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Talent Calibration Can Rise Above Politics. But How?

Are you involved in your organization’s talent calibration process? Think back to the last session you attended with executives. Did they mostly stay quiet? Perhaps experience taught them that opening up about employees exposes them to career-damaging shoot-from-the-hip criticism. Or they may think it reflects poorly on them as leaders if staff members’ ratings are less than stellar.

Unfortunately, this is a common situation. And too often, it leads to needless bias in talent ratings. Hyperbolic statements like “She’s fantastic!” or “He’s a superstar!” don’t help. Actually, leaders’ talent calibration input can be distorted by many factors — territorial issues, inflated egos, unconscious bias, a lack of exposure to employees, and more.

How can you minimize the impact of these variables? After working with many senior leadership teams who’ve faced these challenges, we’ve developed an approach that removes politics from the equation. It’s a two-step process:

  1. Capture leadership behaviors on a scorecard.
  2. Rely on data-based decision-making to drive calibration.

Here’s how it works…

The Behavior Scorecard: Measuring Means and Ends

Some executives are wildly successful, yet they’re notorious for leaving a “trail of bodies” behind them. When the end always justifies the means, it sends a negative message that can seriously damage your organization’s culture.

Before executives calibrate talent, they need a way to manage “ends” and “means” that avoids in-the-moment bias. The answer? Emphasize observable behaviors that reflect your cultural mindset and values. Rather than relying on a standard off-the-shelf competency model, focus on real behaviors that are valued in your organization.

Partnering an in-house team with an external challenger can provide a more balanced perspective. Also, expand your interviews beyond top executives. Perspectives from across the organization help create a realistic and authentic framework. Use focus groups, surveys, and other instruments to help illuminate the nature of leadership at all levels of the organization.

Most companies have already performed much of this work, and the evidence is located in multiple places. Start by analyzing verbatim comments from engagement surveys. Review consultant reports based on employee interviews. Interview people at all levels to understand what is valued currently, and what will help the organization advance. Using this data, you can construct a simple set of leadership priorities, including specific behaviors that can shape assessments and learning opportunities.

Assessments based on these behaviors can be one data point in an executive leadership scorecard. Others might include mobility, diversity goals, engagement survey data, ethical conduct, and participation in employee resource groups. Clearly define measures of leadership behavior that will move your organization in the right direction.

Data-Based Decision-Making: 4 Steps

We suggest a simple 4-step, data-driven decision methodology. We call it the “STAR” process — survey, talent card, assessment, and review. This encourages ongoing conversations about executive talent between peers. It also ensures visibility of organizational talent and breaks down silos to increase mobility, career development and advancement.

1. Survey

Understand a leader’s ‘brand’ before calibration.

Conduct a survey based on the potential and visibility of the “brand” each executive has developed with their peers. To promote a robust discussion, compare each executive’s pre-calibration response with responses from peers. This exercise can be especially helpful for succession planning and development.

2. Talent Card

Show a full view of the leader and their organization.

Use this card to aggregate data about leaders and how they manage their teams. Ideally, it features scorecard data, performance data, risk data, and ethical data. It can also include other relevant organizational data such as spans, layers, diversity, and profit and loss responsibility. To offer a broader perspective, you may also want to add responses from employee surveys.

3. Assess

Weight each item to determine a starting score.

For all talent card data, assign a relative weighting based on importance. This creates a set of “scores” based solely on data. These scores are your calibration starting point. Stack rank the list of leaders by score to identify top, middle, and bottom ranges. A leader’s manager can keep the ranking, or challenge it and add commentary. This balances manager reviews and data-based reviews of executive talent.

4. Review

Prep for calibration.

A review period gives executives a starting point to calibrate talent based on available data. Differences between ratings reveal where the “heat” of conversations should focus during a calibration meeting. This review cycle encourages dialogue about gaps before a calibration session. Encourage participants to stay curious and check their biases. Also, prompt them to ask questions that will deepen their understanding, rather than to explain or defend.

The Calibration Session

After completing the pre-work, you can focus on the gaps between data and manager review as a starting point for talent discussions. It also creates opportunities to ask useful probative questions about each leader. For example:

  • Were appropriate goals established?
  • Is this a “how” or “what” issue?
  • Are they seen as a “blocker” for other talent?
  • How do they interact with peers?
  • Are they visible enough?
  • Do they need to move on to a new role?

