Why Your Company Should Work at Play

Why do our organizations tend to be so sober and serious? With how many people at your company would you feel comfortable acting a bit silly or sharing your biggest dreams and boldest ideas? What happens to us, as we journey through adolescence and adulthood that makes us less inclined to play?

Richard Florida was among the first to explicitly point out the link between creativity and economic success in his books on the Creative Class. (He has a fantastic twitter stream which you can follow here.)

My own employment experience tells me that play in the workplace has a huge impact on employee morale and trust levels, as well as customer loyalty (who doesn’t want to be part of something fun?).  Some of my closest friends were originally co-workers at this “playful” company, which has repeat customers who have been around as long as seventy or eighty years.

The other day, I came across this TED Talk from Tim Brown, co-founder of IDEO, on the link between play and creativity. It’s spot-on and full of insights. Please do watch. I’d love to hear your comments.

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Credit Card Companies: Getting to Know You, Getting to Know All About You

It seems everybody these days knows more about what’s going on inside the heads of our employees than we do.  Whether Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Friendfeed, Diigo, Del.icio.us – name a web 2.0 company and they probably have better data on your employees’ skills, preferences, interests, worries, etc. than you do.

Credit companies also seem to be getting a pretty good handle on this with some new analytical/data mining techniques.  Click the link below to listen.

Marketplace: How credit card companies track you.

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My Big Technology Decision

I gave in.  Finally.  I moved my blog to WordPress.

LOGISTICAL SIDE NOTE:  If you read/subscribe to my blog, DON’T CHANGE ANYTHING!  The zapaterismo.com domain and feedburner feed are now both mapped to WordPress, so 99% of you should not have to do a thing.  BUT, if you have issues, please let me know.

I had checked out WordPress several months ago, to see how it differed from Typepad, which I had been using as my blogging platform.  Not only is it far cheaper, but the functionality by and large outpaces what Typepad currently offers.

But as I thought about the decision to move over, I tried not to be swayed solely by the price tag and the fancy bells and whistles.  Instead, trying to practice what I preach to potential HR technology buyers, I thought long and hard about the following:

1. What do I hope to accomplish through blogging? What will this technology enable?

For me, blogging is primarily about two things

1.) Recording my quasi-random thoughts, ideas, and commentary on life, articles, books, etc.

2) Building relationships

Based on that, what features, functions, and other criteria are most critical to me as a buyer?

This led me to:

1.)  Openness and Integration! That is, easy-to-use, built in integration with major content/news providers and social bookmarking sites.  I don’t want to have to log into the blog portal every time I want to post, nor do I want to spend 25% of my blogging time building hyperlinks and embedding images/video.  Along the same lines, I often want to both blog something AND bookmark it, and when I can’t do both simultaneously, I often end up doing only one OR the other, either because of laziness or forgetfulness.

2.) Integration (and built-in Social Networking)! I want to be able to easily share my posts with communities that I’m aware of and actively participate in (e.g., Twitter), as well as with those I don’t even know about yet.  In other words, I want the tool to help me and my ideas find people who might share my interests and thinking.

3.) Integration and Portability!  This was simply table stakes.  I needed to be able to move my posts, domain, and subscribers over with as little effort as possible.  Fortunately, BECAUSE I was using my personal domain and a third-party tool for feeds (Feedburner) this was a non-issue.  Also, both Typepad and WordPress allow you to import and export posts, which made porting content a snap.

Here was my basic analysis:

WordPress facilitates the first two, which were most important to me, much better than Typepad.  While both platforms offer built-in integration with a number of mainstream content sharing and bookmarking sites (e.g., Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Diigo, etc.), WordPress does two things that Typepad has been slow to adopt:

1.  WordPress makes it much easier to initiate a blog post from anywhere, without having to log into the application, using the PressThis bookmarklet. The pop-up saves the link and allows you to publish immediately or save a draft.

2. WordPress facilitates the process of finding other people and blogs by giving you the ability to do things like subscribe to tags and read random posts from other WordPress users.

So what did I learn? Two very basic lessons:

For one, you can’t thoroughly define your functionality requirements if you don’t know what’s out there.  So focus first and foremost on what you’re trying to accomplish, which you usually can define.  For example, WordPress’s built-in social networking wasn’t something I was looking for because I didn’t know it existed.  But it significantly impacted my decision because it fit with my “what I want to accomplish” criteria.

