Category: HR Management

Succession with Performers

Hunter Dean

Succession with Performers - Hunter Dean

There are almost certainly some people in your business who if you were to loose them you won’t cry about it. There are others who are the life blood of your business however, perhaps in Project or Executive roles and when they go, it can be a big problem!

In many businesses, succession planning for high performers and talent management is done through a process like making sure you have where possible, at least one off site a ¼ then having drinks with those people you’re a little worried about, to find out what the true story is around their ambitions

The problem with this kind of process and it may not look exactly like this, as it might be a six monthly thing, or you might get one of your team a person you know really well to find out things for you.

Consider four ways of ensuring you know exactly where people are up to on your team, so you don’t get nasty surprises.

  1. Setup agreements with your people so that you’ll let them know if you were ever going to make a move somewhere else with some decent notice and be specific. Ensure in this moment that they also commit to letting you know if they were getting itchy feet or wanted new opportunities, and make sure they commit to giving you the same notice period.
  2. When new people start after 4-12 weeks consider having an up front “Performance Management” style type meeting, this is not to tell them they need to pull their socks up, but more to set the scene for the future, and yes you might even address some tiny niggles early.
  3. Keep the dialogue open between all your team members and understand where your market is at. Are there many opportunities and head hunters calling daily in order to try and snap up your best people. Or is the market really quiet in your neck of the woods.
  4. Find out what your best people value most and make sure you are delivering them what they value. In Sales environments part of this might be about money, but ironically often it may be more about recognition, and often people miss this, until it’s too late.

Have a look at what Jack Welch from GE says about the treatment of people, and just have a think about whether

1) You Agree
2) If you do, is your business treating its people like this? If you don’t, do you have a process that’s really working?

If you are in a business where you often have your people leaving and whether they are good or bad start to look more carefully at what you are and are not doing to mentor your people. The true cost of most team member losses is hidden in many monthly financial reports, why is this?

Well in the past financial reporting has not been smart enough and even today is not able to track the “True cost” of losing a person. Below are some things to consider, the numbers are rough but start to have a think, if you are losing people its probably costing you far more than you imagined! Below the salary is only $70K and being conservative true costs might look like.

If we were to track the true cost to the business of people leaving you would need to consider things like:

Person Leaving Average Salary $140K = $12K per month

  • Recruitment Costs
    – Cost $16K
  • The time it took to get them to full competency (4 months)
    – Cost $48K
  • Time other people “Internal Trainers” spent to get them confident
    – Cost $30K
  • The time peers in the business spent with them (2 months)
    – Cost $24K
  • All the Managers time $200K Salary spent (2 weeks across a year)
    – Cost $10K
  • Loss of productivity from down time while you the role filled
    – Cost $20K
  • HR Team member costs
    – Cost $10K

Total Cost $168K

Now that’s only on the outgoing person who may have only stayed 12 month’s to two years, you will now need to incur all these same costs on retraining the new recruit and if you get it wrong again…

Author: Hunter Dean see https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunterdean/ for LinkedIn Profile

Based in Melbourne Australia www.hunterdean.com

 

Why values are so important?

Hunter Dean

I was speaking with a client the other day about how an organisation he knew needed to better understand its existing values prior to moving forward. There is model that has been used by hundreds of thousands of organisations globally. It’s called Spiral Dynamics and looks at how values affect groups. Working on a series of levels, this 5-minute video gives you a serious look at your own business population and what your people value. Is your organisation at Level 1 to Level 5 or Level 7 – have a look and consider. Almost certainly there will be attributes that cross the levels, and certain tenancies will also be rife – ENJOY.

