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.
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.
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