What makes a great leader? Some say confidence. Others say people skills. Some organizations hail innovators and creatives, others move the practical, calculated, high-IQ folks up the ladder. Whatever it is you value most in leaders, it’s important that you can articulate it. Only then can you measure it, develop it, and create an environment that grows high potentials into high performers. But don’t get so caught up in your definition that you lose the forest for the trees. Defining key competencies for your leaders is a good thing, but it’s important to realize these key competencies are not the only thing that matter.

To illustrate this, let’s take a look at the list of competencies identified by the Department of Justice and measured with their Leadership Competency Assessment Tool. I chose the Department of Justice for an example here simply because rules around government transparency have made the list publicly available.

Under the Managing Self category for All Employees, the Department of Justice measured nine core competencies: Communications, Influencing/Negotiating, Customer Service, Resilience, Interpersonal Skills, Continual Learning, Flexibility, Integrity /Honesty, and Internal Awareness. It’s not an especially long list but it does cover a broader spectrum than any individual’s post-measurement development plan would likely target.

Typically, a development plan for any individual employee should focus in on one to three key areas. Even if a Justice Department employee had plenty of room for improvement in all nine competencies, it’s not very feasible to craft a plan for their development in each area. If you try to do this you’ll end up giving them more than they can chew. Additionally, such a large list may appear rather daunting to an employee and could stifle their motivation to work on their development.

But just because a development plan will focus in on a few key areas, that doesn’t mean you should limit your measurement to those areas, even if you know you want all employees to focus their development plans on the same key areas (not usually a best practice, but sometimes a reality).

First, people tend to rate high, it’s a natural human phenomenon well documented by many of the best minds in leadership development. When you expand the list of competencies measured, people tend to give more accurate responses. It’s much easier to give all high marks when there is a list of just three areas. When you ask about nine different competencies, people feel a natural obligation to identify some areas of strength as well as some areas with room for improvement. So you end up with better data.

Secondly, if you measure a small list of competencies, you could be ignoring a potential fatal flaw. For instance, if the Department of Justice identified Communications, Influencing/Negotiating and Customer Service as the key competencies they want to focus on and only measured these areas, they wouldn’t see if an employee was so lacking in another unmeasured area that it overruled their performance in the measured areas. It’s easy to see how someone could score high in Communications, Influencing/Negotiating and Customer Service even if they had zero integrity. But the reality is, as well as that employee performs in those key competencies, a major deficiency in the Integrity/Honesty competency could undermine their otherwise stellar ratings. One needs to look no further than the story of Enron to understand this dilemma. The leaders that ultimately destroyed the company were all bright people and would have certainly scored well in many key leadership areas.

The moral of the story here is to beware the fatal flaw, measure more and focus in on key competencies after the feedback has been gathered. Not only will you get better data, but you’ll stand a better chance of helping your leaders make real substantive progress in their development.

I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago that irritated some of my colleagues at other organizations. I stated that the organization (and not an employee’s manager) is the most important element in retaining and motivating employees. That post was hotly debated and many people in the human resources community vehemently disagreed with my position. They had conventional wisdom backing them. I have data backing me.

I was excited to read Kobe Bryant’s recent comments about his Los Angeles Lakers teammate Pau Gasol. Gasol has been the subject of trade rumors since the beginning of this year’s NBA season. Those rumors have been rekindled recently. After a loss to the Phoenix Suns, this is what Bryant had to say about Lakers management and the trade possibilities:

“If they’re going to do something, I wish they would just (expletive) do it.”

Does Kobe Bryant know what so many HR professionals don’t want to admit…we don’t do our best work when we don’t have confidence in our senior leadership and the organization’s future? It appears so. Bryant continued by saying:

“It's hard for Pau because of all this trade talk and stuff. It's hard for him to kind of invest himself completely or immerse himself completely into games when he's hearing trade talk every other day. I wish management would either come out and either trade him or not trade him.”

When I see the words “invest himself completely” and “immerse himself” I can’t help but think that Bryant is talking about Gasol’s ability to be an engaged, high performing employee. Good luck to Lakers coach Mike Brown trying to motivate Gasol when the Lakers organization continues to muddy Gasol’s and the team’s future.

If you follow sports even at a passive level, by now you have heard about Jeremy Lin. He is the point guard for the New York Knicks who has emerged from nowhere to captivate the NBA, its followers, and many other people around the world. The Harvard graduate of Taiwanese decent has been lauded by just about every news station, magazine, and newspaper over the last two weeks.

The Lin phenomenon has gone too far. Yes, he has done some amazing things as he took his lackluster, depleted team on a seven game winning streak to help make them relevant as they near the season mid-point. His statistics have been gaudy for someone who has undrafted and cut twice. His recent late game heroics have been fun to watch. It is difficult to be critical of his humility through his sudden fame.

The straw that broke the camel’s back is how his ethnicity is being hijacked by the media to make the story even more sensational. In particular, a writer from the New York Times, Michael Luo, compared Lin’s ascent to barrier breaking from another generation.

In a column published on February 11th, Luo (also an Asian-American Harvard grad) wrote that for him hearing the chants at Madison Square Garden for Lin was “a surreal Jackie Robinson-like moment.” Perhaps Luo has forgotten that when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball back in the 1940s, Robinson routinely received death threats and was refused service at restaurants and hotels during his playing days. Being an Asian-American in a game dominated by African-American, white, and European players is novel. The courage to be the first African-American to play baseball in the big leagues set in motion progress toward racial equality that was felt for decades. Let’s be perfectly clear, Jeremy Lin is no Jackie Robinson...not in athletic talent or social importance.

