HRP 3: High performance leaders

Tenet #3  in our Talent Building Blog Series concerns high performance leadership and top brass intolerance for mediocrity. The heart of the matter is actually in the head– it is foremost about the way top management thinks about employee job performance. I call it Exec Think and it has to change before true workforce transformation is possible. There are no magic potions and no patented training programs that can transform a leader’s perspective over night.  And no speech, blog or dissertation are going to persuade.  Instead, Human Resource Planning (HRP) demands roll-up your sleeves, action-based leadership development. The critical competency to be mastered?– Decisiveness about people. Top Executives have to experience HRP to lead the charge for the rest. Active participation from the onset is the only way.

First Time Leadership Assessment

In my previous post on this topic–HRP 2: Inventory Your Talent Base– we dug into the details.  We left off with an example whereby five management personnel and 17 staff were force ranked from best performer to least. Then each was slotted in the most appropriate HRP Category and re-ranked within.   Here’s a link  to a Typical First-Time HRP Assessment in PDF format. View and print it now (preferably in color).  We’ll review it together as we go.

Got it, good! The Category distinction and ranking of all department workers, including managers (in bold), are color coded for ease of illustration.  For example, Sarah Manner is slotted as Meets 1 in color orange–the best performer within the Meets requirements Category. The HRP Matrix and Color Key are provided to remind.  The person who conducted the assessment in this example– let’s call him the “VP of Client Services”– was required to do so at the request of the President.  This is the first time the top executive ever asked for such a thing.

According to his report,  the vast majority of the Client Services team (nearly 70%) are High Potentials (red), Growth Potentials (blue) and Strategic Retains (green).  Thus each, we presume, are critical to department success.  The VP further states that his  Meets requirements (orange) people are all solid performers too. Even the newbie (yellow) is shaping up to look just fine.  And with zero Over and Out (purple), our VP indicates that he would gladly make the same decision to hire all 22 employees from what he now knows about each of them.

Regardless of what he reports to the President, those being assessed by the VP Client Services are not the primary subject. No, no. Instead, staff assessments of this kind are far more a reflection on the person giving the evaluations than it is about the people being evaluated.  For this reason alone, incidentally, all performance appraisals stuffed in company personnel files are invalid to one degree or another. Everyone knows why–because the assessor drives the performance scores, not the people being assessed.

This concept is not completely lost on our VP of Client Services.  In fact, our leader is all too twisted about the exercise, which he surmises, is a score card statement to the President about him. That’s why individual rankings tend to be inflated, especially the first time managers do it this way.  Our VP naturally does not want to submit a weak team for Presidential scrutiny.  The other dynamic at play is personal loyalty; an admirable trait to be sure.  His team has accomplished a lot.  He is proud of them. He will stand up for them and be counted– counted indeed, artificially high.

High Ball Reporting

Inflated performance scores are not new, of course.  Managers do it all the time.  On a scale of 1 to 5 where five is best, managers usually give a “3″ when they mean three, but oddly also give “3″ when they mean two. In fact, managers rarely ever give a “2″, but when they do, they mean one.  And almost nobody gets a “1″ because, you know, that’s just mean. On the top side,  supervisors are notorious for granting a feel-good “4″ to balance out that scathing  two.  Although a lot of  fours are really threes,  sometimes truth glimmers when managers give a “4″ and actually mean four; but roughly 75% of the time when they give a “5″ they also mean four, so it’s hard to say what anyone really means. Weird, ain’t it?  These are called “lies” by the way.  Forced Distribution systems are specifically designed  to avoid this well known tendency to inflate performance  scores. But when you throw in the Category thing in the Human Resource Planning Matrix, the high-ball / lie-ball  bounces back.

Let’s see. Over 40% of the people in Client Services are reported as either High Potential (4) or Growth Potential (5).  That sounds great and it could be true; but it probably isn’t.  Instead it may reflect that it is too easy  to work and succeed in the Client Services Department and that the VP is a soft grader. High Potential status should be rare and denote  only the super stars. And Growth Potential distinction should be left only to great job performers with true near-potential for growth.  Joe Muddle, for example, has been an Inside Salesperson since 1986.  He is a nice man and beloved company icon.  But for 24 years he has been past up for promotion. So he is likely not Growth Potential material.

Our VP also labels a lot of people Strategic Retains, perhaps on the false assumption that it looks better to the President to have a lot of indepsensible people on the team. Not neccesarily.  It could demonstrate that too many of his employees are specialized and not enough of them are cross trained.  That kind of thing can hold a company hostage to a mediocre talent base where knowledge is hoarded, not shared.

