Does Your Culture Handcuff or Unleash Your Talent?
Helping organizations to conduct talent reviews is one of the services Groove Management offers to our clients. Creating a disciplined approach to assessing talent and creating succession plans is an important activity for any rapidly scaling business. Organizations win through leveraging their talented employees. It has been my mantra that talent and culture are the two hardest competitive advantages to clone. If you have the right talent and an engaging culture your organization has a leg up on the competition.
One of our clients leveraged Groove Management’s services to create a leadership competency model and and then applied that model to assess all people leaders. We utilized the traditional nine box model of performance versus potential to plot each leader. As an extra step we placed directional arrows next to each person in their box to define their trajectory. The activity was done function by function. Once completed we held calibration sessions where the leaders of various functions came together to discuss their talent. For instance we had all GTM which included sales, marketing and communications meet to discuss their rating and to calibrate the placement of the talent. Once calibration was completed, the entire process was presented at an executive team offsite led by the CEO, CHRO and Groove Management. We had a robust discussion about the high potential talent, the gaps and the development needs of various individuals. The last step in the process was for the CEO to present the high level talent review to the board of directors. This showed the CEOs commitment to his people and to investing in talent.
Underlying this process was the role that culture plays in any organization. Having studied corporate cultures for twenty plus years, I am intrigued by the impact culture has on talent. I have drawn a conclusion about high potential employees that seems to hold true in most organizations that I have worked in or with. The hypothesis/conclusion is that all top right box employees possess a common trait. That trait is courage. They are willing to stand alone, they don’t accept the status quo, they go above and beyond, they challenge others regardless of level and they deliver. Courage alone doesn’t get you to high potential, but EQ and IQ alone won’t either. It is the combination of courage and capability that differentiates HIPOs from others.
This leads to the question which is the title of this post. Does your company culture handcuff or unleash your talent? If you have few people that are high potential is it a symptom of your culture holding people back or is it just that you don’t have the right talent? It could be a bit of both. When an organization constrains people, discourages risk taking and prioritizes compliance over innovation, this tends to hold back the most capable employees. Top talent wants to be unleashed, they want to be set free to do their best work. The balancing act occurs as an organization scales and works to deliver a consistent experience for both employees and customers. The phrase, “Heroics don’t scale” comes to mind. As a result organizations put in place rules and systems that deliver a predictable result regardless of the level of talent. What this does is it allows C players to perform at a B- level and makes A players also B- players. In the long run, the high potential employees choose to leave organizations that have this cultural wiring. They key is to create a culture that unlocks potential and enables employees to do their best work.
If your organization has performed a talent review and the results show too few high potential employees, I would ask the question whether your culture is unleashing or handcuffing talent. Upgrading your talent might not solve the problem. In fact it might just exacerbate the situation as new hires that are handcuffed will become equally frustrated. A good starting place is to meet with the executive team and ask them to identify which employees are excelling and why? Is it that they possess the courage to break free from the cultural handcuffs or is it that your culture unlocks potential?
