Focus, focus, focus…

The stock markets may all be up on the first trading day of 2012, but it doesn’t take a Nobel Laureate to see that we are in for a rocky ride for several years to come (actually, just looking back to the first – equally positive – trading day of 2011 might be enough!) What though is the likely impact on professionals engaged in HR and talent management?

If my own network of friends and clients is anything to go by, then it will simply be 10x increase in focus: specifically, focus on delivering the right person for each role, right now.

That sounds fairly harmless until you consider what decreases as focus increases: depth-of-field. In other words, as a single issue comes into sharp relief, issues just a fraction closer or further out become blurred. In the case of a relentless focus on delivering razor-sharp talent for vacancies as they appear, I would expect that longer term programmes for the development of talent pipelines will slip out of focus. That means that the role of the professional HR or talent management specialist is to be able to find more efficient, cost-effective ways of keeping building that pipeline without being able to get major focus or commitment from senior management for the foreseeable future. Your senior management are trying to finesse sustained growth against a backdrop of almost total economic uncertainty; their tolerance for the medium- and long-term proposals you make will be very limited.

Every challenge is a (possibly very well disguised) opportunity.  Sharpen your own game. Have you got a clear picture of the reservoirs and flows of talent through the organization? Your FD can map out the reservoirs and flows of money through the organization; being able to do the same for talent is a perfectly reasonable expectation. (If your current toolset doesn’t seem to cover this, elaura.com/imagine may help.)

When  you can map talent accurately like this, then filling vacancies won’t be a mad scramble to analyse each role as a one-off, but rather a strategic exercise where you know 80% of the answer before you even know the specific role you are being asked to fill. You will satisfy the focus demanded by your senior management without actually losing sight of the bigger picture.

 

 

 

A Book Worth Gutting

Picked up “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Nobel Economics Laureate Daniel Kahneman at Changi on my way to NZ 3 weeks ago, and spent most of my evenings there reading it thoroughly. Will be going back over it with a fine tooth comb in the weeks ahead.

In some ways an impossible book to summarise, representing as it does a life-time’s worth of enquiry into the workings of intuition and perception. Kahneman ranges over topics as diverse as statistics, marriage and pupillometry, but a core theme is the nature of intuitive judgement, both its value – effortless judgement – and its dangers – error-laden and often substituting the actual question or problem for another more easily answered. Another is the role that luck plays in performance; Kahneman suggests that regression to the mean accounts for a great deal of failure to sustain apparently stellar performance (in other words, that a great deal of stellar performance is in the first place just statistical variance).

One of the nicest features of the book is Kahneman’s stated intention to influence water-cooler gossip; each (short) chapter ends with examples of how the chapter’s themes could appear in casual conversation, and thereby correct typical, systemic misperceptions of business and life situaions.

A book to read and gut and read again.

Fine Grained Data Rules, OK?

Taking a client through her Birkman Report yesterday, she made a comment to the effect that all the other tools she had taken recently (and she had taken a whole raft of them) had described her as in some way emotionally detached. That certainly wasn’t the picture arising from her Birkman, nor was it really how she saw herself. When I pushed her on this, it came down to the fact that she was highly-thought oriented; and on most if not all of the theory- (rather than empirically-) driven tools, logic and thought are placed in contradistinction to sensing and feeling. So very thought oriented equates to emotionally detached.

The problem here is a theoretical framework that is too highly-constrained and, in essence, too coarse-grained. Demonstrably separate factors are bolted together at both ends with no freedom to capture reality.

Roger Birkman developed his eleven (3-dimensional) behavioural constructs based upon his observation of beahvioura and behavioural traits. As a result what is so often treated as a single continuum, from Thought Orientation / Logical / Detachment at one end to Emotionally Engaged / Feeling / Empathetic at the other, is actually broken down into at least 12 largely independent scales (4 components x 3 dimensions). So my client did tend to be somewhat direct, and needed a certain level of objectivity from others, but combined that with some intense emotional orientation, a reasonably decisive approach and an extreme need for time to reflect and a reasonably high need to process ambiguity before making important decisions. And, what is more to the point, that is the picture of herself she recognized and could relate to.

Why settle for an image in newsprint halftone black when you can have Panavision and TechniColor (that’s an LCD clock versus full HD movie for you if you are Gen Y)? Fine-grained data rules, OK…

Failure to Brand Successfully: unexpected consequence

Reading an academic article this morning on what, in non-academic literature, would be called employer branding  (Slaughter, J. E., & Greguras, G. J. (2009). Initial attraction to organizations: The influence of trait inferences. International Journal of Selection and Assessment,17, 1-18). The article highlighted something which amounts in practice to a double penalty for failure to brand the organization appropriately or successfully.