Secondly, it reiterated my belief in the three I’s –  Integration, Integration, Integration.  No single vendor can give you all the functionality you want within the four walls of their system, ESPECIALLY in our increasingly networked world.  The good ones help you get value out of their application anyway.

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Enterprise Search Analytics and Talent Management

ZDNet wrote up a nice review of Wolfram/Alpha's demo of their new search engine at Harvard recently.

The demo was webcast and a recording can be found here.

What's it mean for HR and talent management?  A lot, I think. One of the next big moves as far as talent management technology goes – a move that has already begun – revolves around the ability to easily identify experts/expertise within the enterprise. It's the confluence of knowledge and talent management via the recongition that PEOPLE and not documents are the primary keepers of knowledge in our companies.

Most vendors are currently approaching this through profile searches, which is valuable but limited in its power and usefulness.

The Wolfram/Alpha search engine on the other hand, and other tools like it, could find some unique applications in our companies as means by which to much more comprehensively aggregate and present expertise to searchers.  Depending on what it is allowed to crawl (Is email off-limits? How about phone conversations?), these tools could become very powerful means for serving up social links and just-in-time knowledge on the proverbial silver platter.

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Rejection Letters and Employer Branding

Sue Shellenbarger at the WSJ wrote a very interesting little article today on college rejection letters.  It resonated with me and I thought I would share it with you all, since our organizations today are also experiencing record numbers of applicants for very few jobs. 

This hiring dynamic creates a great opportunity to build brand loyalty by being honest yet empathetic and even helpful in the manner in which you turn people down.  Give it a read…

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124096471555766239.html 

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Differentiating Talent Cont…The Devil is in the Details

My last post talked about differentiating talent at the upper end of the performance spectrum. One thing I've learned over time and in my work is that as you approach the upper end of the performance/competitiveness continuum, differentiation becomes a game of inches. 

A couple of everyday examples of what I mean… 

1. In the world of cycling, my newfound love, winning is about most efficiently transforming human force into speed and movement on the bike. Every turn of the pedal is an opportunity to either leverage or waste the force that your legs are generating. If you pedal 80-90 times/minute in a race that lasts several hours, every microscopic bit of leverage counts. So don't roll your eyes (like I did) when you hear the bike salesman talk about "system integration" and "aggressive geometries." 
2. I had the privilege of seeing an amazing Minnesota Orchestra concert on Friday night (mentioned in my last post), where I learned that the average string player owns an instrument worth somewhere between $100,000-$200,000. I'd be the last person to believe that the delta in sound quality between a $10,000 and $100,000 violin somehow mirrors the delta in price, but it seems that here again, where competition is fierce and people are enormously talented, we're talking about little differences making all the difference. 

If you have other good examples I'd love to hear them. 

There are two lessons to be gleaned from this, I think:

1. As it relates to people performance, winning is as much about equipping people with the right tools as it is about strict "talent."  
2. As it relates to differentiating people's performance or potential performance in really critical roles, if you don't have a selection/assessment process that's sophisticated enough to tease out these small details, you're likely not making reliable decisions.

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Differentiating Talent Cont.: La creme de la creme

My last post talked about the triviality of identifying the super high fliers – the Susan Boyles – when everyone else is…well…relatively mediocre.

Last night I had the privilege of attending an amazing concert of the Minnesota Orchestra in Minneapolis, which got me thinking about a very different but related problem (side note: please check out the solo violinist, Leila Josefowicz – brilliant).  

That is, when the population you're selecting from is made up of the world's best, how do you differentiate one from another?

Think about this:

There are about 4,000 professional orchestral musicians in US. (There are about 8,000-10,000 total worldwide, but for the purposes of this example, let's limit ourselves to the US.)  

Another 4,000 musicians graduate every year from conservatories. So schools graduate enough orchestral musicians every year to re-fill every single professional orchestra seat in the nation.

Let's suppose that the average tenure of a musician playing in an orchestra is 20 years.That would mean for every orchestra seat in the US there are twenty incredibly talented musicians waiting for a shot at a seat in a professional orchestra.

The hiring dynamic that creates is pretty well demonstrated by the Minnesota Orchestra's current search for a new Concertmaster. It's important to note that the Minnesota Orchestra is consisently rated of one the top 10 orchestras in the country, and that the Concertmaster's role is both very large and well paid (in the neighborhood of $450k/year).  

