Article

(This article was originally published in Entrepreneur magazine in 2019)   There’s an insidious set of forces working against your being a high performer. It’s not your jerk of a boss, the local cantina that starts happy hour at 2 p.m. or your inexplicably slow wireless connection. It’s a combination of click-bait misdirection (e.g. The 4 […]

Our field gained traction about ten years ago when most companies were either adding or exploring how to add Talent Management as a function. In the years that have passed we’ve made amazing progress in some areas and shown our weakness in others.

Intense debate marked the landscape of Performance Management over the last five years.
After much uproar, the dust settled and presented new challenges and opportunities for HR professionals. Between the calls for change and the debate over validity – what has really changed?

Even CHROs who have aggressively upgraded other elements of their organization have hesitated to make the often-obvious talent changes needed in their direct reports. We tell you how to ensure you shape your team for incredible results.

Where nice goes wrong is when the label is used by leaders to explain why they don’t have, or don’t force others to have, the difficult conversations and make the challenging decisions needed to improve their organization. Let’s redefine a “nice culture” so that it benefits everyone in your organization as well as your external stakeholders.

There may be high potentials in our midst who have been passed-over in our talent review processes because they don’t meet the conventional definition of potential or because the process didn’t work as it was designed. Are there hidden gems in your organization and, if so, how can you find them?

The secrets behind HR success lie beneath the organization design. How you bring that structure to life, through the people within it, will differentiate your success far more than the design ever can.

Our experience conducting hundreds of talent reviews and building the process for complex global companies shows us that six factors create a successful talent review. We believe that it’s less about the tool and more about the process.

There’s plenty of passion and noise behind the movement to eliminate performance ratings. Now might be a good time to examine what the science and practical realities say about the validity of this approach.