Grumpy, Chill, Hip, or Out-of-touch - Some new dimensions for your 9-box grid

The classic talent evaluation/assessment/review/calibration process usually looks to position everyone in the group of interest (managers, members of a specific department, everyone having the same type of role), on a 9-box grid that uses 'Performance' and  Potential' as its axes.

If you have been in the talent management game for more than say 6 months, you are no doubt familiar with the process of reviewing, assigning, and then taking actions based on where individuals fall on the 9-box. High performer with high potential to advance? Make sure he/she is being given challenging assignments, is being rewarded well, and knows you recognize their value and they have a bright future if they keep up their great work. Low performance and low potential? Maybe it is time to have a frank conversation about whether they remain a good fit in the organization, at least in their current role.

But 'Performance' and 'Potential' are not the only ways or measurements by which to assess and rank a group of employees. In fact, these measurements might not even be the best way to assess a group. Click for a larger version

Take a look at the chart to the right, (courtesy of NBA.com) - a 9-box-like (I know it only has 4 boxes, lay off), that plots the current set of 30 NBA head coaches using 'Grumpy <---> Chill' on the horizontal axis, and 'Hip <---> Out of Touch' on the vertical.

How does one go about assessing Grumpy vs. Chill, or Hip vs. Out of Touch?

Well, here is how the NBA.com piece explains the distinctions?

Grumpy-Chill -- Does the coach seem like a generally cheerful person? Then he's going to be more on the chill side. If he's cantankerous, he's going to be on the grumpy side. This one is pretty self-evident.

Out of Touch-Hip -- This is a little more confusing, since it incorporates coaching strategies, how they relate to players and a wealth of other things. If the coach runs an outdated offense that shuns threes and emphasizes long twos, he's going to end up on the out of touch side. If he can't seem to reach his players, that's also out of touch. But if he's running a "key and three" offense or really understands how to deal with today's players, he'll be on the hip side.

It wouldn't be that hard to make a couple of minor tweaks to the axes and dimensions on the NBA coaches 4-box in order to make it relevant to just about any kind of organization, and in particular, its managers. Grumpy and Chill are pretty much universal concepts no matter what the industry. And grumpy doesn't necessarily equate to 'bad', depending on the context. As for Hip and Out of Touch, this is also a pretty universal continuum. Instead of assessing managers on basketball concepts, just replace them with your organization's version of what constitutes 'hip'. It could be new ways of organizing teams, adoption of new technology, acceptance of variable work styles and preferences - you get the idea. Like most organizations want some kind of a blend of folks on the traditional 9-box, so to you'd likely want at least some Grumpy leaders and maybe a couple that are 'Out-of-touch', as they probably help to remind everyone that 'new' is not always 'better'.

I love the idea of using different, (and hopefully valuable), lenses through which to look at the world. Performance and Potential are good, and have a place in talent evaluation certainly. But they are not the only two dimensions that can be useful in describing people, and they definitely might not be the best ones. 

In fact, if I was a front-line worker thinking about joining an organization, or choosing my next assignment, I would be much more interested in where my new manager sits on the Grumpy/Chill/Hip/Out-of-touch matrix than on some Performance Vs. Potential grid.

I actually am not thinking about where I would self-assess on the 'Grumpy/Hip' matrix.

Definitely more on the Grumpy side.  But I swear I am pretty hip...

The Performance Curve

If you are a fan of baseball you might be familiar with the maxim or rule of thumb that states for Major League players that an individual player's performance (hits, home runs, wins as a pitcher, etc.), tends to 'peak' at around age 29 or so (give to take a year or two), then most often declines until the end of their careers.

This phenomenon, most often raised when a team elects to offer hundreds of millions of dollars and 5+ year contracts to players on the wrong side of 30, has been pretty well observed, studied, and documented over the 100+ years of data about Major League player performance.

Since charts make everything better, take a look at the generalized performance by age chart from a 2010 study published on Baseball Prospectus:

The specifics of the Y-axis values don't really matter for the point I am after, (they represent standard deviations from 'peak' performance', but simply looking at the data we see for both the original study sample (veteran players with 10+ years of data), and 'less restricted' players, (more or less everyone else), that performance peaks in the late 20s and declines, predicatbly, from there. Keep this data in mind the next time your favorite team drops a 7-year, $125M contract on your best 31 year old slugger. Those kinds of contracts, for hitters or pitchers, almost never work out well for the team. And again, the reasons are completely obvious and predictable. Almost all players skills begin to decline by age 30. All players are in decline by 32.

What does this predictable and observable performance curve for baseball players mean for you as an HR/Talent pro?

I think at least three things can be taken from the baseball performance curve that apply more generally.

1. While baseball, and sports in general, allow more precise and discrete measures of performance that allow us to pinpoint when performance 'peaks', this phenomenon applies in many other scenarios as well. You, or your managers, know after how long in a given role that an employee's performance has likely hit its apex, and continued tenure in that role is likely to results in lessened performance. Put more simply, you can't keep people, especially good ones, in the same roles for too long. They get bored, they figure it all out. And after too long, they start to tune out. The time to move people to the next role isn't when they are on the decline, it is when they are just peaking.

