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.