I thought I’d pen a few thoughts on this topic. I think there are at least five key things to consider:

  1. Do you know what values currently drive your people & how would you find this out?
    One way is to use a values survey or values measurement tool or group session on understanding how people feel the organisation treats them and what’s driving their current behaviours.
  2. How do you change them?
    If the current values are different to what you thought they’d be, how do you then change them? This is where things start to get interesting. Suppose you spend 4 hours in a room with your top 5 execs coming up with “SEVEN KEY ORGANISATIONAL VALUES” and then post them all over the place. Can and does this work?
  3. Involve the masses, but make sure you have a strategy to narrow down the results!
    If you use a survey as suggested above, rank the areas people have rated as “Most Important” and then look more into how these match the organisation. A specific intervention might take the form of a workshop where significant numbers of people (or an example population) go through the results and are asked for feedback on any extremes.
  4. Bringing “values” to life!
    Don’t just rest on your laurels once you have some traction. Have your managers consider how those values in every area of the business will and do affect them and what this means. E.g. Integrity is a great word, but what does it mean in the context of your business unit and how might it affect your internal talent management strategies?Often I see execs performance managing team members for taking too much sick leave or annual leave at crucial times, and then a week later they execute a key change management piece and take the following off because it had been “planned for ages”.
  5. Be congruent and vigilant about what you do.
    As you co-create the values in your organisation with your people, be careful of the behaviours you and your exec team exhibit in the business on a daily basis. Have a complete congruency between sets of values and the specific behaviours you and your teams display, ensuring they all link back.

By following the above five points, you create a continuous process of improvement around what’s valued inside your organisation. Check out Jim Collins, author of Good to Great & Built to Last in a 2-minute Video brief on the power of values here. Ensure that at the centre of any intervention are things like performance management & change management processes & implications have been fully thought through.

Performance Mngmt Why?

Hunter Dean

Performance Management – Why Get Good At It?

Over the past 10 yeas I’ve experienced many organisations where senior executives shy away from having the “Crucial Conversations”, the reasons are often similar.

“Look I don’t think you really need to “Fire” people, or its not really in our culture, we don’t feel its necessary to force people to change etc”

This entry is about why the better you are at Performance Management the better you’ll be at anything your business throws at you at all, in fact the better you’ll ironically be in your relationships outside the business also. At the end of the day if something in a business or any other relationship is not working if all parties concerned are not wanting to change or pretend they are when they’re not then stop wasting your time. When you consider implementing processes around talent identification and talent management seriously consider how good your best people are around the following areas.

Three Keys to Strong Performance Management

1) Consider a proper format

In some organisations development plans are a waste of breath and hence when someone falls down there is little if anything to benchmark it against other than their peers actual business metrics. This often though may not stack up though, as people often have excuses like, I deal with different clients, products or systems and hence its different for me.

In order for your personal performance development plans to actually be of use, keep them simple make sure you look at things like what are the top three key things to focus on?

  • Why are you falling down on them right now?
  • What knowledge resources or skills do you need to change this by Friday?
  • Are you prepared to make those changes?
  • Can you make them?

Either people can or cant do whats required in a Performance Management setting, lets be honest actually there is little in between. The problem most leaders have is a lack of courage to ask specific enough questions to ensure a proper answer and therefore result from the team member.

2) Ensure its self perpetuating

There is no point spending a whole lot of time working with a person then leaving them to work on themselves around an area only to find that later they go away and on Friday when you check they have done nothing. Performance Management work must be self perpetuating in the eyes of the person receiving the “Coaching” otherwise its nothing more than the kind of serious telling off your parents used to give you years ago at home.

In order to make Performance Management systems self perpetuating consider starting to get better at your own ability to communicate with people over tough things. Look at some managers who are naturally angry people, meet their children you’ll find anger. Then look at how they performance manage and you’ll see it was easy for them, they just had the meeting spoke very loudly and intensely, to the person until they gave in and agreed to everything asked of them. Then they went off and the employee went off to do his/her own thing.

“Problem is they then don’t, and nothing changes”

Many managers in fact believe that people “Cant” change which makes performance management a little tougher. Look at how good you are at your own tougher communication skills, how good are you at telling your best work mate they have screwed up so badly they have almost lost their job?

3) Understand the things that matter

In many cases managers are trying to council a staff member on something they themselves have no idea about.

For example selling 20% more of a product line in an area where the demographic is such that it cant be done. So they coach and coach then find unfortunately that it would have been much better to ask more questions up front, in which case they would have learned more about the problems being faced. The solution may actually be to sell a different product which can often then result in more revenue than that earned prior anyway.

Make sure you get skilled in the use of tough conversations don’t blame your team members, you are the one that needs to be able to coach them, if they are not performing then perhaps you are the one that needs to have a serious look in the mirror first, not them!