You should never be surprised by someone that works for you

Well, probably not 'never', but certainly not very much, and not when the 'surprise' is that the employee is really, really, really talented at something related either to their actual job or more generally to your business.

The context of the notion that you, ('you' being a manager, leader, business owner, etc.), should have a strong sense of both the capabilities, and more importantly perhaps, the potential of the folks on your team. I know, not exactly some kind of breakthrough idea, right? HR and business leaders have been plotting folks on the 9-box Performance/Potential grid for years and years. In fact, there are at least a dozen really cool software programs that will help you automate and streamline and enhance the entire 9-box exercise.

But so what, really? None of that matters if there aren't strategies in place to actually action the results of the exercise.

Here's the specific example that I heard discussed recently on of all things, Bill Simmons' BS Report podcast, which is usually about sports topics. On this particular episode, Simmons and his guest were discussing TV talk shows, specifically the Daily Show on Comedy Central.

Last Summer, The Daily Show's host John Stewart took an extended sabbatical from the show in order to work on a movie project. In his stead, Comedy Central slotted show contributor John Oliver in Stewart's place to host the show for a few months while Stewart was on leave.

And long story short, Oliver killed it. He was funny, clever, and once his extended run was complete filling in for Stewart, he has suddenly in demand. He had many more options than perhaps he would have had he not been given this kind of showcase opportunity from Comedy Central. But once the guest run was completed, Comedy Central, perhaps surprised by how well Oliver performed in the 'top' job at the Daily Show, was left kind of stuck - at the they did not have a similar, high-profile kind of role to offer Oliver, and as was brought up by Bill Simmons on the podcast, they did not have Oliver contractually locked up into continuing on with Comedy Central at all.

Long story short, Oliver moved on to HBO where his new show, 'Last Week Tonight with John Oliver', has launched to critical acclaim and pretty significant buzz (amongst folks who care about these things).

And Comedy Central is left wondering just how they managed to let Oliver walk, particularly when just a few months later another network star, Stephen Colbert, announced he was leaving to eventually become the replacement for CBS legend David Letterman on his talk show.

In theory, better planning and understanding of their talent on Comedy Central's part might have led to a much more beneficial outcome for the network all around. Their #1 star Stewart, gets a needed break to re-charge and explore some important personal projects, a highly capable team player, Oliver, gets a chance to prove himself, and eventually slot into the #2 role, Colbert's when he leaves.

Except that is not, in fact, what is happening, and Comedy Central is left wondering how they let Oliver go to (possibly) become a bigger star somewhere else.

Hey, it happens. Maybe Comedy Central did know just how talented Oliver was, and just did not care that much. That is pretty bad.

But maybe they were actually surprised by how good he was, and if so, that is even worse, because if you are really managing and engaging with talent, and not just playing with names on a 9-box, you should never really be surprised by someone that works for you. 

How far are you willing to go to get better?

At the (continuing) risk of alienating blog readers who are not the least interested in the connections between sports and HR and the workplace (come on, get with it people), I felt compelled to go back to the NBA well one more time to share a sliver of a fantastic piece in Grantland about the Atlanta Hawks' Kyle Korver.

For the uninitiated, Korver is a 33 year old veteran player about to enter his 12th season in the NBA, after completing 4 years as a college player at Creighton. He has played for 4 different teams in his career, and was notably traded before ever playing a game in the NBA by the Nets, the team that originally drafted him to the 76ers in exchange for $125,000 - enough cash to fund the Nets' summer league team and buy some office equipment. He then bounced around the league somewhat, making stops in Philly, Utah, and Chicago before joining the Hawks in 2012.

Since becoming a Hawk, and in particular since the Hawks have adopted a more open, fast-paced, spread the court and shoot 3-pointers type of offensive style, Korver has enjoyed something almost unheard of with professional basketball players on the wrong side of 30 - he is getting better. Korver's scoring average, shooting percentages, and most notably his 3-point shooting percentages have all gone up each of the last 3 seasons, just when most players his age are declining to a point where few even remain in the league.

To what can you attribute this remarkable late-career renaissance for Korver?

Probably to three things, two that are basketball specific but have relevance to pretty much any kind of workplace, and one other that is strictly a personal development play, and too has relevance to anyone looking to improve their performance in their job.

One - The league in general has adopted a style of play that suits Korver's natural talents more so than it did even just 5 or 7 years ago. Teams are favoring a more open game, are spacing the floor to free up 3 point shooting, and relying less on dominant center oriented offense. Through a combination of rule changes and a focus on analytics that values a high percentage 3 point shot over almost any other kind of shot, Korver has found himself a valuable niche in the current NBA. For the rest of us, the lesson is about finding that correct industry or type of work that fits with what we are naturally good at or inclined to enjoy. It sounds really simple, and it should be, but we all have probably spent longer than we care to admit in jobs or at companies that were not 'right.'

