Newsletter March 2007
Talent management: Managing the best
Most organizations depend on having a certain number top people to drive research, customer relations, strategic planning or other crucial fields. However, common management wisdom often doesn’t apply very well to this key staff. In its March 2007 issue, Harvard Business Review (HBR) featured two articles on the challenge of managing of extraordinary talent. Here are the key messages in a nutshell:
Leading Clever People
(Rob Goffey, Gareth Jones, HBR, March 2007, p. 72-79)
From more than 100 interviews with highly creative, smart people and their managers, the authors found some interesting commonalities. The most important message is that clever people don’t like to be led at all. Not a very comfortable position to start with for those managers who are supposed to lead these valuable employees.
But there are ways around this issue and first of all managers should consider some important characteristics which apply to most highly intelligent people:
- They know that they are valuable
- They look for the environment where they can best follow their interests in generating new ideas
- They tend to ignore hierarchy
- They want access to top management whenever thy think they need it. So, instead of feeling bypassed and blocking this direct access, managers should promote it and help good ideas coming through
- They have valuable networks with peers, which is good news because it increases knowledge but bad news because it provides them more opportunities to leave
- They rarely thank you for leading them well
The authors develop a strategy for retaining and developing those people and make them ever more important assets of your organization. The key is for the manager not to them a traditional way but to act as a sponsor for their creative ideas. Keep red tape and organizational restrictions away from these people and give them enough space to develop the creative ideas your organization needs! This means that managers have to use completely different styles to lead the exceptional and the average staff, but it’s worth the effort.
Crisis at the Summit
(George D. Parsons, Richard T. Pascale, HBR, March 2007, p. 80 – 89)
This article also looks at high-achievers but from a different angle. It identifies and resolves an interesting paradox: the reason many top performers fail at a certain stage of their career, is success itself. The people the authors are looking at here are driven by challenge. When given a new job, they live on adrenaline until they’ve mastered this task. However, when the job doesn’t have any major challenges left, these people lose their purpose. A vague sense of dissatisfaction with their job and their own performance makes them usually push harder but this leads nowhere because more of the same will not deliver significant results once they’ve climbed the summit of their current job.
The so called summit syndrome usually approaches in three phases. It is difficult to identify in the early phases, as these top-performers will usually continue to deliver above average results very long. It should be the affected person herself to identify the early signs of the crisis: daydreaming, loss of interest in the current job, being more receptive to job offers as well as private endeavours, etc. At the same time energy is draining away as she tries to uphold the level of performance as visible to others. It is important to react swiftly, as soon as the excitement of the job seems to fade away. Then the individual may – on her own or with a coach – develop a new winning formula, often involving delegation of simpler tasks (instead of doing more of the same) and find a new purpose aligned with her inner aspirations. Not an easy task – but feasible if taken seriously.
Although both articles address only a small part of each organization’s staff, it is crucial to manage these issues correctly. Common performance management systems usually measure past performance in a standardized way and push people for more. None of the above mentioned issues is tackled by these systems. A high performer in the middle of a summit syndrome will still look perfect in your appraisal scheme exceeding even the criteria for the top grades. While this would be a good sign for a “normal” person, a high-achiever of the type we talked about is likely to get bored and lose his purpose when exciding success criteria that effortlessly. Time to think about a performance management system tailored towards the particular needs of each target group!
For help in designing your performance management process or integrating it into you HR information system, don’t hesitate contact us: kontakt@iprocon.de
Back to Newsletter 03/2007 |