What was he thinking?

And the most predictable high-ball / lie-ball of all is to list not one employee in the Over and Out Category (purple). This issue is most worrisome for our esteemed VP who isn’t at all sold yet on the whole forced ranking thing anyway.  His thinking here is political. He doesn’t want to tip his hand to the President by admitting to harbor marginal performers. That wouldn’t look good at all.  Worse,  if he  identifies any on his team as sub-par, the President will surely mark them rotten and insist that they be fired.  And our very good man  just doesn’t want to go there.   There is not a pressing reason. These lowest ranked people  have not broken any rules after all. And except for a large pocket full of imperfections, they do their best, usually.  No, the VP needs to protect his entire team and maintain good reputation–so everyone in the department at least Meets job requirements.

Let’s now summarize the rationale behind the inventory–because it all comes down to this: What was he thinking? As so suggested, our esteemed VP of Client Services conducted his inventory based largely on how he estimates it may be perceived by the President. He was bound by good motives and emotional attachments to loyal employees. He desired to present the best possible appearance for both himself and the team. He considered what would be least disruptive for the department. He sees no urgent reason to shake things up for an unknown long term payoff he has never before considered. And, worst of all, his political leaning was to stack the deck in favor of the most desirable outcomes for the people at the bottom of his list. These thought tendencies are almost universally displayed when executives conduct their department’s first talent inventory. And this is the very thinking that must be eradicated from the leadership ranks to have any shot at moving your company from good to great. This Exec Think must change.

Changing Executive Think with Action

Action, Power and Sponsorship are required to change the way people think. Let’s start with Action.  The sage advice goes something like this– It is far easier to act your way into right thinking than it is to think your way into right acting.  Frothy speeches about raising the bar will not persuade.  Instead, leadership development must follow an action-learning model:

1. Executive submits first-time talent inventory to President
2. President calls meeting for Executive to defend / explain inventory
3. President allows for exceptional treatment of top performers
4. President allows for proactive new hires to ultimately replace lowest ranking
5. HR and Legal directed to support, not hinder termination decisions
6. Executive revises inventory if desired (not required)
7. Actions taken to reward top ranked workers and remove lowest ranking
8. Process is drilled down 1 more level with VPs now driving it

I have known clients to stop at Step 1.  This usually occurs because the President goes into the thing half hearted.  The time required by the Top Executive to launch and maintain a good to great talent building initiative is considerable.  If the Cheif Executive is not up for it, take your marbles and go home now.  It will never work. Never.  Steps 2 through 5 are all about the President swinging in to high-involvment action. She sets up a forum where each Department Head has to defend his and her talent inventory to the top Exec.  If you have a decent HR VP let him sit in too; but if you do not enjoy a credible HR guy, skip it.  If you are using a professional faciltator like Switch HR, include the consultant in these sessions by all means.  Then get ready, because if this meeting is orchestrated correctly, sparks will fly by design.

The goal of this meeting is for the President to challenge the VP Client Services regarding his rationale behind the HRP Assessment so submitted.  As a benchmark, it is useful for the President to compare the VP’s ranking to a more “Optimal Distribution” indicative of a high performance organization. Here is a Checklist of questions to challenge the HRP assessment that the President should ask to better understand her lieutenants’ thinking. You should print this out too because it connects some important dots with the prior sample document–the Typical First-Time HRP Assessment.  The VP Client Services probably wasn’t ready for this.  That’s okay.  In fact, it is desirable.  Don’t tip him off and send the questions in advance. Learning and change occur best in tough meetings like this, not in classroom training.  To cinch it, a couple ground rules should be made clear from the onset:

First, the VP Client Services does NOT have to change his submission as a result of this meeting.  If, after considering the President’s questions, he wants to stick to his guns and the current inventory as submitted, the President should allow it.  The VP Client Services needs to decide, not the President. As such the President should merely ask questions, probe rationale and firm up her own understanding of the Client Services Department’s talent base.  It is critical that the President refrain from giving her opinion about one employee or another, even if she has one.

Going down the list of employees, one-by-one, the President has an earnest discussion with the VP Client Services using his completed inventory, the HRP Matrix, and the Checklist of questions as the agenda.  Yes, this takes a lot of time; sometimes more than one session.  But it has to be done.  The President must have the same meeting with all of her direct reports, scrutinizing the staff talent assessment offered by each.  When the meetings are over, the President employs steps 3,4 and 5 by announcing a few key changes that give the new program teethe, might  and weight.