Two - The Hawks, Korver's current team, and their head coach John Budenholzer are installing specific patterns and plays to take advantage of Korver's skills, and that more often than not place him in a position where he or his teammates have the best chance for success. Often non-star players do not get much opportunity to showcae their talents, as most NBA teams orient their game plans around the strengths and preferences of their star players. It is not that role players like Korver are not capable, it is just that they often get limited opportunities. Here is a quote from the Grantland piece:

No coach has unleashed the full breadth of Korver’s game like Budenholzer. Korver isn’t a traditional pick-and-roll player; he can’t dribble the ball 25 feet to the rim, juking dudes along the way. But Budenholzer has tailored a sort of hybrid species of pick-and-roll to his secret star — a high-speed curling action in which Korver takes a pitch or a handoff, probes the defense with a dribble or two, and makes the next pass from there.

This is the classic, 'never get a chance to show what I can do' problem that happens in many workplaces. You can either get stuck as too much of a specialist, thus becoming too valuable for the one thing that you do well, but might not be too excited about, or you can fight and push and volunteer for projects that will simultaneously energize you and raise your overall value. Even if you work for the man, sometimes you have to make the man work for you.

Three - Korver probably works harder at getting better at his job than most of us work at getting better at ours. Work ethic is sometimes a tough thing to assess and then to value. Often it isn't about the level of effort that goes into doing the actual work, in Korver's case actually playing the games, but rather what someone is willing to do when they are 'off the clock' so to speak. What are they working on? What are they reading and researching? How far are they willing to push and explore in order to improve? One more bit from the Grantland piece shows what this means to a guy like Korver:

Korver is also willing to test himself in unconventional ways. Elliott introduced him to misogi, the Japanese annual purification ritual some athletes have adapted into a once-a-year endurance challenge. Korver and Elliott stand-up paddled 25 miles from the Channel Islands to Santa Barbara last year. Korver may have one-upped himself with themisogi he did this summer.

Big-wave surfers build lung capacity by holding a large rock, sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and running short distances on the ocean floor. Korver and four friends decided to go back to the Channel Islands, find an 85-pound rock, and run a collective 5K holding the thing underwater. Each participant would dive down, find the rock, run with it as long as he could, and drop it for the next guy to find. Those waiting their turn wore weight belts and tread in water between five and 10 feet deep.

It took five hours. “We were honestly worried about blacking out,” Korver says. They were also worried about sharks.

“He wants to turn over every stone, and try every possible thing that might make him better — as a player and a person,” Elliott says.

Get that? A group 5K, underwater, while carrying a 85 pound rock and hoping you don't black out and/or get eaten by a shark. That is work ethic. That is wanting to get better. That is the kind of approach, in combination with the right system and organization, that allows a 33 year old shooter to keep getting better when decades of NBA history says he should be getting worse.

How far are you willing to go to get better? 

The Trends Shaping Global People Management, and One That Isn't

Recently the Boston Consulting Group published a report and research study titled 'Creating People Advantage 2012: Mastering HR Challenges in a Two-Speed World', a look at the most pressing and important trends and issues in Human Capital Management gleaned from their survey and interviews with over 4,000 HR and Business Executives from over 100 countries. You can access the full 59-page PDF report here.

Take a look at the summary chart below - you probably won't be too surprised by the three most important HCM topics as defined by 'High' Future Importance to the organizations, coupled with 'Low' Current Capability in that discipline. 

In case you can't figure out the chart, (it took me a minute), the three topics that fell in the red or 'Strong Need to Act' zone were:

Managing Talent - Ok, kind of generic, but I guess it makes sense

Improving Leadership Development - Sort of a perennial issue in most organizations, but as the report details, becoming more acute due to demographic reasons, (the aging workforce, mainly)

Strategic Workforce Planning - Most organizations reporting ongoing difficulty in adequately forecasting short and long-term talent needs

So taken together, not all that surprising I guess, we have been hearing and reading about these trends and critical areas of focus for HR and Talent professionals for some time now. We need to get smarter at understanding our people, at developing them for future leadership roles, and more precisely planning for our future talent needs.  

Basically, we need to just get better at our jobs. Sounds like a sound bite from the press conference of every losing football coach ever.