Using the Five Factor Model (“The Big Five” – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism), the authors hypothesised that each of these factors would correlate positively or negatively to willingness to accept a job at companies representing certain brand characteristics (e.g. Dominance [in their market], Boy Scout [honesty and doing good] etc).

Here is the interesting bit: companies which had negative ratings on the brand characteristics (e.g. exemplified a lack of “Boy Scout”) saw a bigger effect than those who exemplified the characteristic. In other words, if you had the positive branding, you would attract roughly the same percentage of people who had the character trait (hypothesised to relate to the brand characteristic) as those who didn’t. But if you had the negative branding, you would attract far more of those who didn’t have the character trait than those who did.

There may be other ways to read this, but in simplest terms  (and doubtless at the risk of massive oversimplication), the implication could be this: successful branding gets you to the ballpark, but you then still need to identify the people who fit your branding from within your pool of applicants; failure to brand on the other hand could mean that your pool of applicants may not include “the right people” at all.

 

Testing for Competencies

I was asked an interesting question yesterday, with regard to whether the Birkman Method tests for competencies.

No. It doesn’t.

But then, and I would argue this one into the teeth of a hurricane, nor does any other Questionnaire-based instrument. Let me explain.

A competency has at least two components, being a) knowledge about what should be done in a particular situation which is b) put into operation at the appropriate moment. Part a) by itself is not a competency, despite the many claims to the contrary. Knowing what you should do does not mean that you either will –  OR EVEN COULD – put that knowledge into operation.

Often this is because of a well-established problem within learning theory, namely the contextual element to the accessing of prior learning. Very much learning that should feed into the exercise of competencies never gets there because it is first acquired within a classroom setting of some kind; that makes it readily accessible when, for example, sitting an examination (or completing a competencies questionnaire) but rather harder to access in an operational setting.Context prevents much learning from ever being integrated into practice; it unfortunately doesn’t prevent it showing up in a completed questionnaire. So the first problem is that knowledge alone is not the same as competency.

So what should we do. We can, of course, ask respondents to self-report their competencies. The obvious problem is that people aren’t stupid: “do you invest time in developing your direct reports?” “Umm… that’s a hard one. What answer were you hoping for?” We can mitigate that by giving a range of options which at face value sound equally desirable and ask the respondent to indicate the one which best describes them. That still runs into the less obvious problem, which is that even at our most honest, we turn out to be not very good at accurately reporting our own behaviours. We tend to describe our behaviour in terms of what we believe to be the right thing to do, rather than according to what we actually do. So “Yes, investing time in developing my direct reports is my number 2 priority” may not equate to my direct reports feeling invested in at all.

This is not meant to be a counsel of despair, however. Here is what we can do to test for competencies:

1. Observe and evaluate actual behaviour, preferably validating our observations by comparison with those of the people around the subject (e.g. peers or reports). Please note, I did not just say “run a 360, that should do it”. I remain unconvinced that 360s work as well as they need to; Stephen Covey’s story about the Israeli Air Force not withstanding (“are you suggesting we would spare a colleague’s feelings when the survival of the nation is at stake?”), there is often a reluctance to tell things as they are. The fact that some will use them as a chance to get even doesn’t solve the problem. Use a 360 as back up to actual observation by all means.
2. But what about situations where the person is not yet on board or at least in the applicable role? I have never found a better answer than Marcus Buckingham’s one, which is to ask for a specific example of a competency in action AND THEN LISTEN LIKE MAD to the first thing they say. If you get something like “yes, I believe that competency x is absolutely critical” you can probably forget ever seeing x in action; if, on the other hand,  you get “okay, last Thursday I had to speak to …” followed by a concrete example of x in action, then Robert is your parental sibling*; you have got a positive match on that competency.

Any role for Questionnaire based tools then? I can’t speak for others, but Birkman definitely gives you a shortcut, not to the observation of the competency itself, but to the likelihood that it will or could be observed. With the breadth of data available in Birkman it is often very possible to establish whether an individual has the motivation and inclination to produce a particular behaviour. You might wonder how this adds anything, if you are going to observe or ask competency-based questions anyway. What it does is allow you to focus in on both likely strengths AND gaps in the competency repertoire for the individual, and ask exactly the right questions to elicit examples of the competencies that are there in spades, as well as those which will test whether the individual has in fact developed competencies which as less typical for someone of their make up.

