Talentism

What Not Where

Recently I was watching an episode of the TV show "Lie to Me" and I had an epiphany about the future of work: work will be defined by what, not where.

The lead character of "Like to Me" (Dr. Cal Lightman, played by Tim Roth) has a skill that is much in demand*: he can detect the truth by analyzing a person's face, body, voice and speech. The show centers on how Lightman and his team use that skill to solve different problems. Often the problems are crimes, but the fictional team also use the skill to solve hostage negotiation stand-offs, disaster rescue operation bottle-necks, mysterious romantic entanglements and business negotiations gone wrong. In the show Lightman has built an entire business around this one skill, and it looks like the business is thriving. It also looks like the limits of the opportunities afforded by application of the skill exists only in the writer's imagination. Apparently being able to tell when someone is lying is much in demand.

One evening I was turning the show over in my mind, thinking about how cool it would be to have that particular skill (my kids would beg to differ), and then it struck me: "Lie to Me" is a dramatic revelation of one of my central problems working in a big company. That problem is that a "job" is a concept focused on groupin a bunch of problems that really don't have much in common, but that somehow define what value you can provide to the organization. In other words, the modern concept of a job places a premium on "where" you work (i.e. finance), and devalues "what" you do (i.e. tell if someone is lying).

In most companies you are labeled by what group you work in, not by what you do. Your brand is about your domain, not your skill. HR is a great example. A good HR function has people who are good at quantitative reasoning (comp), effective social interaction (employee relations), and systems thinking (workforce planning). Anyone of these skills can be applied in almost any domain, including operations, finance, engineering and manufacturing. But if you work in HR you are "an HR person." Which means that it doesn't matter whether you are good at math, or great at systems analysis or a great negotiator. What matters is that what someone thinks about HR, and what they think about HR (or finance, or engineering, etc.) is what defines your opportunity to apply your skill to the greatest advantage for the company.

Let us take the fictional Dr. Lightman as an example. If he came to work for a big company he would likely go into sales, because he would make the most money sitting across from the table with prospective buyers, quickly determining whether the prospect was going to really sign the deal and what the optimum price point would be. But since Lightman would be sitting in sales, he probably wouldn't be asked by business development to help figure out whether a critical partner was secretly looking at a competitor's deal. And he certainly would never be asked to talk to an engineer who was leaving the company in order to best figure out how to retain that person.

Of course selling is very important. But it may not be as important as keeping a key partner in place, or saving the organization's top talent. The company would be far the poorer for it's inability to internally source a valued skill for a problem that would get the best return for the shareholder. But it wouldn't matter, because Lightman would be thought of as a "sales person", even though his skill of "truth teller" is so much bigger and more important. In other words, no matter how valuable his skill, he would be reduced to being identified with a domain. He would be a "where", not a "what."

The problem with the "where" orientation to determining a person's potential value to a company are many. But among them are:

Lack of Engagement - People usually enjoy application of particular skills more than the preservation of a particular domain. This is easy to prove. Go talk to anyone within your company and ask them "What do you really enjoy doing?" The answer will not be "engineering" or "human resources." It will be instead "solving complex problems" or "helping people find a better job." Engineering and HR are domains. Problem solving and job placement are skills.

Poor Performance - When work is oriented around domains it means that problem sets are artificially aggregated based on a belief in the commonality of the work. For instance, HR work is about people, finance work is about money, etc. But this means that a person who is in finance has to do a lot of work that has nothing to do with money, including negotiating what chart of accounts to accrue something to, how to apply certain financial regulations in certain circumstances and making presentations about financial data. None of those is a "money / math" skill, but because they are aggregated under the header of finance, a person in finance can be expected to do any one of those things.

