Your Best People - How to find, measure and manage your top talent

When companies talk about talent management they are generally referring to the things they do with a small pool of individuals who have been defined as stars. But is that enough? Is talent management something that only needs to be focused on a few people? Hard facts call this very much into question.

In the US and the UK, Gallup surveys found that between 15 and 20 percent of employees are what they term “actively disengaged”. They describe these individuals’ behaviour as “not just unhappy at work; (but) busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish”.

That’s one end of the behaviour spectrum. At the other end, the survey found between 20 and 30 percent of employees are “engaged”, which is defined as “working with passion, driving innovation and moving the organisation forward, and feeling a proud connection to their company”. These people, presumably, comprise the pool from which “talented” individuals emerge. As the survey shows, however, while the top 20-30 percent are busy trying to apply and grow their talent, the bottom 15-20 percent are actively trying to sabotage them. So concentrating purely on the top group is not enough; companies also have to focus on their disaffected people.

There is no question that managing talent effectively is important. More than 90% of managers agree. They just don’t know how to get their hands around the problem and part of the reason is the lack of agreement about what talent is, and even more to the point, how to measure it. However if we move from the rather amorphous concept of “talent” to the more tangible concept of “best” – defined as matching the right behaviour to the demands of the job – the problem is more easily resolved.

Performance is job specific. If we say someone is a good performer what we mean is that he or she is performing well in their current job. The performance is the result of behaviour in the present – not just any behaviour, but the right behaviour for the job or task.Once you understand that different levels of performance are the result of the degree to which an individual exhibits the right behaviour for their specific job you have a clear, observable and verifiable way of measuring the performance not just of the “talented” group in your company, but everyone.

The disaffected and disengaged people in organisations are doing a number of things, but chances are that very few of them are what they are supposed to do. Unfortunately job descriptions tend to be general and are often out of date. And performance appraisals don’t get to the heart of the matter because, while the manager may know that the individual is not doing what he or she should, little or no hard data is available to support that conclusion. So without tools to deal with the situation, the performance destroyers survive to continue wreaking their damage.

Companies don’t purposely hire disengaged people. Disengagement is something that happens to them after they get into their jobs; it’s caused by the organisation and its management. Studies of underperformance show that in the vast majority of cases the individual doesn’t know what results or outputs he or she is expected to produce (the “what”), let alone how to go about achieving them (the “how”). Instead they go about their jobs virtually blind and have to feel their way along to discover what’s required. It’s rather like a rat in a psychologist’s maze. If it chooses an incorrect path it gets an electric shock and if it chooses a correct path it receives a food pellet. Eventually the rat will find its way through the maze, but not until it’s had quite a few shocks. Humans are less shock resistant and after being banged about a few times they are inclined to engage in what Peter Drucker calls “retiring on the job” – i.e. they give up the idea of adding value and, at best just go with the flow, or at worst become performance saboteurs.

The way to deal with this problem is to develop a clear behaviour blueprint for each job – i.e. a behaviour specification. Job specifications talk about the “what” – objectives, targets, processes, etc. Behaviour specifications talk about the “how” – the specific things that an individual has to do (observable, measurable, verifiable behaviour). A behaviour specification gives a very clear picture of what the job is about. It isn’t a general description of some competencies, nor is it a job description listing responsibilities. It’s a crystal clear plan of action: if you focus your energy on doing these things you will be successful in the job.

You can’t change what you can’t measure, so if you want to change the behaviour of the “actively disengaged” you need to be able to measure what they are doing – their behaviour – and match that with the behaviour demanded by the job.