All Posts in Process Management and Improvement

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

In business, no idea is real until it reappears, under an approved author’s byline, in the Wall Street Journal or Harvard Business Review.

Okay, I’m whining. But still. Nick Corcodilos and I have both written repeatedly about the fallacy of skill-to-task matching—the practice, common among internal recruiters, of carefully listing every skill a position might require, as if a perfect match between skills required and skills acquired does even a half-decent job of predicting a candidate’s performance once hired.

If you need convincing, two points should do the job, made over-and-over again in this space, in Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World (under the headline “hire people, not resumes”), and by Nick on www.asktheheadhunter.com. The first: Employees who are stretching are frequently superior to employees who are happy to do what they’ve been doing. (But not always—”pinball players,” who do a great job so they get to play again, are nothing to sneeze at either, assuming you’re the sort of business leader who sneezes at employees.)

Skill-to-task matching favors applicants who are coasting over those who are stretching. That’s the first point. The second:

Especially in knowledge work, but really, in just about every kind of position in the company, the best predictors of success for any employee are:

  • Habit of success: Loving what success feels like, and knowing that’s needed to feel it again.
  • Love of achievement: An employee who takes pride in producing something important will (I trust “Q.E.D.” is all the proof you’ll need for this one) work hard to produce results they can take pride in.

Not always recognized—employees who work well in teams consider helping their team succeed to be a worthwhile achievement—it’s part of the love of achievement, not separate from it.

  • Intellectual integrity: Faced with reliable evidence, employees with intellectual integrity adjust their opinions, rather than insisting their “opinions” (the correct term is now “biases”) must still be right.

If you’re never convinced until you read it in HBR or the Wall Street Journal, check out David Wessel’s review of Peter Cappelli’s, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs (“Software Raises Bar for Hiring,” WSJ, 5/30/2012 and well worth reading in spite of my regrettable need to say “I told you so”).

Cappelli blames the problem on the increased use of automated resume screening software, which he considers to be a response to the completely understandable desire to minimize cost while increasing the ability to wade through the very large piles of resumes that flood in for every open position in a time of underemployment.

Regular readers of Keep the Joint Running will respond, “No, it isn’t completely understandable! It’s assuming instead!” They’ll ask, that is, the most important question about any business function, which is how the six optimization parameters (fixed cost, incremental cost, cycle time, throughput, quality, and excellence) rank.

According to Cappelli, the top two are incremental cost and throughput. He’s almost certainly right that this is the fact. Understandable? Not so much.

This is how companies attract and select the people who will do the company’s work. What are the proper priorities for this, the most important responsibility business leaders have?

Excellence comes first—recognizing who will truly succeed the best in each position, even if that choice is unconventional.

Next, I’d put quality—the absence of defects. While skill-to-task-matching is a losing proposition, goodness of fit to what a position actually requires is not. Beyond that, conforming to the relevant laws and regulations, especially with respect to all forms of discrimination, really does matter.

Throughput, also known as capacity, comes third. Companies are faced with a flood of resumes for many open positions, and do need ways of coping with it. Not ways that reduce excellence or quality, though. Quite the opposite—companies need ways to spot the needles of great applicants in the haystack of all the rest.

That leaves cycle time (filling positions quickly), fixed cost (the cost of turning on the lights every day), and incremental cost (the cost of processing each applicant) to float — to be whatever they need to be so that companies make great hires.

Think recruiting would look as it does if companies were explicit about how the six dimensions rank in importance?

Not me. Not Nick, either. And, fortunately, it appears the world of mainstream business thinking might finally be coming around as well.

* * *

If anyone from WSJ or HBR is reading this … call me. We should talk.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Should executives receive incentive pay? Should anyone?

Last week’s KJR explored the logic behind incentive pay, and concluded it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny (I nearly said “close scrutiny,” which contrasts with the distant scrutiny that’s so popular these days).

Incentive pay shares a characteristic with at least four other well-established business practices — recruiting, performance appraisals, outsourcing, and software development — namely, the widespread certainty that when they don’t work, the problem is with the details of execution, not the fundamental concept:

Recruiting: As my friend Nick Corcodilos of Ask The Headhunter fame has been pointing out for years, the industry-standard recruiting practice of posting a position description, screening resumes based on skill-to-task matching, and so on fills fewer than one out of every ten open positions. And yet, most companies continue to pretend it works, even though, based on the numbers, it’s obviously broken.

Performance appraisals: Okay, I don’t have any documented numbers to back this opinion. Based on what I’ve seen, over the past few decades the performance appraisal process (really, practice) has become increasingly bulky and time-consuming for both managers and those they manage.

The payoff for the additional time and energy diverted to this activity? So far as I can tell, managers hate it, few employees find it valuable, and there’s no evidence that better employee performance correlates with more extensive and intensive performance appraisals.

Outsourcing: As documented in Outsourcing debunked (me, 2011), the only constant in the outsourcing industry is its failure rate. Commonly, three years into most outsourcing deals the contracting company finds itself either renegotiating their contract or terminating it altogether. Overall the numbers seem to show that between 30% and 70% of all outsources fail, depending on whose numbers you’re reading and the type of outsource they’re writing about.

But the numbers you read almost certainly underestimate the failure rate. Here in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro, for example, it’s widely known that Best Buy is quietly unwinding its high-profile outsource to Accenture, but nobody in either Best Buy or Accenture publicly admits the whole venture was a failure.

Software development: For at least two decades, waterfall development wasn’t a way to develop software. It was the way, even though the way that preceded it (or at least one of the ways) — frequent informal conversations between business managers and programmers, with programmers showing business managers their results as soon as there was something to show and the business managers providing feedback that led to quick course-corrections — demonstrably worked.

I say demonstrably because the near-universal pre-waterfall outcome was stable, tailored-to-the-business, feature-rich applications, unlike waterfall, with its notorious 70% across-the-board failure rate.

Isn’t it interesting that when you read the Agile Manifesto, it sounds a whole lot like nostalgia for the pre-waterfall days?

At least with software development, as an industry we finally acknowledged that waterfall doesn’t work, although we needed a couple of decades dominated by dismal failure to accept this.

Too bad the Agile Manifesto hasn’t kept up with the times. It’s about software delivery to customers at a time when (1) there are no internal customers, and (2) the point isn’t software delivery, it’s successful, designed, planned business change.

Incentive pay, recruiting, performance appraisals, outsourcing, and software development. Five very different concepts. In all five cases, the business community has spent decades assuming the problem was with execution, not in fundamentally flawed concepts.

Here’s the irony: If an assumption was to be made, flawed execution was the right one. It’s the Edison Ratio in action.

Edison, you’ll recall, explained genius as being one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Given this 99:1 ratio, logic dictates that when something goes wrong, it’s 99 times more likely to have been with the sweat than with the idea … with the execution, not the concept.

So the issue isn’t that business leaders, faced with failures, focused their attention on execution. Quite the opposite, this was admirable. It means they recognized that there’s no substitute for sweating the details.

No, the issue is how long it should take to figure out that the problem is the core concept after all.

In this, business leaders would do well to accept the advice of the source of so much wisdom, W.C. Fields: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then give up. There’s no use in being a damn fool about it.”

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