Changing Executive Think with Power

Action requires consequences to become firmly ingrained and repeated.  This requires Executive Power.While never demanding that any individual be fired or demoted, the top executive must remind that she is serious about employing forced distribution as the way to ultimately drive mediocrity out of the organization.  She must insist that the lowest ranking employees–hand selected by her lieutenants– ultimately be removed.   The harsh message will be accompanied by a powerful positive.  Step # 3 is to empower the VP Client Services with a bucket of new resources to immediately reward the few best of the best people at the top of his list.  This is critical.  Far too many change initiatives go through pains to “raise the bar” on poor performers and turn up the heat on mediocrity, without offering the positives at the same time.  Change requires that you do both– turn up the heat and invest. This could mean raises, special project bonuses, new development opportunities, more training, and more direct exposure to the President herself. Immediate efforts to provide visible, frequent positive feedback to these best and brightest must happen too. HR usually has a big bag of positive reinforcement tricks for that sort of thing.

Then another surprise announcement.  The President authorizes the VP Client Services to hire in new talent now, as long as he agrees to keep his staff count at current levels within six months from hiring the newbie.  The implication is clear enough– you can hire in proactively as long as you fire out eventually.  In fact, the President doesn’t care if he hires in one, two or even three new people.  As long as staff count stays on budget by an agreed upon time.  The President’s directives will have the desired impact on the VP Client Services.  He  now finds himself empowered to reward his best people like never previously allowed by the traditional pay system and standard HR operating procedure.  And the ability to hire in new talent proactively removes any excuse or fear that he will take a hit in the event of turnover.  It also forces our faithful VP to reconsider the question in purple–would he really rehire his lowest ranked employees from what he now knows?

Then the capper. The President has directed the Human Resource function and corporate legalist to give license and active support to the VP Client Services to remove anyone from the organization as the he sees fit, regardless of what the personnel file now says or doesn’t say about the person. The President explains the concept of “at will” employment and says that HR’s new job is to find ways to help managers make changes happen legally while respecting the dignity and fair dealing of all involved.  The President has also authorized funds to support exit strategies, including severance pay where applicable. HR’s job is to utilize it’s considerable expertise in this area to speed it up, not slow it down or block it.  This is a new Power that may well intimidate.  Now there are truly no excuses not to make changes.  It is now exponetially more difficult to defend the people at the bottom of the list.

Finally the Top Executive asks our newly charged department VP to reconsider his talent inventory and to submit a final version within a week.  The President will support whatever he finally decides.  That certainly gives our esteemed VP Clients Services, alot to think about, doesn’t it?!

Changing Executive Think with Sponsorship

Now it is time deliver.  Step number seven on our Action List is to put a game plan in place and implement.  The scope of this activity is manageable. It involves special treatment of those few super stars at the top of the list and a decisive game plan to address those few at the bottom.  This should be done behind the scenes and without fanfare. Let the grapevine take care of that.  People typically don’t tell anyone when they get a huge raise or other unexpected benefit, especially when they know  it is a unique exception made especially for them.  But they sure stop complaining and step up their support and involvment. And that will be noticed.  Plus, secrets get out.  A flurry of hiring activity will obviously be noticed too.  And of course, when people get let go, that’s a pretty big thing.  The logistics of it all are beyond the scope of this post.  But suffice it to say that action speaks for itself.

Sponsorship speaks even louder.   Sponsorship means endorsement of the process and exclaiming  it as your own.  It means to become champion of the newly learned behavior by practicing it and embracing the newfound knowlege by giving it away.   The final step is our Action Plan toward leadership is to have theVPs play the role of President and the supervisors play the role of VPs.  That is, the HRP program must now be drilled down with the President’s direct reports now leading the charge.  So now the Department VPs charge their mangers to conduct the talent inventory and drill it down another layer into the organization.  The VPs will now sit in judgment of their manager’s assessments and the process moves out across the enterprise.  Typically, this second phase should occur about three months after the first.

And what  of  the VP Client Services? Did he rethink his initial assesment and redo his skill inventory?  Has he hardened his position? Has he decided that he can improve his team for the long haul by being more decisive now about those good people at the bottom of his list?  Stay tuned.  In our next post we discover if our brave VP took the leap to transform his department from good to great.