I was reminded by today's HBR Management Tip of the Day of the high price of bringing super stars into your organization. First, you have the premium that you have to pay in order to lure them away from their present job (and enough to keep someone else from luring them away from you in the near future). Then, you have the internal cost of envy and frustration (from incumbents who think they are as good or better than the new guy, but being paid a fraction of the salary). However, today's Harvard Business Review tip reminded me of the statistics on super star failure. When they join your company they no longer have the network that they had at their old job (their formal and informal go-to team). They no longer have the same software, processes, policies, and culture that they learned to optimize.
Individual performance drops by 20%, which frustrates the super star and your company.
The actual losses mount as morale declines, roadblocks are intentionally placed in front of the super star, Wall Street punishes you for a highly visible bad hire, and the super star eventually leaves in very public fashion.
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbo/articles/article.jsp?articleID=R0405F&ml_action=get-article&pageNumber=1&cm_mmc=npv-_-MGMT_TIP-_-MAR_2008-_-MTOD0311
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Monday, March 10, 2008
How to Build a Success Profile
Establishing Job Profile Context
1. Define the mission of the job.
a. What is the ultimate product or service produced?
b. How does this product or service contribute to the organization's strategy?
c. How would one know whether the mission was being accomplished successfully?
2. Describe the major outcomes/accomplishments required to achieve the mission.
a. Which outcomes does the organization NEED to have?
b. Which outcomes are NICE to have?
3. Define performance standards for each outcome NEEDED.
a. What does someone in this position need to know to achieve the outcomes?
b. What technical skills would be required to achieve the outcomes?
c. What experiences would someone need to have to successfully achieve the outcomes?
d. Which of these knowledge, skills, and experiences are possessed by the best performers, but not by the rest?
4. Identify barriers to achieving the mission and outcomes.
a. What has prevented people from succeeding in the past?
b. Which barriers are caused by knowledge, skill, or experience deficiencies?
Capturing Knowledge, Skill, Experience Requirements
NOTE: Save all knowledge, skill, and experience components for use as a master list of components. These will be used to validate the success profile.
5. Isolate knowledge components.
a. Circle points of knowledge identified as NEED to know, not nice to know (i.e. those that help the best performers in this position succeed beyond the rest of the performers in this same position).
b. To what degree must this knowledge be entrenched to be a best performer? (basic, intermediate, or expert)
6. Isolate skill components.
a. Circle skills that were identified as NEED to have, not nice to have (i.e. those that help the best performers in this position succeed beyond the rest of the performers in this same position).
b. To what degree must each skill be mastered to be a best performer? (basic, intermediate, or expert)
7. Isolate experience components.
a. Circle those experiences that truly differentiated the best from the rest in this position.
b. Which of these experiences would a person have for at least a year before becoming a top performer?
Capturing Leadership Competencies
8. Leverage research. (In this example we will use Lominger's Leadership Architect, which includes 67 research-based leadership competencies.)
a. Mark competencies that are critical by level according to Lominger's research, add the Price of Admission and Competitive Edge unique to that level to the poster.
9. Modify based on incumbents.
a. Identify top three people in the position.
b. Sort through Lominger cards to find the top ten competencies that differentiate those three from the rest (i.e. the top three have more of this than anyone else).
c. Mark top ten on poster with colored dots or 'X' marks.
d. Discuss to reach consensus.
10. Narrow selected competencies down by presence in the general population.
a. Select 8-10 Price of Admission competencies for the Success Profile.
b. Select 5-9 Competitive Edge competencies for the Success Profile.
Validate the Profile
11. Assess all incumbents against all 67 competencies.
12. Identify highest performers and select competencies that they have more of than the other performers.
The Case for Blended Learning
Think back on the training classes that you have attended during your career. Of those that provided a great deal of theory instead of focusing on the work that you did at the time, did you do anything differently or better as a result of attending that course? It is highly unlikely that anything changed for better or worse.
Theory can establish a deep understanding, but must be followed by a focus on observable and measurable work-related activities. For example, learning about effective listening can begin with compelling reasons to become a better listener and theory on how listening works, but improvement won't happen without providing a concrete, easy-to-remember model and plenty of practice time during the class (with immediate feedback). The learner should also identify critical times to practice effective listening on the job and create a plan for using the model during those times. Sharing that action plan for listening with your boss is the most powerful anchor because you now have to meet her/his expectations as well. Had the class stopped with just a theory on listening, real improvements at work would not occur, especially during critical times.
Some Competencies are too Complex to Teach
Some competencies should only be leveraged during selection. Requiring development in a competency that is innate or nearly impossible to improve or to notice improvement has resulted in legal actions by employees against their employers. It is also prudent to ensure that all employee development processes and systems set the learner up for success and not for failure. (If a competency is extremely hard to improve or change then it is not likely to provide significant ROI to provide training on that topic.)
Developmental difficulty is based on several factors:
• How complex the skills are that are needed to execute the competency well
• How much experience is required to master the competency
• How much the attitude, values, opinions, and beliefs of the learner impact the desire to be competent
• How the competency involves, engages, or triggers the learner's emotions
• How much intellectual and cognitive complexity is required for mastery
• How much hard-wiring is required to use the competency
It is also important to note how frequently the competency shows up in normal distributions. The rarest competencies may be the hardest to develop simply based on its rarity.
