Four Groups

Psychometrics says Paul Wilmott! Surely not!

I doubt whether it will catch on, sadly, but I’ve also been advocating for years that there should be a process of psychometric testing, along the line of Myers-Briggs, for fund managers. This is actually not uncommon in other business scenarios involving large loans, buyouts, etc. and ought to be standard practice for any position of serious responsibility.

Katherine Jones points us to two gaps in the HR and talent space, via research from Hewitt and the Human Capital Institute.

1. 88% of businesses hold executives responsible for results, while only 10% hold the same group accountable for developing their direct reports
2. 26% (of 700 organisations) believe that their managers have the capability to grow people ‘considerably’ while only 5% of organisations believe their managers show this ability consistently

SWOT that then for an opportunity!

What happens when human values and financial values are seriously misaligned at the operational level? Keysha Cooper once of Washington Mutual reveals all to the New York Times.

“If a loan came from a top loan officer, they didn’t care what the situation was, you had to make that loan work,” she says. “You were like a bad person if you declined a loan.”

One loan file was filled with so many discrepancies that she felt certain it involved mortgage fraud. She turned the loan down, she says, only to be scolded by her supervisor.

“She told me, ‘This broker has closed over $1 million with us and there is no reason you cannot make this loan work,’ ” Ms. Cooper says. “I explained to her the loan was not good at all, but she said I had to sign it.”

The argument did not end there, however. Ms. Cooper says her immediate boss complained to the team manager about the loan rejection and asked that Ms. Cooper be “written up,” with a formal letter of complaint placed in her personnel file.

Ms. Cooper said the team manager told her to “restructure” the loan to make it work. “I said, how can you restructure fraud? This is a fraudulent loan,” she recalls.

We’ve written before about the links between human and financial values but its interesting to see the contrast recounted first hand given the extreme circumstances.

We’ve written a paper outlining a new model of leadership (its currently up as a pdf, but might become a blog post). In brief, the document talks about the importance of context within leadership and in building on the work of Maslow, Graves and Wilber, it is possible to see leadership through four perspectives of;

• Self Awareness
• Personal Relationships
• Business and Social Systems
• Team and Group Culture

The paper goes into more detail about each of the themes and offers examples of each. What is also interesting about the model is the ability to apply it to every day situations, giving a sense of a leader’s particular strengths and areas for possible development. Going forward, it will be interesting to look at various leaders and see how each of them fares in light of the model.

In terms of putting some practice behind this approach, we’re planning on writing up some real world examples of the model and in doing so, the following principles will be applied;

• The person must have national or international media coverage
• We’ll take the first 10 posts from google blog search, ordered by relevance as our ‘data’
• To qualify, the blog must have trackback turned on, this always helps the blogosphere grow
• Only content in the post will be examined, external links will be ignored

Finally, it is worth pointing out some caveats;

• While each article is assigned to one of the themes, it might easily fall into several
• The allocation to a theme is entirely subjective, other people might place it in another quite justifiably
• Only looking at 10 posts is useful, but it would also be interesting to look at 25, 50 or 100 posts, if only for the strength in numbers
• The results from Google’s blog search may well change over time, even minute by minute
• The perspective gained on a particular leader may well change over the months and years, reflecting changes in perception and their own approach to leadership

How so did we win I hear you ask? Well, did you know that there is a CEO who values the importance of developing talent that they suggest that everyone spends a day a week talking about this (and a few other things too)?

Just think about that for a moment. A company exists that understands the importance of its people, their talents and the inevitable organisational intangibles that come from managing them that everyone spends a day a week on things like this. This means that people are free to do things that they value most highly, the things they enjoy the most!

That is the path to victory!

We’re not talking about 50 hours a year training and development time, we’re not even talking about utilisation rates, we’re talking about setting aside a whole 8 hours of each and every person’s working week and letting them do as they see fit. This means they can use this time to work with their team, their manager or on anything they believe is valuable and important to them. Here’s what the CEO said about giving people a day a week for such activities…

“It forces the conversation with a manager who is over-managing… I come to you and I say the project is late, you guys have screwed up, my classic old management style and you sit there and say you know what, I’m gonna give you everything I’ve got 80% of the time”

“It forces the dialogue, it serves as a check and balance on this sort of command and control management that a lot of companies have…”

That’s it folks. Its that simple. Command and control management be gone…

With all this talk about talent management, engagement, people are our greatest asset and so on, it takes a pretty smart (or depending on how you view the world, pretty stupid) CEO to make such a bold commitment to employees, customers and shareholders. Clearly the CEO believes that every employee spending a day a week to win the war for talent has a huge payoff for everyone involved.

While it may look extreme, at its heart, the approach asks a really great question of other organisations, namely how much time and energy is being lost on activities that don’t add to productivity and the bottom line?

Put another way, would the principle of spending a day a week on talent and talent development in its widest context improve the bottom line of other organisations?

Clearly, this CEO thinks it applies to their firm, so why not others?

So which firm am I talking about? Before spilling the beans, its worth taking off on a quick sidetrack. Like many of the firms who gain recognition for great work, their overall reputation and perception in the eyes of different stakeholder’s can cloud our thinking. For example, if I told you this was GE, you’re likely to first think about Jack Welch, Mr. Eddison, the financial performance of conglomerates and so forth. I believe my point would be lost. In a similar vein, if I said it was Toyota, thoughts of their culture, manufacturing methods and eco friendly cars would similarly come to mind before the point I’m making. I’m sure you can see the dilemma here…

Anyway, back to the point. A company has committed to giving everyone a day a week to get engagement, leadership, congruence and all the other good things that come from conversations about talent management right.

Why isn’t this a bigger story or am I missing something here?

By the way, the company in question often tease us with their “I’m feeling lucky” gambit, along with their free massages and offering each and every one of us a bird’s eye view of where we live (hint - its not NASA!).

p.s. Thanks to Jack for putting me onto this

p.p.s. The CEO in question is talking about these ideas here. You’ll need to go to 47:05 to get the quotes, but the entire piece is well worth watching.