RSSWhy Measuring Talent is Inherently Fairer
The way companies evaluate measure is a sham. This comes to mind today because I was reading a post recently that took issue with the idea of quantifying talent because it makes decision makers lazy and that not everything that is important can be measured. While I agree that an overreliance on numbers can be detrimental, the truth is that no one is even quantifying talent!
There is much talk about measuring talent, but the tools that purportedly do so are simply measuring the wrong thing. Performance reviews measure achievement of goals, but are qualitative in nature and rarely oriented towards growth in a worker’s skills. Competency models are simply too high level and arbitrary to be a useful basis of ongoing measurement.
These tools are “quantitative” in name only. However they have contributed to corporate laziness on part of decision makers who have come to rely on these numbers instead of looking deeper to analyze meaning. These tools are only capturing the surface of human performance, not the essence of talent.
Talent encompasses both skills and motivation. While motivation is very difficult, if not impossible, to assess, skills are very much tangible, definable and measurable. Skills cover not just the technical and functional components of work, but also management and leadership skills to guide work smoothly toward the corporate vision. And these skills are specific and detailed, many times uncovering the hidden truths about what is truly important in a role and what talents a person possesses.
Rather than contributing to the culture of corporate laziness, the richness of skills opens up new possibilities for leadership. It allows companies to become vastly more effective with its human capital and realign itself to best utilize this pool of talent. For employees, it is inherently fairer because the process is transparent and enables employees to have more control over their career path and professional development. This is the future of human capital management, the foundation of which is the ability to have a meaningful measurement of talent.
Hi Mark
Totally agree. I guarantee that when asked who is your most talented sales person, 9 out of 10 sales vp’s will respond based on performance against quota. In reality the “best” sales people get the best accounts / territories.
I issue a challenge to sales directors to flip the accounts and see how well the “stars” do on the more difficult accounts.
Agreed Kevin. Are your sales people really the ones with the best quota performance and what is the correlation to having the best accounts / territory?
Being successful in sales requires understanding ALL of the skills needed in that role for that company and selling model. Success is not guaranteed from one sales role to the next. When firms simply look at quota performance, they are only looking at past performance and not the match to their particular role. It is not necessarily one and the same.