That said, the Minnesota Orchestra will be auditioning over 200 musicians for the Concertmaster spot.  Obviously, this group has already self-selected – every single person thinks he or she is talented enough to be the chief violinist for a major professional orchestra.  So, needless to say, they will all be amazing.  

Here's my opinion…Wiithout an incredibly rigorous and valid vetting process and a very clear, specific idea of what you're looking for in your next Concertmaster, there can be simply no good way to differentiate one from another in a crowd like this.  What do you think?

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Loving and Learning From “Britain’s Got Talent”

If you haven't yet seen Susan Boyle's and Shaheen Jafargholi's "Britain's Got Talent" auditions, PLEASE watch them now.  I'm supplying links below, since I am not able to embed them here.

Susan Boyle – Frumpy, never-been-kissed, and ultra-charming 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY  (over 100 million hits on YouTube)

Shaheen Jafargholi – Soulful and twelve years old

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVU4IkzMNIo (already over 2 million hits on YouTube) 

Both performances are incredible. Mind-boggling, really. In fact, anyone who is not tone deaf could easily pick these two out of a crowd of wannabe divas.

That begs the question, "Who needs Simon?" Honestly. His ability to separate the extreme wheat from the chaff is nothing special. In fact, he epitomizes the gut-based form of talent assessment so often lamented. It's easily influenced by bias and, therefore, unfair and at times even questionable from a legal standpoint. But in this case, hey, it works.

Likewise, it's generally easy to spot the super high-flyers in our organizations. Unfortunately, however, business and talent management imperatives require us to rely on and plan around a much broader base of talent than these select few. That means we need to be able to differentiate the "pretty good" from the "good," the "good at certain things," and even the "getting better." That's where science enters the picture.

We know how to measure things like performance, potential, and readiness in a way that is significantly more objective and reliable. Let's start applying these methods more extensively.  

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If You Ever Questioned Whether Talent Matters…

According to Simon Johnson, former IMF Chief Economist and MIT professor, a showdown is brewing between major banks like Goldman Sachs and the Obama Administration. This showdown, Simon says, not only places in question the federal government's ability to control these banks, but also poses a real threat to the nation's economic recovery.

The issue?  Caps on bonuses and executive comp. Goldman says that the removal of these caps, through payback of TARP dollars, would create significant strategic advantage in their ability to recruit top talent. 

Pretty powerful testimony to the value of talent in today's economy. 

Listen here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103122382

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Talent Management as Trust Management

Originally uploaded by sujathafan

It is sometimes easy to forget the "human" in human resources or the fact that there is a soul underlying the "talent" in talent management. It's pretty remarkable, since utlimately the what we do in talent management – who and how we hire, develop, promote, etc. – signficantly and directly impacts the lives of lots and lots of people.

Earlier today I was speaking with a current classmate of mine. He's a former GI in his mid-thirties who works in financial services. He has no experience in HR and his company is not very large. Yet, he made the very astute observation that organizations are moving in the direction of developing two workforces – one that is nurtured, developed, and catered to, and the "other" that simply produces.

It's an oversimplification, but our conversation made it clear that the secret is out – the broad goal of talent management in most organization is hire, develop, and promote superior talent.

Our good intentions clearly raise lots of moral dilemmas, particularly as it concerns those who end up – rightly or wrongly – on the "other" end of the spectrum (i.e., my classmate). 

I only want to get into one of those dilemmas right now, and that is the disconnect between our desire to create high-performing people/organizations and the backward processes by which we identify and nominate "talent."

The sad reality in most organizations is:

1. Performance management processes don't produce highly reliable data. They simply aren't often helpful in reliably and objectively differentiating employee performance. The process that was once an "ass-covering exercise" has not been sufficiently adapted to the reality that most organizations (and the technology they leverage) are now relying heavily on performance data for making important talent decisions. 
2. Other talent measures/processes, such as employee "potential" and promotion "readiness" ranking are most often based on gut, at best, and politics, at worst. 

The end result is a dysfunctional dynamic that severely jeopardizes that already feeble social contract between employee and employer (see here for more).

Bottom line – if we're going to do talent management, we owe it to people to do it in a way that is as fair and objective as possible. If not, we're not creating better performing companies based on meritocracy; we're simply empowring the kind of gut-based decision-making and politicking that has given our discipline a bad name among everyone from college interns to the CEO.

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