The calibration team does more than simply determine an appropriate rating. It also makes data-driven decisions around talent actions. Next steps and plans for both struggling and high-potential talent can be recorded during the session.

Benefits of a Better Talent Calibration Process

We’ve worked with many senior leadership teams who’ve faced serious talent calibration challenges. When one firm used this process to deepen their talent discussion, it helped them create more effective development plans and design more confident action plans during the calibration session.

This planning process enabled executives to conduct more fruitful conversations with their most talented leaders. And these conversations about strengths, opportunities, and career paths within the company resulted in increased mobility through promotions, retirements, and resignations. As a result, the company made way for new talent, while increasing the visibility and mobility of diverse talent.

By relying on available data and linking evaluations to transparent behaviors, you too can reduce bias and improve the conversation about enterprise executive talent. Ultimately, you can minimize the unwanted influence of politics in discussions and decisions about your organization’s most precious resource — talent.

 


EDITOR’S NOTE: In developing this article, Jennifer Tice collaborated with Andy Atkins, VP, Executive and Team Performance Practice at BTS, a global consultancy. For more than three decades, BTS has been designing powerful experiences that have a profound and lasting impact on businesses and their people.

Unification of HR Systems – Set Up for Success

Podcast Sponsored by: Tydy

Considering a new HR system for your company? Finding the right HR system has become a critical piece to a successful, thriving business. In order to support a company’s talent strategy, there are several distinct types of HR systems available. It might seem difficult to select which one is best for your organization. This is a critical choice because HR systems that contribute to a good employee experience are 1.3 times more likely to perform better. And, who doesn’t want their business to perform well? 

Our Guest: Kiran Menon

In this episode of the #WorkTrends podcast, we unpack the important topic of HR systems with Kiran Menon, the CEO, and co-founder of Tydy. Tydy is an employee experience solution that connects, unites, and automates HR processes and technologies. During his 17 years of experience in consulting and sales, he has worked across multiple locations, leading teams in Europe, the US, and Asia. Kiran states:

“Tydy actually started from an onboarding perspective. What we are doing is we really went out there and reimagined onboarding and redefined what onboarding meant for large enterprises. Our focus is on employers with about 5,000 plus employees. Tydy moved them from cumbersome weeklong processes to quick, simple, and verified onboarding in seconds.”

How Has Technology Impacted the Way HR is Managed?

In the last two years, companies have faced an increased need for better software and improved processes throughout the digital space. With many work teams working remotely from a variety of places, there has been a surge of software options to optimize and manage complex HR procedures across businesses. Kiran explains:

“There’s been a huge proliferation of multiple apps in the workplace. Suddenly post-April 2020 companies globally scoured everywhere to look for different types of applications that could digitize processes and deliver a digital-first experience. What’s really happened is there’s been a sudden influx of too many apps and too many systems. This overcomplicates the process. Technology has impacted HR pretty massively, but also, it’s brought about a lot of concerns, issues, and frustrations.”

HR Systems and Onboarding

One of the most crucial functions of an HR system is the onboarding process. The importance of this process going smoothly directly correlates not only to a company’s success but also to its financial health. Kiran states:

“We work with companies where day one of an individual joining and getting started is billing day, right? This means that the moment the person starts, you actually want them to get onto the floor and start becoming productive. That’s billing hours in whatever that industry may be. Now, if your onboarding system does not enable them to do that, you are actually losing revenue when your assets like your laptops are not ready until day five, or day 10 in some cases.”

With all the benefits of a unifying HR system, are there any drawbacks? Kiran explains some of the challenges:

“One of the biggest questions from an ownership perspective is when you’re thinking about onboarding, who owns asset allocation. Is it HR? And until you understand the plan that ticks off all these boxes, it becomes very tough to think about unification. 

Managing HR in the Future

With all of these quick shifts regarding HR systems, will there be any more major changes in the way that HR is managed in the future? Kiran gives us his prediction:

“You still have about a good decade to two decades of innovation in front of you. We haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how data could be used. Or, how you could potentially automate verification systems, or automate even career mapping from a data perspective. So I think there’s a lot more that needs to be uncovered and developed from a future perspective.”

I hope you’ve found this recent episode of #WorkTrends helpful when considering an HR system to elevate your company’s onboarding and overall organization. To learn more, contact Kiran Menon on LinkedIn.