But what stood out to me from the report was not the three 'red' items, but rather the one topic out of 22 that registered on the opposite end of the scale - at the bottom of the scale in capability but also rated as least important in the long term, namely 'Actively Using Web 2.0 for HR.'

What? 

Applying the latest in social, particiapatory, collaborative, and modern technology to improve HR and Talent Management rated dead last?

Even 'Improving Employer Branding' (which hardly anyone even understands), rated more important?

I have to say even though I would not have expected a really geeky, technical sounding function or topic like 'Web 2.0' (and please, BCG can you drop that term, it fell out of fashion in 2009), to register above most of the more traditional and familiar HR and Talent focus areas, to see it rank last in future importance by so many Global HR leaders is a little concerning and sad.

As a proponent of workforce technologies and as someone who knows the impact that the application of collaborative and social technologies can have to help address almost ANY of the topics on the BCG survey, I hope that these results are not truly indicative of how HR pros see these tools and their potential.  

What are you seeing in your organization - are the new tools and technologies on your radar in HR?

Stop Making Decisions

Stop making decisions. Or rather, stop making so many decisions.

Here's the thing - you're smart, you have an important job, maybe you have a family, kids, a bunch of people in your personal and professional life that rely on you to be the leader and to take charge. You have to make a ridiculous number of decisions each day - for yourself, for your teams, your kids, maybe even your friends.Kandinsky - Ville Arabe

And it's exhausting.

So I'd like to offer a couple of simple recommendations to reduce the amount and volume of decisions you have to deal with in any given day, taken not from me, but from a couple of folks you might be familiar with - President Obama, and the President of the Internet, Mark Zuckerberg.

Here they are, more or less:

1. From Barack - Eat and wear the same thing every day (or at least get someone to make all your meals and place them in front of you at meal time).

From the Vanity Fair piece linked to above:

(Obama) I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions

2. From Zuck - Wear the same thing every day (or at least get someone to lay out your clothes for you each day).

From the Business Insider piece:

I mean, I wear the same thing every day, right? I mean, it's literally, if you could see my closet," Zuckerberg starts to explain, as Lauer asks if he owns 12 of the same gray t-shirt. "Maybe about 20,"

Remove from your daily decision making the mundane, wearying, and non-productive process of deciding what to eat and what to wear and you will free up time, energy, and mental capacity to focus on things that really matter.

Now, you might not be in a position to order around your minions to organize for you your food and clothing choices each day, but chances are you are spending time contemplating, deliberating, and ruminating on things that at the end of the day that at best don't really matter that much, and at worst, are materially detracting from your ability to do amazing things.

You don't need to be consulted about everything.

You don't need to weigh 38 options before you decide where to have dinner tonight.

You can let go of at least one thing that doesn't really matter to spend 10 more minutes on something that does.

It is ok not to be in charge all the time.

Have a Great Weekend!

You can still see, right?

In a few short weeks my New York State issued driver's license will expire, and to continue to remain in the good graces of our fine state's laws and regulations I will need to renew said license, a fairly simple exercise in filling out some forms, paying some kind of fee, (it's a FEE not a tax), and interestingly to me, submit to an pass the State's vision test, (picture of the state's 'Eye Test Report' accompanies this post).Read the fourth line starting on the left, please?

It makes sense I think, that for the renewal of my driving privileges that the State desires not only to receive my additional $64.50 and a new and current picture of my handsome mug, they also want me to prove, (or have a registered Health Care Provider attest), that I can actually handle the first and most basic element required to safely operate a motor vehicle - I can actually see. 

And I applaud the State of New York for making sure to verify my ability to see before sanctioning me for another four years out on the roadways as an authorized operator of (most) any car, truck, van, I can get my hands on. 

But putting aside the practical and budgetary realities aside for a moment, (believe me in New York we do not need to pay any more taxes), the license renewal process and the associated Eye Test reveals the obvious flaw in the process - in order to be a safe and responsible driver, it doesn't really matter if I can see, what matters is whether or not I know how and can demonstrate that I can drive.  And while I know in New York, or in any other place for that matter, road re-testing of long time drivers is not feasible (and probably doesn't make sense), this necessarily flawed process reminds us that most of the time when making decisions surrounding the capability and suitability of someone to successfully perform any task, we almost always make our judgement with imperfect and incomplete information.

And in the 'checking of the boxes' process of traits and experiences we often fail to remember the essential function or task that we really need to have accomplished.

New York State will re-authorize me for $64.50 and proof I can see. Whether or not I know how to drive, well that is another story.

And by the way, I am an excellent driver - it's all of you people that are a menace out on the roads.

Have a great week!