite interviews.

http://healthleaderforge.blogspot.com/2016/06/rev-frank-macht-director-of-chaplaincy.html


OK – those are my suggestions for this week. If you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here:https://tinyletter.com/markbonica

I' d love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line by e-mail, or you can tweet to me at @bonicatalent .

Book: "How Google Works" by Schmidt and Rosenberg

How Google Works is a quick and easy read (I am a slow reader and I plowed through this book over the weekend), but packed with some interesting perspective and specific tips.

The book highlights the fact that Google operates in the manner that Google manages human capital for talent. It is almost straight out of the pages of The War for Talent published back in 2001. Hire the best talent, take your time to get the best talent, help the best talent develop, manage under-performers out.

The book emphasizes the importance of culture, and the importance of preserving that culture by bringing in the best.

What can we learn as talent managers in healthcare from How Google Works? I've had a number of conversations with executives on the Health Leader Forge, and many of them, really a majority of them, say that the leadership lesson that they had to learn the hard way was around hiring and managing under-performers. So even though the dynamics of healthcare delivery are quite different than the frothy, ping-pong table, nap-nook filled world of internet start ups, the problem of talent management and finding the right people is still the main problem leaders face.

Schmidt and Rosenberg have some interesting recommendations - like creating a hiring committee where the hiring manager has a veto, but not the final decision to hire - makes a lot of sense. There needs to be a focus on slowing down the process to ensure organizational fit and appropriateness. Hiring by committee makes sense because as the authors point out "Hiring decisions are too important to be left in the hands of a manager who may or may not have a stake in the employee's success a year later" due to corporate movement of either the manager or the new hire (p. 121).

That's an interesting prescription and it ties back to The War for Talent, which argues that the single most important thing an executive can do is build their team.

career mapping and transparency

Nice article on employer transparency about career development:

When career maps are paired with effective advising, employees are empowered with tools and support to own their careers and actualize their future with the company making it a win-win for both employee and company. The result is employees who are in charge of, and enthusiastic about, their careers.

When a company is committed to transparency, it forms a partnership between the employer and the employee. As the company shares its vision for the future with employees, workers will understand what the company values, and they can invest their time and energy in improving the skills they know they need to successfully advance within the organization.

rest here: http://www.talentmgt.com/2016/06/29/when-employees-own-their-careers-everyone-wins/

This was a thing I think the Army did and does do particularly well. Most young officers are encouraged to develop a career map early on, and most senior officers are willing to talk about their careers and to discuss junior officers' maps.

In my own research on early careerists, career mapping is something I am hearing a lot about. When an organization engages early careerists in career mapping, they seem to develop a much stronger bond with the company than when they do not. 

ACHE session on military transition

I'm preparing to do a study looking at the challenges of transitioning from the military health system after retirement. The ACHE had a session on the topic this past congress - some nice material:

https://www.ache.org/carsvcs/MilitaryCivilianTransition.pdf

where should organizational training emphasis be?

One of the things I try to bring out when I interview executives for the Health Leader Forge is how they made the transition from individual performer to supervisor, and supervisor to manager.

Victor Lipman in this article in the HBR points out the fact that organizations tend to invest more in leadership training than in basic management training:

And as I neared the end of my corporate days, I realized I’d received much more management training in the last five years than I did in the first 20 years — when I really needed it — combined.

My experience in the Army is probably not reflective of corporate America. The Army invests a lot of effort in training junior leaders. Whether that training is effective or not kind of depends. But the effort is there, and the Army regularly evolves its training efforts.

My sense from the interviews I have done with executives in the civilian healthcare sector is closer to what Lipman talks about: if the executive was lucky, s/he had a mentor in her/his early days who could coach her/him.

Should organizations do more for individuals transitioning to supervisory roles? There's a fair amount of literature that reflects the fact that high performance as an individual does not translate well into high performance as a supervisor/manager. It seems that would be a good place to invest. How should it be done seems the question. It seems most organizations assume that the manager a new supervisor reports to will do the training, or the new supervisor will just figure it out. What kind of formal training is particularly effective for new supervisors? Are classes effective? Or would some sort of formal mentoring program be more effective? If mentoring, who should do the mentoring? I know I was always a bit leery of telling my boss I was struggling with anything leadership related.