2. In baseball gigantic contracts are often bestowed on players in their late 20s or early 30s, mostly on the basis of several years of prior high performance. While this on first glance seems to make sense, it almost always results in a bad deal for the team And again, the reason is not usually the fault of the player. It is just that 100 years of data show that almost all players are simply not as productive from ages 30-35 as they are from ages 25-30. The lesson here: We need to remember that most compensation should be about ongoing and future performance, and not predominantly as a reward for what has already happened. Past performance is not always, maybe not even all that often, a great predictor of future performance.

3. Baseball player performance is very predictable, as we see in the above data, and there really is no excuse for baseball team management to pretend that is not the case. Decades of data make it plain. I think soon, maybe even fairly soon, the kinds of data and predictive data that organizations will have about employee performance will be similarly robust and powerful. Just as baseball team execs find it very difficult to heed this data, it will be tough for HR and business leaders to 'listen' to their data as well. But the best-run organizations, the ones that make the best use of their resources will be the ones that do not fail to heed what the hard data about performance and people are telling them.

Ok that is it, I am out 

Trust your data.

And don't give 32 year old first basemen $100M contracts.

Great players win early

I remain convinced that everything, everything (pretty much) you need to know about HR/Talent Management/The Workplace you can learn from watching the NBA. I even said as much a few weeks back.

The dynamics of NBA basketball exhibit remarkable similarities to many of the most common workplace situations: Relatively small working teams, (even in large organizations, most work gets done in much smaller groups), a need for the team to function cohesively, and, importantly, plenty of opportunity (and need for), individual expressions of creativity and high performance.Yao

With that setup, I want to call out yet another example of how understanding the NBA can help you with HR and Talent management, this time a look at how early-career NBA player performance can help you in evaluating tricky things like how long should it take a new hire to be 'fully productive' and an even more challenging question - 'What is the performance ceiling, or potential of this new hire?'

At Deadspin, they took a look at the early career results, (defined by team regular season win totals), for high draft choices (in HR-speak 'Top talent'), over the last 15 or so years. What they found after examining the data is for the most part is that really truly great players begin to show positive results for their (almost always 'bad') teams, by their third season in the NBA.  Here is an excerpt from the analysis, then a couple of comments from me about how you might be able to consider this data in a 'normal' workplace context.

This is a look at regular season wins. Taking just the regular season gets us out of theringsssssss mentality. The NBA playoffs are the most meaningful of any sport's, but geting 66 wins out of Mo Williams, Boobie Gibson and Delonte West is a version of greatness that hasn't been explored as deeply as it probably should. (Steve here - this is a reference to the stiffs that LeBron James carried on his back in his first stint with the Cavaliers).

So let's draw a totally arbitrary line in the sand at 50 wins, and plot out not just who gets there, but when they get there, the idea being that in those first few years, we can isolate talented players on inferior teams. As it happens, the hunch mostly bears out: In today's NBA, good players win, great players win early.

The Deadspin piece goes on to list the players that meet this (admittedly subjective) criteria - 50 wins by year three, the player was a high draft pick, and the 'new hire' played significant minutes from the beginning of their career. And the list reads like a 'Who's Who?' of current NBA stars - Chris Paul, LeBron James, Kevin Durant etc.  The point is not really that LeBron and Durant and Paul are great players, it is pretty easy to tell that by just watching them, but rather how that greatness actually manifests in organizational success, i.e., wins.

The point is (quoting from the piece), 'Good players win. Great players win early.'

What takeaways about new hire productivity and longer-term potential might you be able to glean from the data about NBA stars? I have three quick ideas:

1. The 'learning curve' for really talented, special performers is likely much, much shorter than for average performers. They will 'get' the basic elements of the industry/organization/role really quickly, and might be bored if your typical onboarding/training program feels too slow and too restrictive. 

2. Great, transformative talent will likely demonstrate that talent in some manner pretty early in the process. It might be a great new idea for a product/service, an improvement in an existing process that saves time or money, or simply how they begin to elevate the performance of those around them. But the point is, you likely can tell pretty quickly if you have a potentially great performer on your hands.

3. But in order to one; not be bored with a slow training cycle, and two; even have the chance to demonstrate great ability and potential, the new player on the team has to be given some opportunity to do just that. In the NBA study, the new players had to have averaged 28 (out of 48) minutes of game action, i.e. they had to essentially be starting, featured players even though they were new. The same is true in any workplace really. In order to contribute meanigfully, you have to have a chance or platform to do just that. The overwhelming tendency is to shield new hires from the most complex and important projects until they are 'ready', but by doing that you might be preventing both their chance to demonstrate their true capability and potential. 

It's all about the NBA. It is. I will convince you eventually. Ok, I am out.

Have a great day! 

You need a rival, not just more competition

Wanted to point out to a really interesting study/paper on the effects of rivalry and competition on individual performance. In the study titled 'Driven to Win: Rivalry, Motivation, and Performance', author and researcher Gavin Kilduff took a look at what the phenomenon of interindividual rivalry (think Bird - Magic, Bill Gates - Larry Ellison, or Beatles - Rolling Stones) and its consequences for motivation and task performance.