Subscribe to the #WorkTrends podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. Be sure to follow our #WorkTrends hashtag on LinkedIn and Facebook, too, for more great conversations!

Recruitfest! Join Us. The Future of Talent Starts Here

I’m very excited TalentCulture is a corporate sponsor for this event Thursday, Oct 7th. Look forward to seeing everyone. We will also be present at the TweetUp – Here is today’s guest post from Eric Winegardner, Vice President, Client Adoption, Monster Worldwide.

This week promises to be the highlight of my year.  In just two days, nearly a year’s worth of brainstorming and planning will come to fruition and illustrate the possibilities when two organizations partner around a common desire of moving the Recruiting industry forward.  Of course, I am talking about Recruitfest!

I had the opportunity to attend RecruitFest! in-person last year in Toronto. I had skipped the inaugural event the year before and to this day consider it a professional miss.  What I experienced over those two days was a truly unique, transformative recruiting event that I knew I wanted to be a part of- and quite honestly wanted Monster to be involved in.  The first day had not even wrapped, and the wheels of partnership were in motion.

There’s something about the RecruitFest! brand that attracts the best and brightest minds from our industry.  Some credit the casual environment where people can participate in the conversations that matter to them.  Others say it is the design of the agenda that encourages speakers to lead conversations around topics rarely discussed, but critical to moving our profession forward.  I think it is a combination of the two- great people having passionate conversations about the possibilities inherent to the evolving world of work.

While this year’s RecruitFest! agenda is a bit more structured, it is still built around voicing opinions (however controversial) and exploring possibilities with the objective of transforming the conversation from theory into practice.   Our collective goal for the day is that everyone walk out (or log off) of RecruitFest! excited about being a part of this amazing community and reminded that what we do is perhaps one of the most noble professions on the planet: finding great jobs for great people.

Most importantly, we want you to have an experience that changes the way you think about recruiting and makes you a stronger, better informed professional equipped to serve the people who really matter: your clients and your candidates.

The Recruitfest! agenda is designed to tackle the business of recruiting holistically. We know that it’s not all about sourcing, or interviewing, or compensation, or benefits or any of the hundreds of tactical responsibilities involved in placing the right candidate in the right job.  It’s about how all of those elements can work together to position you and your talent organization as strategic business partners.

This year, we’ve selected a group of world-class leaders to steer the conversation.  Just check out this line-up!  Some are familiar names, others will be.  They all have one thing in common, wicked-smart and passionate about the business! What’s cool is we’ve grouped them together to facilitate conversations about topics that while they may be experts in require examining perspectives that they- and you- might not have thought of before or even entirely embraced.

More interestingly, the track leaders will be joining the audience of recruiting professionals at the event for the duration, participating in and adding to the dialogue as peers, not “influencers” or “thought leaders.”  That means that you get to hear from some of the most influential minds working in talent today, talking about the topics that really matter, in a completely spontaneous, unscripted, and unrehearsed format.  More importantly, they want to hear what you think.

The biggest learning opportunities and most valuable takeaways at RecruitFest! happen in real time. That’s because the conversation informs the content, instead of the other way around.  And that’s where you come in.

I truly believe that the best ideas and the brightest minds in recruiting don’t necessarily spend their time publishing blogs, joining me on the conference circuit or even sharing their insights and ideas with others in the recruiting community.  Why? You’re too busy recruiting!

October 7 is the day that all changes.  That’s because RecruitFest! has redesigned the un-conference experience it introduced to the recruiting space.  We will be utilizing cutting-edge tools and technologies to create a true “un-conference” experience whether you’re in Boston, Baltimore or Beijing.  You don’t just get to watch the stream at your desk, you get to participate in the conversation! The Recrutifest! virtual experience will allow you to converse with other participants, ask questions of the presenters and in-studio attendees, and evolve the conversation- all from the convenience and comfort of your own desk.

I encourage you to check out the schedule, speaker bios and session descriptions and start thinking now about how you can lend your voice to shaping the success of RecruitFest!  Register for the FREE virtual event today, and join during every available moment you have on Thursday!

As the emcee of the event, it’s my job not only to introduce our amazing speakers and awesome topics, but to keep the dialogue flowing.  That means it’s my responsibility (and my promise) to show no preference to any attendee because of how they are hearing and seeing the conference.  I don’t care where you are.  I care what you think.  And it’s not every day that a recruiter hears that.