It's a short editorial, but it raises some interesting questions.

false positives vs. false negatives

Was just listening to Adam Grant talk about his new book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World on Innovation Hub and what really piqued my interest was his comments about false positives vs. false negatives in the workplace. In the interview he talks about how Seinfeld was pretty much panned by the execs at NBC after focus groups hated the show. It only survived because one exec had some extra space and he thought it was funny.

I think the key reason Seinfeld survived was because this not because this particular exec had a lot more courage or insight than his colleagues, but because he could afford to absorb the failure - failure was low cost. A false positive - i.e., choosing to go with Seinfeld and taking a chance - and being wrong would have had no cost to him. He had space that needed to be filled, if no one liked Seinfeld, no one would remember that he had given the show a chance.

The execs who rejected Seinfeld did not have that freedom - if they gave a thumbs up to Seinfeld and it turned out they were wrong (false positive), it would have been costly to them. Thus they passed on Seinfeld (a false negative) because institutional incentives made them more conservative than they should have been.

I've been reading about IDEO and how they try to fail early in their creative processes so that they can learn more quickly.

Grant's Seinfeld story is a great example of how organizations build in conservatism and miss opportunity.

How do we create organizations so that employees can take more chances without being punished?

significance of fun job titles

Fun article in HBR about the value of letting employees make up their own job titles. I especially liked "Germ Slayer" for an infectious disease specialist)

https://hbr.org/2016/05/creative-job-titles-can-energize-workers

From the HBR article:

The researchers surveyed the workers, along with members of two control groups, about their attitudes toward their work before the retitling and five weeks later. They found that those who had been asked to choose new titles had lower levels of emotional exhaustion, felt more validated and better recognized for their work, and experienced greater “psychological safety,” which can promote free information exchanges. They concluded, “Rather than viewing titles solely as sources and reflections of formality and rigidity or mechanisms of bureaucratic control, our research suggests that titles can be vehicles for agency, creativity, and coping.”

The underlying academic paper is "JOB TITLES AS IDENTITY BADGES: HOW SELF- REFLECTIVE TITLES CAN REDUCE EMOTIONAL EXHAUSTION" at Academy of Management Journal 2014, Vol. 57, No. 4, 1201–1225. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amj.2012.0338 .

from the article:

Similarly, when one of the authors of this article was an assistant professor, an executive
once asked, “Who do you assist, and when will you get to teach your own classes and do your own research?”

I have had the same experience and hate using that title - especially since I am in my mid-40's. It makes me sound like a TA instead of an actual faculty member.

The authors conduct a mixed methods study, doing a qualitative, grounded theory study at a local chapter of the Make A Wish (MAW) Foundation where they initially discovered that this chapter encouraged employees to come up with their own job titles (in addition to formal titles granted by the organization). They made some generalizations, then ran a quasi-experiment at a hospital where the treatment group was encouraged to make up their own job titles. After five weeks, the treatment group showed reduced emotional exhaustion.

Subjects from both the MAW and hospital treatment groups liked their self-reflective job titles, though a significant minority at the hospital did not use them and/or did not think they were appropriate for the organizational context.

The authors point out some risks - namely that cynical employees could take advantage of the freedom to create names and create inappropriate/disruptive titles. My thought is it would take a fairly strong culture to overcome that kind of behavior - if management simply vetoed employees who made inappropriate names, the cynicism would just be enhanced. For censure to be effective and not counterproductive, it would have to come from peer rejection - employees would have be feel ashamed of making cynical names.