If any of this sounds a bit involved, just ask yourself how often you have been let down by a battery of tests which appeared to demonstrate the presence of a competency in an individual who then failed to demonstrate said competency when it really mattered. If you are anything like the HR Directors I have spoken with on this subject the answer is probably “too often”.

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*It is a requirement of my continuing Australian Citizenship that I occasionally say things like this. If you don’t recognise ‘Bob’s your uncle’ in this form, you might want to rethink that holiday booking; you’ll be up to your neck in drop bears before you get out of the airport. Straight up…

Symbiotic Branding

I have an annual pass to the Singapore Zoo. I often catch an early bus up to Mandai so I can grab a coffee and a chat with my friend the Sumatran Orangutan. On the last couple of visits I noticed something unexpected and intriguing in the orchid house.

Turns out that most orchids (and I presume we’re talking about the epiphytic orchids, not the ones that grow in soil) have a symbiotic relationship with a fungus, without which they would not be able to feed. Even more interesting, orchid seed is so fine that there is effectively no room for any stored food, just genetic coding. Once again, fungus is the secret solution; the seed collects some fungal spores and on landing the fungus grows and provides food for the orchid seed.

I haven’t had time to explore this (probably 5 minutes in Wikipedia would do it) in order to learn what the fungus gets from the arrangement, but I’m sure there is something. (Okay so I did go to Wikipedia and learnt that “All orchids are myco-heterotrophic at some point in their life cycle“, but that the benefit to the fungus is largely unexplored. Doctoral thesis, anyone?)

So from orchids and fungus let us segue smoothly (like an 18-wheeler through a garden wall) to recruitment and branding.

Brands have tiny seeds, so small that there is no room for food, just genetic material. Attempts by brand experts and marketeers in the past to propagate brands by tying them to pretty logos and witty advertisements have resulted in significant media spend but little growth in brand value. (Much as I love the Guinness mud-skippers and the Old Spice “Man your man could smell like”). Turns out that to grow and reproduce, brands have to be in a symbiotic relationship with people; not customers in the first instance, but rather employees who embody the brand’s DNA. That is how a brand grows…

If you accept this premise at all, then you will eventually conclude that there must be a pretty important symbiotic relationship between brand and recruitment. Recruiting the right people is critical if customers are to experience the brand as it is meant to be; and that experience of the lived brand is critical to build the employee experience required to make the brand desirable as a potential employee to the right people.

Grow your brand without chemical additives

Of course this doesn’t just apply to orchids. One word: Apple.

Catch ‘em while they are young

A little reflection which may explain also why posts on this blog have been fewer and further between…

A friend gave me a copy of Bob Buford’s “Halftime” which I have been enjoying immensely. “Halftime” is about making the mid life  transition from mere success to a focus on doing what has signficance.

The only thing is, I would kind of like to put Bob out of business. I absolutely agree that “first half life” has to make room for the financial obligations of marriage and raising a family and all that goes with that; it is just that I would like the rising generation to have a clear view of how to live a life of significance from when they first set out. And I do believe it can be done.

(And just to be clear – I am not taking anything away from Halftime; just using it to make a point; I am all for people finding a way into greater significance at any age)

hoozyu (http://hoozyu.com) is a programme we have set up to bring Birkman power to the 14-25 age group, in an appropriate package and at an affordable price point. Our ambition is to roll it out to young people across the globe; our first big push is into Asia, but we are ready to support people who want to work with this anywhere.

Have a look at the site (and the blog, hoozyu.wordpress.com); wherever you are in life, if this sounds like a way you could be working towards significance while helping young people do likewise, get in touch!

Roller-Blading to America

The subject of Birkman versus MBTI (or sometimes DISC or StrengthsFinder) as an Organizational Development / Talent Management tool comes up with alarming regularity. Alarming because from where I am standing, this seems very like asking whether flying or roller blading is the better option for intercontinental business travel. It isn’t wars of religion – Boeing versus Airbus Industrie or SQ versus QF. It is “tool designed for this purpose” versus “tool designed for a completely different purpose”. Roller blading is a wonderful thing, and so is MBTI.