Expensive - The "where" orientation causes companies to compensate individuals regardless of what value they provide. For instance, the head of finance usually gets paid a lot. But what do they really do as the head of finance? It may be that they are only good at financial forecasting and that they have progressed up the career ladder by finding themselves in situations where forecasting saved the day and brought rewards and recognition to this individual. But the reality is that financial forecasting as a skill is not really worth that much. Supply probably roughly meets demand. So you are paying the head of finance much more than you need to based on their title in their function, not based on the skill they posses. The hierarchy of the function artificially inflates the compensation range relative to the value of the applied skill.

But the trouble with "where" just starts there. Like many ironies of the present business system, big companies spend more on talent than small companies but get less out of it. There are many reasons for this, but one of the most significant factors is that as a company gets bigger it places less of a premium on what a person can do and more of a premium on their job type, title and location. By comparison, a start-up must make the best use of its investment dollar, and will constantly look for the best person to solve a problem or innovate their way to a solution, regardless of their title or specific domain. For example, in a start-up the head of engineering may get to do the big marketing presentations because it turns out they are better with certain audiences than the CMO. That would never happen inside a large company. The "what" (presentation skills) would be far less important than the "where" (engineering vs. marketing).

Think about it: don't you have a skill or competency that you really enjoy, that makes a difference, that can be applied across many different domains or specialties and that has value for a company? Most people do. You may not know how to think about it in that way, but trust me, it is far more likely that you have one of these skills than that you are expert in a domain. It is far more likely that you like what more than where.

If you are willing to take a moment and put on your "what" hat, I would love to hear comments about how you think your job would change.

Want to Reduce Turnover? Turn your Employees into Brand Talent!

It is increasingly difficult to separate the act of finding great talent from the act of keeping great talent. In many ways it is a math problem: there aren’t enough people out there to replace the people you are losing. Reducing voluntary turnover is turning out to not only be the most cost-effective recruiting program you have, but maybe the only option left to you.

As recruiting managers come to this “ah-ha!” moment, they inevitably turn to the option of employee loyalty programs. The idea is simple: if you give the right rewards and say the right things then employees will stay around. It’s just like selling detergent: make it cheaper and sexier and people will overlook that your clothes don’t get clean. Fortunately people value their work experience more than they value their cleaning products, so the average consumer marketing cons aren’t going to work.

Loyalty programs will have decreasing effectiveness because the days of blind commitment to a company are done. In the past a company was an embodiment of a principle: security. Employment was rewarded independent of the value someone contributed, so you could be loyal to a company because they would be loyal to you. No longer. Too many employers view talent as a cog in the economic wheel: less valuable than the money and machinery, more valuable than the lobby décor. Many employees see an employer as an abstraction consisting of institutional shareholders wagging the dog that is management. Whether these perceptions are warranted or not is besides the point: it is the reality of our world. The days of executives taking a hit from Wall Street because they want to keep their employees around is a rare event indeed.

Employee loyalty programs have been a small but key contribution to this tsunami of cynicism. Management credibility is paid in the coin of authenticity, and nothing feels more contrived than an “attaboy!” followed by increased work hours, lousy bosses and decreased wages. Piecemeal changes to the relationship with employees won’t turn this situation around. It really does take a radical new approach.

What Do We Want From Our Social Networks?

Social networking is reaching a natural inflection point where we should all start to examine exactly what we are getting out of it and what we really want.

We are starting to formalize and systematize what all good business people have known for the past 5,000 years: relationships are at the heart of how work gets done. When we look to formalize and systematize we are really trying to optimize. Optimization is a way to get more output for less input (“pay less, get more”). All things that become optimized are subjected to the same basic process: scoping, then defining, then naming, then atomizing (breaking into discreet parts), then analyzing and finally measurizing (I made the last one up, but it’s the point where we all become concerned about how to measure the discreet parts we just analyzed). The process has one objective: to turn the intangible into the tangible in such a way that we can improve it and communicate it.

Buildings that Stand

In 1979 Christopher Alexander published a book titled The Timeless Way of Building. Alexander opens the book by saying:

There is one timeless way of building… It is not possible to make great buildings, or beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way.

For recruiters that “one way” is transparency and authenticity.

