People are not resources and they don’t perform, they do
The workplace today seems to have a penchant for Aldous Huxley’s Brave new world hypnopaedic process but in reverse. Unlike the World State in Brave new world, It loves to assure us that we are important, unique, we are valued ‘resources ‘ yet puts in place mechanisms that fail to account for individuality and talent.
Organisations have tried to address individuality in many ways, from not actually getting it (the corporate world until about the late 1990s) to settling on the misnomer of Human Resources. Despite having the warm and fuzzy word ‘human’ in it, to think of people as resources is no different than counting cattle or doing a warehouse inventory, people become interchangeable, roles define the workplace.
Talent management not performance management
One of the interesting aspects of this problem is the plethora of attempts to come up with devilish and frankly hilarious ways to manage performance. These generally fail and the clue is in the name, ‘performance management’, people are not cars, they don’t perform, they do things and if you got it right, those things can be amazing.
Performance assumes an asynchronous process where the individual is told what ‘costume’ they are to don at the office, these ‘costumes’ are often elaborately defined by grand principles and set behaviors (competencies, I am looking at you) often completely unrelated to the kind of people the organisation actually needs to get the work done. Using this ‘tinted glass’ fact-sheet, recruiters and so called managers (a clue, managers are supposed to manage, not tick boxes once a year) assess the individual not on what they do, but on how they did it against the expected behavior, performance becomes adherence to expectations, the organisation already made up its mind on what is good, it cannot ever be surprised.
One can’t help but wonder what Albert Einstein‘s performance review would have read like…
Albert needs to pay more attention to his attendance; he missed several days of work to be at a ‘conference’ in Oslo. We appreciate that receiving a Nobel Prize must be an exciting experience for him, but other colleagues at his grade are managing staff, are performance managers and still show up every day, if he wants to start moving towards a 2 or a 1, he will have to start showing the high performance shown by some of his colleagues. Albert needs to pay more attention to the competency based system, in several instances he has cited his winning a Nobel Prize for the theory of general relativity as evidence of his ability to think outside the box and strategically, yet he has failed to provide evidence of what he did, how he did it and what the result was, winning a Nobel Prize is of no consequence if he cannot provide evidence of how he achieved it.
And what his line manager comments would have been like…
This has been a busy year for Albert, his section on pneumatic motion has just expanded and increased its workload twofold, he has been asked to deliver a small project cataloging the number of paper clips tossed away last year (this could deliver great savings by ascertaining how many paper clips can be recycled, hence reducing the number purchased) Is in charge of picking up the paper deliveries every Tuesday and has also won a Nobel Prize. Albert has been coming to terms with the scientific aspects of pneumatic motion, and although he has not shown the level of interest expected, he is learning and his supervisor is confident that in a year or two he may be allowed to oversee pneumatic motion patents filing on his own, which is a great responsibility.
Albert has had difficulty keeping time, with several unexpected days off in Oslo, Munich and Paris, but he and his manager are working together to keep better control of his leave. Although Albert in some aspects shows evidence of a box 4 (time management issues, slow to pick up, little competence evidence) I believe that there is an obvious item that changes that perception and cannot be ignored; Albert worked two weekends in a row to index all the 1913 records for the ‘ignition, lighting and fire creating devices’ section and was commended by the director of that section for a job well done. I think this shows Albert’s potential, only if could control his outside activities and concentrate in developing the competences required of the grade above.
The only valid world for many organisations is the world of the organisation and any activities or achievements that do not match the perceived set of behaviors assigned to a resource tend to be written off, you only know as much as the level at which they placed you and only things that can be directly linked to the defined behavior can be accounted for. The idea that you can quantify talent is laughable and so is the idea that a tick box on a list of principles will allow you to measure that talent.
Partners not employees
Imagine you decide to produce and sell widget x, you sit by the window in your new office and quickly realize that you need people to make this happen, you have the capital, but that is just money in hand, or credit, it does nothing by itself. So you get an engineer to design the widget, a tester to test it, a marketing guy to sell it and four or five people that know how to build to get the thing going. Once you have recruited everyone you put a sign out that says ‘Widget x Ltd’, brilliant, you are real company! Well, you are not, that is, you alone; all of you are.
Without the engineer you get no design, without the marketeer it does not get sold and no profits, without the tester you may kill someone with a faulty widget and without the manufacturing people widget x will never leave the drawing board, ALL of you are the company. Assuming the company is an entity above the people that comprise it is a failing of the modern world, only when the company becomes an entity whose quality is directly related to the quality of the people that make it up can you innovate.
Very quickly, of course, you get to see these people as roles, we just need and engineer/marketeer/tester/manufacturer, it is not about people anymore but functions. When people become resources, when any will do, when interchangeability becomes the norm, then your product goes from being THE product to being a product, you go from being a Michelin star restaurant to being McDonald’s. I can almost hear Sixtus IV yelling through the Vatican corridors ‘just get me a painter for the chapel, any painter!’.
You don’t employ somebody as much as ask somebody to come into partnership with you to achieve something; they have a talent you need, you have a series of rewards to give back, if agreed, you enter into a partnership. Their job is to give you what they are good at to the best of their capabilities, your role is to make sure that the environment surrounding those people enables them to give you their best. They don’t owe you anymore than you owe them, you don’t have the upper hand, it is an exchange of equals and promoting someone is not about you magnanimously doing them a favor. Promotion is about someone delivering to a level far higher than you remunerate them for and you realizing the obvious benefits of keeping them with you and improving the chances of better products by matching their talent with greater authority.
When we approach talent as a resource, when we focus on the how, for which qualifiers have already been prescribed and not on the significance and quality of the what, you will fail at innovation. It would be a crime to assess Michelangelo on how he painted the Sistine chapel, it is irrelevant if he was cranky, did it at night, on his back, if he followed Ghirlandaio’s techniques, if he used approved paint or mixed his own or if he was nice to Sixtus IV. Sometimes, to deliver something truly spectacular you need to be bold, different, daring and totally off the wall. Greatness is not a competency and as long as you see your people as roles, as resources and define them by a general, patronizing set of behavioral patterns which most often favor mediocrity instead of greatness (if you meet ALL of these you are good enough), you will be a second rate organisation making second rate things.