Developmental difficulty is based on several factors:
• How complex the skills are that are needed to execute the competency well
• How much experience is required to master the competency
• How much the attitude, values, opinions, and beliefs of the learner impact the desire to be competent
• How the competency involves, engages, or triggers the learner's emotions
• How much intellectual and cognitive complexity is required for mastery
• How much hard-wiring is required to use the competency
It is also important to note how frequently the competency shows up in normal distributions. The rarest competencies may be the hardest to develop simply based on its rarity.
Keys to Successfully Creating a Competency-Based Training Curriculum
To build a competency-based training and development system or to map existing courses to a competency model, you must be mindful of the four keys to success:
• Training should only include competencies that can be effectively developed (i.e. hard-wired traits that don't significantly change over time won't change as a result of some fabulous training class)
• Students must be able to apply the lessons learned while on the job in observable or measurable ways (if the benefits of training cannot be measured then training will not be valued)
• Courses should teach more than one competency (competencies do not live in isolation so teach clusters of common skills together, e.g. planning, prioritizing, and decision making)
• Courses should be followed by on-the-job application and feedback and bring the manager into the developmental cycle (create job aids for the bosses of the students so that the bosses can hold the students accountable for what was learned)
• Training should only include competencies that can be effectively developed (i.e. hard-wired traits that don't significantly change over time won't change as a result of some fabulous training class)
• Students must be able to apply the lessons learned while on the job in observable or measurable ways (if the benefits of training cannot be measured then training will not be valued)
• Courses should teach more than one competency (competencies do not live in isolation so teach clusters of common skills together, e.g. planning, prioritizing, and decision making)
• Courses should be followed by on-the-job application and feedback and bring the manager into the developmental cycle (create job aids for the bosses of the students so that the bosses can hold the students accountable for what was learned)
Communication is the Key to Competency Success
Training, staffing, HR, and line managers often speak different languages. For example, when a manager asks his/her HR representative for permission to seek a new direct report the manager is given a job description following approval. Staffing is told about the opening and screens for 'planning skills' based on the request from the manager. Once the top candidates have been identified and screened the manager selects one based on fit with the rest of the team. Soon the manager realizes that what staffing screened for was different than what the manager understood 'planning' to mean. The HR generalist who had produced the job description disagreed with the manager on the meaning of 'planning skills' and then found that what HR meant per the job description and what the staffing person interpreted were also different. To bring the new employee up to speed as quickly as possible it was decided that the new person should be sent to a training class. Looking through the available classes, two were found that referenced 'planning' in the learning objectives. The manager sent the new employee to the first available class. Upon returning from the class the new employee attempted to show the manager the newly-learned skills only to find that what was being taught was still not what the manager needed the employee to do.
What a painful, yet common, story from a real organization that has a competency model. The real problem is that only the titles of the competencies are in common use instead of the descriptions. The real power of competency-based models lies in the common language that results from the clear and unambiguous definitions of the competencies. This language should be applied to all HR systems so that job descriptions and success profiles lead to consistent interview questions, employees are consistently represented on workforce planning maps, performance appraisal feedback means the same thing to both manager and direct report, and classes teach the competencies as they are commonly understood.
What a painful, yet common, story from a real organization that has a competency model. The real problem is that only the titles of the competencies are in common use instead of the descriptions. The real power of competency-based models lies in the common language that results from the clear and unambiguous definitions of the competencies. This language should be applied to all HR systems so that job descriptions and success profiles lead to consistent interview questions, employees are consistently represented on workforce planning maps, performance appraisal feedback means the same thing to both manager and direct report, and classes teach the competencies as they are commonly understood.
How Trainers Should View Work
There are the worker bees (Implementation/Evaluation), the managers (Translation/Communication), and the top dogs (Creation/Re-Creation). The top dogs are those folks that create initiatives and objectives for ABC COMPANY as a whole and the business units. The job of the managers is to put those initiatives and objectives into words that can be understood and utilized by the worker bees. The worker bees are accountable for both the implementation of the plans crafted by the managers and for evaluating the results to ensure that we are going where we think we are going.
The skills that must be taught fall into three distinct categories: Strategic, Intra/Interpersonal, and Technical. As you move up the organization you will find that there are fewer technical job skills but more strategic skills required. Therefore, a training curriculum should be weighted accordingly with line employees focusing more on technical knowledge and skills, some interpersonal skills related to working with customers and/or team members, and only a presentation on the company's strategy and how the line employees fit into that equation. Mid-management would get a mixture of those same classes with the emphasis being on understanding (not doing) the technical work, managing people (not work), and executing the strategy. Senior leaders will not need to know the technical work, but should have a high-level overview of the company's employee activities; senior leaders need to know how to manage cross-functional processes (and teams of leaders); and senior leaders must know how to craft and cascade strategic plans.
The skills that must be taught fall into three distinct categories: Strategic, Intra/Interpersonal, and Technical. As you move up the organization you will find that there are fewer technical job skills but more strategic skills required. Therefore, a training curriculum should be weighted accordingly with line employees focusing more on technical knowledge and skills, some interpersonal skills related to working with customers and/or team members, and only a presentation on the company's strategy and how the line employees fit into that equation. Mid-management would get a mixture of those same classes with the emphasis being on understanding (not doing) the technical work, managing people (not work), and executing the strategy. Senior leaders will not need to know the technical work, but should have a high-level overview of the company's employee activities; senior leaders need to know how to manage cross-functional processes (and teams of leaders); and senior leaders must know how to craft and cascade strategic plans.
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