The Book is Fat

I recently finished reading Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. I have taken to calling it The Book is Fat because Friedman breathlessly describes every conversation he has ever had with anybody on the Indian subcontinent. It seems that every cab driver in India is a sage who is one step away from building the next Infosys. I have been an erstwhile fan of Friedman’s for years, but it seems with each book he gets a bit more garrulous and self-absorbed. I am never sure whether his books are going to turn out to be insightful economic analysis or self-congratulatory travelogue.

What is an Employee?

An asset? No… assets are depreciated. They have a useful life and then are discarded. You know exactly how much value you will get out of an asset (at least in accounting terms). When was the last time you knew exactly what you were going to get out of a employee?

Capital? No… capital is exchanged. Capital is arbitraged. When was the last time you got a group of employees together and sold them to a competitor for a price? Or, better yet, when was the last time you saw the value of a knowledge worker listed on the balance sheet?

Investments? No, no, no… long story, but when you invest you make an explicit risk / reward calculation. When was the last time you heard a hiring manager say of a new hire “Well, they will probably really mess up the whole project, but if they get it right we are golden!” If employees were investments we would seek to reduce all possible risk for the return we get. Small problem: human beings tend not to do well when managed for risk. They like to be inspired for return. While it seems to be popular, I am not a fan of "employees are things" metaphors, and an investment is a "thing." 

Volunteers? Closer, but still no. In most organizations the expectations of volunteers is low. The expectations of employees is usually more than "try to show up when you can".

No… employees are investors. They provide you with something of value and you in turn give them a return. You want the good ones to give you more and the bad ones to give you less. As a manager you don’t want T. Boone Pickens investing, but you do want Warren Buffet.

What Exactly is "Talent" Anyway?

When I first started blogging I put up a post called “New Rules for Recruiting in the Creative Age.” That post is my manifesto about what I believe about recruiting and the concepts, technologies, systems and processes that it involves. Often, when I think I am going to far astray, I check back in what that post to make sure that I am still on the same page with myself (a sort of “strangelovian” concept).

Three of the rules from that post have a direct impact on our exploration of the meaning of talent. They were:

6.) Talent is defined by production, not opportunity ("Real artists ship").

12.) Talent is not a person. Talent is a capability.

13.) Talent is not an employment contract. Talent is the delivery of the capability.

Great Article by Dave Lefkow!

A big shout out to my brother from another mother Dave Lefkow (I really can't make hip-hop work, can I?) His article in ERE today was absolutely awesome. It's just one of many reasons I am so pleased to be writing a book with him.

Make sure you check out his article (and all his other articles while you are at it, and his blog).

Great job Dave!

Why TuSK?

A couple of people have inquired: "Why start TuSK (Talent u Should Know)?"

Over the last couple of months I have had an increasing number of conversations with people whom I respect and admire that go something like this:

For the last (X) years I have been heads-down at work. My whole focus has been doing a great job for my employer / client / customer. Then one day I looked up and realized that the great network that I had prior to the start of my job / project had gone away. And now I raise my head from work and look around and see and hear that a lot of work is getting done through informal and formal referral networks. I feel like I am on the outside looking in. What do I do?

TuSK is my response to those conversations. It is a way for me to give back to all the people who have given me value through the years.  I hope that TuSK develops meaningful networks  for people who may not otherwise know how to "jump in."

And if you are "in my network" and want to become an author so you can tell the world about the great people you know, please write me. Thanks everyone!

Clear or Certain?

On Monday we talked about the concept of "Right versus Rich." Today we will talk about "Certain" versus "Clear."

"Right" people need certainty. It is a psychological signature; you can see it in how they approach people, projects and their work in general. You want to find "certain" people if you are hiring for advanced technical research positions, scientists, financial analysts, compensation specialists or safety inspectors. You want people who display the "certain" signature for any job where getting it wrong costs lives or costs millions of dollars, and where the cost of getting right is always worth it.