The Two-Edged Sword That Is Talent Management

 

“The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team. As a coach, I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven.”  -- Knute Rockne

It seems to me that much of the discussions on managing talent (ProjectManagement.com’s theme for February) revolves around a simple binary, illustrated in the Game Theorist’s favorite tool, the Payoff Grid, below:

When attracting or retaining “talent,” in those instances where you perceive a member of your Project Team to be talented, and they are, in fact, capable, then it’s all okay. Similarly, if someone wants to be part of your Team, and you perceive that they really can’t contribute, and this person, indeed, would add little or nothing to your Team, then the PM can deal with them on that basis. There’s a great deal of pixel ink spilled on the inherent injustice of Scenario 1.A., where a genuinely talented person has been judged to be unlikely to contribute, and how horrible such misjudgments can be, blah blah blah. I will touch on that shortly, just not in a conventional manner (GTIM Nation expects no less). For now, though, let’s look at Scenario 2.B, where a person has been hired on or transferred/assigned to your Project Team based on reputation, or education, or other factors that would normally point to a “talented” person when that person is not a serious contributor and may, in fact, ultimately detract from your Team’s cohesion and overall effectiveness.

The Impact Of Filter Conditions On Success

Based on the Payoff Grid above, the central question that needs to be resolved is: How to bridge the gap between what the PM perceives as “talent,” and who is actually “talented?” In the instance of Scenario 2.B., the person who has been perceived as talented when they actually aren’t pose a severe danger to your project’s success. These people didn’t attain the trappings of being highly capable without any true merit by accident. In these cases, it is entirely likely that the personnel who present as more capable than they really are belong to the Maccoby Archetype “Jungle Fighter,” who gets ahead via political machinations and skullduggery more than any genuine achievement. If members of this archetype have infiltrated your Project Team, they can (and will) cause major headaches, and can easily ruin your chances of coming in on-time, on-budget.

Let’s go back and re-evaluate the criterion used for assessing “talent.” If those criteria are valid, then it would take a great deal of effort for the not-talented person to join your Project Team. If those criteria are invalid, it’s much easier, as illustrated by another payoff grid:

Scenarios 4.A and 4.B represent the dangers involved when the PM is attempting to attract talent, hence the title of this particular blog. Note that, based on that particular row in the Payoff Grid (#4), what the two danger scenarios have in common is that the hiring manager is using either invalid criteria in an otherwise effective candidate-assessment process, or, in extreme cases, the whole assessment process is invalid. Attracting and retaining a highly-capable Project Team is tough enough as it is; but, if the selection criteria are flawed from the get-go, and sub-capable personnel are added to your Team while talented ones join only through extreme luck, guess what’s gonna happen to your overall capability. Keep in mind, also, that there’s an elevated possibility that these people who presented as capable while not really being so are Maccoby Archetype Jungle Fighters, meaning that overall Team cohesion is on a collision course with some major stress tests.

Circling back to the scenario where a truly talented individual is passed over due to bad selection criteria in the assessment model, what happens to those people? You’re not using them, and they don’t just evaporate. It’s reasonable to assume that they will find a position somewhere, and it’s entirely possible that that somewhere is going to be with your competition, either inside the macro-organization or with its outside competitors. This particular management nightmare scenario, where you’ve made the effort to attract talent but ended up rejecting it, has become a proverbial double-whammy: your ability to accomplish scope on-time, on-budget has been diminished, while your competitor’s has been enhanced.

Want to avoid that scenario? Make it a point to continually re-evaluate the criteria you use to add (or dismiss) members of your Project Team, to test for validity and relevance. Do this successfully, and who knows? You may get quoted in some ProjectManagement.com blog 90 years from now!