1. MBTI (and DISC and even StrengthsFinder) are essentially sorter tools (they sort you into one of predetermined number of boxes; StrengthsFinder just has more boxes). The 90 currently available Birkman scales mean that every Birkman profile is close to unique; so this is more like a fingerprint than a type indicator AND YET it allows you to categorise broadly. So, for example, you can say these people are all Strategic in their organizational perspective, and yet still discriminate between them on the basis of important differences as well. So: MBTI has 16 possible outcomes, Birkman has a million or more (theoretically around 79 million, but there are a lot of null possibilities in there). Birkman is a fine grained tool that captures uniqueness in a usable manner.
2. MBTI is not calibrated. You and I could both come out with identical scores and yet behave quite differently. One major reason for this is that there is no attempt to calibrate what a particular score means. So, for example, my view of possible ranges of human introversion v extraversion may be quite different from yours. What seems unbearably introverted to me may seem uncomfortably extroverted to you. Birkman on the other hand is normed and calibrated within and across populations, so that a particular combination of scores is always going to produce very similar behaviours in the individuals concerned. With Birkman, apples are always apples.
3. MBTI is theory driven, Birkman is empirically based. Birkman doesn’t start from a theoretical view of human behaviour, but from 60+ years of observation of actual behaviour and building an instrument that accurately captures and predicts that behaviour. (MBTI is of course based on Jungian Psychology).
4. MBTI was never designed to be a tool for organizational development or recruitment, and, in my experience, has very low levels of acceptance amongst organizational psychologists (i.e. it is pretty hard to find practicing organizational psychologists who promote its use as an OD or talent tool; I am not suggesting that Org Psychs cannot be found who like MBTI, any more than I am suggesting that no business traveller ever roller blades to his office on a sunny morning). Birkman on the other hand was developed because of Roger Birkman’s fascination with organizational behaviour and especially the impact of perspective upon problem-framing and behaviour. Birkman looks at the individual in their social and organizational context and as such is pretty well unique among psychometric tools.
5. In order to use MBTI to predict behaviour under stress (for example), the user must work on the assumption that everything in the way of behaviour arises from a person’s own view of her or himself (which is all that MBTI measures); Birkman on the other hand predicts negative or reactive behaviours on the basis of unmet and often unrecognised underlying needs and expectations on the part of the individual, which may have little or no connection to the individual’s conscious view of self.

Or at least that’s why I will keep hopping on a plane to Houston every time there is a Birkman Conference on!

Socially… social!

I hit 50 next month (there; I’ve said it. It’s not old; my dad made it to 98…). When I was 13 or 14 we got introduced to the school DEC (remember them?) eduSystem, with 4k of memory (you won’t remember much), an ASR 33 Teletype and a paper-tape reader.

When I was 18 I landed a job advertised as “night shift computer operator” which turned out to be “run computer bureau, both shifts”. There we had PDP/8a-500s (64 k of memory: ook!) and soon a PDP/11-34 with (ta-daaa!) 96k and a couple of 4MB disk drives, each the size and shape of a top loading washing-machine. The 11-34 arrived in a pantechnicon with a stack of manuals as tall as I was; the boss did the wiring and I had to work out the OS. Those were the days…

And now I see this:

For once, Scott Adams has it wrong. That isn’t a Grandpa Box. A Grandpa Box fills a room with furniture and cables and a choice of mono gray or mono green CRTs.

And, more importantly, smartphones and tablets (yawn) – been there done that. What is ACTUALLY rather hard for an old-school COBOL, “sort this 4MB file using only two 1.2MB disk packs”, grunt is to understand Social Media. But Social is the “be there or be square” of the 21st Century. I think I am finally starting to get there.

Don’t get me wrong: I am a classic early adopter, at least when it comes to free stuff that might challenge and stimulate the neural pathways, so yes, I had a facebook account and a linkedin account and blogger (I was really early on that one) and twitter when they were all still pretty fresh. But unlike the various programming technologies I have picked up to keep up, most of this (barring blogging) social paraphenalia produced a complete “No Signal, check your cable” response from ze little gray cells.

The problem for us ancient ones with Social is that  it looks like some form of exhibitionism; something we were always dissuaded from indulging in (strap / cane / 1000 lines, “my tongue is an unruly member”) rather forcefully. In fact (always allowing that the exceptions are now rather visible from everywhere on the planet), the Social generation seem to have a very clear sense of how to control and channel their disclosure; the real power of Social is something Kevin Kelly articulated rather well in New Rules for the New Economy (1998), namely that it is all about FREE. As such, for me at any rate, Social now fits into a well-trodden vector of adding value for free, in order to be first choice port-of-call when important, non-free stuff needs to be accomplished (or, in retail, when the lumpy objects need to be bought).

Still, it is a complex landscape to navigate, but I am finding it makes more sense when you steer by “add (real / great) value for free that enhances your (or your brand’s) reputation with your current and prospective customers”. It was just so much simpler when most things in life, business and grandpa-box computing came with a wiring diagram and a manual…

Group dynamics…

This isn’t the only reason people study the theory of groups… (but it is a compelling one)