I really liked this article. Very creative and interesting.

failures of new managers

Good article in the HBR about new managers. A list of things new managers fail at:

If the new manager doesn’t fully understand that, they might hold things up by:

• Doing tasks that should be delegated to team members
• Taking back the tasks that they have delegated because they believe they can do them better
• Undercommunicating with direct reports, making them unsure of their duties
• Micromanaging in a way that doesn’t allow team members to expand their own capabilities

rest here:  https://hbr.org/2016/06/how-to-know-if-someone-is-ready-to-be-a-manager

better to be a generalist

Interesting, especially since the observed field was investment banking where I would have expected deeper experience to be a strength:

Experienced hiring managers said they preferred people who had a diverse range of skills. They said things like “Someone who has accomplished a lot of things is better than a one-trick-pony who just keeps doing the same thing and isn’t taking advantage of what the MBA has to offer.” People who’ve demonstrated talent across different areas seem to have an edge.

 https://hbr.org/2016/06/generalists-get-better-job-offers-than-specialists

Fits my view of the world - it's nice to see it validated.

a year is a long time to wait

Goldman Sachs among others is changing the way it gives performance ratings - shifting to more frequent feedback rather than just a number according to the WSJ here.

I liked this observation generally about the annual performance eval:

Ranking a year of employee performance on a numerical scale can be tough on all workers, and particularly young ones, who are hungry for more-constant feedback from bosses, surveys show. More firms are eliminating numerical ratings for workers as bosses realize “the person receiving the rating is now stuck with the number for an entire year that labels them,” said Josh Bersin, a principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP who advises companies on talent management.

A year is a long time to wait between evals, especially early in one's career. For me, the extended period is almost as important.

Some of my recently graduated undergrads stay only a year or so in their first job. That first year feels like an eternity, as I remember it, because everything is new. More feedback during that first year is important. I'd venture, more formal feedback is important as well.

some thoughts from "The War for Talent"

In some of my initial scouting of the literature on "Talent Management", I kept hitting on Michaels, Handfield-Jones, and Axelrod's The War for Talent. It's an HBR published practitioner text, not academic, but it covers some interesting topics.

Generally there are five things companies need to do to manage talent:

1. bring in highly talented people
2. develop people quickly and effectively
3. retain high performers
4. remove low performers
5. know who the low and high performers are

These are all pretty obvious, but not necessarily well done.

In reading their book, it was #5 - that consistently seemed to come up, and consistently surprised me. How could you not know who your most talented people are?

Based on my experience in military organizations, larger units don't really know. By larger, I mean hospitals. In part they don't know because of the size. In part they don't know because leadership turns over so quickly. But in part they don't know because the HR system didn't provide that information in a meaningful way.

The local command did not know the performance histories of the military personnel, even though military personnel were exposed to forced ranking. The military personnel system had the historic performance information, but local commanders did not have access to it, nor were they told to provide any special consideration to any of the military personnel. There was no central authority that was tracking high performers (or low performers) either - the central HR system was a faceless blob.

Civilian personnel were not exposed to forced ranking, and as a result 95% of the civilian personnel received superlative (maximum) performance ratings, masking actual performance and making performance rankings meaningless. Since military personnel were in leadership positions and rotated every few years, they were not around long enough to effect real change. Poorly performing civilian personnel were provided protection by the cumbersome civilian personnel system as well as unions, making it easier to ignore them and let them continue to fester than act to remove them.

I would love to see an organization where #5 is done effectively. It would still take courage and determination to do 3 and 4, but if 5 was done well, I would think 3 and 4 would tend to follow.

Starting Out

I've committed myself to a research agenda around the concept of "talent management." Even though my PhD was in economics, coming to UNH's Department of Health Management and Policy, I realized the area of economics I had studied - economic philosophy, history of political economy - was so far removed from the kind of research that the Department valued that I would fundamentally be starting over - even if I tried to do "health economics". Since I don't particularly care for standard health economics research, I took the last year to land on the subject matter I do care about. And that area is talent management. 

I'm defining talent management broadly as the strategies organizations use to recruit, integrate, deploy, and develop its human resources. 

This interest comes from the rather haphazard and awkward process I went through during the first eight years or so of my Army career as I struggled to find the area of work in the organization that I was best fit for. I eventually landed in finance where I was well suited and was able to perform at the level I desired. Had the system had some better mechanism for managing talent, I think it would have been relatively easy to get me there earlier. As it was, I almost left the Army in my early years because I wasn't well suited for operations work. 

So I find this idea of talent management both important and interesting. I'll be posting articles and thoughts here as I develop my agenda. I'd love for people to share their ideas with me.