Long story short, (and the paper is kind of long so I will save you from reading the entire thing if that is not your bag for a Friday), is that in a study of competitive distance runners it was found that the presence in the competition of a rival, increased individual performance by as much as 25 seconds over a distance of 5K.

And the paper makes an important distinction between what constitutes a rival versus the more general and generic idea of competition. A rival, in this context, is another runner with which you have competed against numerous times in the past and whose finishing times were consistently near to yours, such that in the course of many races contested over time you would have come to 'know' and recognize that competitor as a rival.

So at the starting line, during the race, and in the important drive to the finish line you would in theory see and recognize this rival, and at least according to the study, your performance would improve relative to a race where you were just trying to do your best and not trying to best your rival.

It is kind of an interesting concept I think, that there is a difference in performance that is driven by a rivalry compared to the more general and abstract notion of competition. Competition is vague. A rivalry has a name and a face and talks trash about you sometimes.

If indeed we perform better when we have a rival what might that suggest for more mundane situations in the workplace? Should managers more actively pit one employee against another in performance-related competitive situations in order to foster the notion of rivalry?

Should organizations more explicitly identify and benchmark against key competitors and strive to 'defeat' them in sales, recruiting, or other corporate contests?

Should each if us personally select or identify a 'rival' to measure ourselves against and to compete with on a day-to-day basis?

It's a jungle out there my friends...

Happy Friday.

Career Lessons from an Aging Hair Band

This week I had the chance to attend Cornerstone OnDemand's annual user conference in San Diego, and as usual the folks from CSOD put on a great event. There were probably two highlights for me overall, the first being the excellent presentations and case studies presented by numerous Cornerstone customers at the event, (like Staples, University of Southern California, and my personal favorite New Belgium Brewery). In these and other sessions, customers themselves shared their HR and workforce challenges, how technology is helping them meet these challenges, and provided a glimpse into what is really going on in HR organizations and with HR technology in the HR trenches.

The other highlight of the event was the Cornerstone customer appreciation party that was held on the deck of the retired aircraft carrier USS Midway, and featured a performance from 80s era hair band Poison, (that is Poison front man Bret Michaels in the pic at the right, taken by me with my dodgy iPhone).

Beforehand, I definitely had my doubts about how interesting and entertaining a set from Poison would be in 2014.While I certainly knew of them, and would recognize several songs from their set list, (you would too, don't try to lie about that), going in my general suspicion would be we'd just get a rote, by-the-numbers re-hash of familiar songs that the band has probably played 23,945 times. Additionally, a band like Poison might have looked at this small, (maybe 500-700 people there), corporate gig as just a way to make a few bucks without too much effort before heading to the next gig.

But instead we were treated to a really well-done, high energy, and I have to admit, totally enjoyable performance that surprised me, someone who is not that much of a music guy and certainly someone that does not play Poison, (or any other music from that genre/era) on the reg. From watching Bret and company work for the hour or so that they were on stage, I think there are (at least) three simple performance/career lessons that anyone can take away from the 80s rockers that would be applicable to just about anyone.

1. Attitude is important, maybe more important than effort - You could tell from the very beginning of the set that the band was not simply going to mail in the performance and that they were really energetic and engaged. They definitely wanted to put on a great show, to give the crowd a good time, and (I would bet) to truly earn their fees for the night. But before giving the effort required to deliver that performance their mindset or their attitude towards the event had to be right. If you go into any project thinking 'I really am not that interested in this work', there is almost no way to sustain the work rate or effort needed to deliver good performance. 

2. Effort is still really important too - It was clear the band had their minds right at the start of the show, but for work or performances where success or failure can be greatly influenced by the level of effort put forth, a good attitude or 'wanting' to succeed is never going to be enough. Bret and the other guys sustained a really high energy and work level for the entire set, never really taking a break, always engaging with each other and with the audience for the duration of the show. There was never really a lull or a pause in their effort, and at no time did they seem disinterested in what they were doing. And that is hard to do I think, when you have played the same songs thousands of times, or maybe in your case, delivered the same monthly status reports for the last 8 years. But the audience can tell if you are really working or not.

3. It helps to be a nice person - From random encounters with fans in the hotel prior to the show, to the way that the band engaged with fans during and even after the show was over, it was really clear that the guys in Poison were really appreciative and thankful for the support from the audience, (or were just really good at faking it). So beyond caring enough about what they were doing to have a great attitude, and put forth the effort, they also took time to try and personally connect with people as well. You can get away with being a jerk for a while if you can deliver great work, but you probably either will wear out your welcome because you are a jerk, or you will eventually stop delivering great work. And then you will no longer be 'That jerk who knows what he is doing', you will just be 'That jerk.' And no one will put up with that for very long. You will last much longer if you at least try to be nice.

So yes, I am admitting that I had a good time at a Poison concert. And I am not ashamed. If you were there you would have had a good time too. And you just might have learned something about work and career longevity along the way.

Happy Thursday!