It has been a slow news period for the sports world since the Super Bowl. That has aided the making of this story. Soon college basketball’s March Madness will take our attention away from the insanity that has been attached to Jeremy Lin. In the meantime, enjoy the ride this kid is on, let’s see what he can sustain in the marathon that is the NBA season, and let’s refrain from the ridiculous hyperbole.

Minneapolis, MN, February 3, 2012 – Modern Survey CEO, Patrick Riley, was this week’s featured guest on HR Happy Hour with Steve Boese. Speaking on the topic of “How Technology Changes Work,” Riley and Boese talked about the technology megatrends that are paving the way for huge changes in the workplace. The two also rattled off a number of predictions for the future of work and discussed their probability as well as their impact.

Listen to the show:

About Modern Survey
Modern Survey is a human capital measurement company. From licensed technologies to full-service enterprise solutions, Modern Survey helps organizations gather employee and customer feedback to create positive change and sound business decisions. With solutions covering employee engagement, performance management, 360-degree feedback, exit surveys, customer satisfaction and much much more, we offer our clients a smart blend of science, strategy and technology. Through direct and partner channels, our solutions have been used by more than 500 companies, over 85 of which are among the Fortune 500. www.modernsurvey.com

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Media Contact:
Christopher Jensen
Modern Survey
cjensen@modernsurvey.com
612/399.3837

Oh, what amazing things people can do. Sometimes it’s hard to notice. Ever find yourself impressed by fellow commuters on the drive home from work? Chances are they’re all jerks. As the old George Carlin bit goes, anyone driving faster than you is a maniac; anyone driving slower is an idiot. But that sentiment is the product of a caustic environment, everybody is trying to get home and every other car on the road serves as an impediment, so we get judge-y. We can’t stand people. It’s hard to see their value. But one thing I’ve learned from the human capital measurement business is that when viewed in aggregate, the feedback you can get from individuals can provide astounding value.

To illustrate this point, I refer you to Star Wars Uncut: Director’s Cut, a project that kicked off in 2009 to re-create the classic film Star Wars: A New Hope word for word, scene for scene, solely out of fan submitted video clips. The project creators cut up the original film into 473 15-second segments and thousands of fans refilmed those segments in any manner they wanted. Ranging from exquisite hand-drawn animations to silly shots of costumed cats, Star Wars Uncut is a sterling example of what amazing things can be accomplished when the contributions of many individuals get compiled together to make a new whole.

In your most misanthropic hour, when you’ve lost all faith in the human spirit, I implore you to do your soul a little favor by watching one of the more magical triumphs of human achievement. It just may refresh your outlook on your fellow homo sapiens. And if you are in the business of gathering feedback from employees, customers or target markets, you may also find a renewed passion for the value of your work.

Modern Survey has an exceptionally industrious employee named Ben Harkins. In addition to being a model employee and curator of problem solving, Ben is also an entrepreneur at heart. Right now that entrepreneurial spirit has him building a real estate portfolio.

Young and capable, Ben does a lot of work on his own home and his rental properties by himself. On a recent Saturday this fall, he was doing a woodworking project using a table saw. One split second and one small mistake severed one of Ben's index fingers completely off and marred two other fingers. His life changed in a heartbeat.

There are a couple ways people react to a situation like this. They either feel sorry for themselves and descend into a funk or they work to forgive their mistake while learning something from the experience. Ben chose the latter.

He stayed in the hospital from Saturday to Thursday enduring multiple surgeries to reattach the severed finger and repair the damaged ones. He said his outlook was buoyed by his family and the Modern Survey teammates who visited him. He chose to overcome the physical and psychological challenges he faced.

By Friday, his first day out of the hospital, he was on a client call (his choice). "I needed to get back to work", he would later say. On Monday, he was in the office again. Ben showed great resiliency - perhaps even more than he knew he had.

Organizations are a lot like people. This is true when it comes to resiliency too. Some choose to wallow in collective organizational pity. Others rally to face their challenges only to emerge smarter and stronger than ever before. Many of the former organizations are no longer with us. They were bought, merged with another, or simply went away.

I am proud to say that Modern Survey had its best year of our 12 year existence in 2011. We, like so many other companies, took our lumps over the last three years. My partners and our employees learned a great deal about ourselves during that time and we feel extraordinarily bullish about our future.

It turns out that Ben is not the only resilient employee on our roster. It was the strength of our entire team that got us through the difficult times. Without the belief and confidence in a brighter future we would have been like so many other companies tossed on top of the organizational bone pile. Thanks to our employees for having the character to persevere!

If you haven’t heard already, there has been significant M&A activity in the Human Capital Management (HCM) industry.

Here are some of the headlines:

1. SAP buys SuccessFactors for $3.4B

2. Success Factors buys Jobs2Web for $110M

3. Salesforce buys Rypple for an undisclosed amount, and launches a new Human Capital Management business unit

Is all this significant? Yes! What does it mean for your business? If you’re an SAP or SuccessFactors customer, it provides a set of unknowns (it’s hard to guess how a fast growth company will gel with an established monolith). If you’re not an SAP or SuccessFactors customer, it’s a defining sign that cloud computing is officially the status quo. If you aren’t considering options to migrate or upgrade your HR Technology solutions to a cloud platform, it’s time to put a plan together. If you DON’T, you may limit your company’s ability to be competitive, to recruit top talent and to enable your managers and employees from working in a way that maximizes innovation and generates high performance.

And we are just at the headwaters of the options that companies will have with cloud computing. The unions of SAP/SuccessFactors and Salesforce/Rypple are an indicator more than anything else. There are many other vendors and approaches offered by cloud computing to address your company’s specific needs.

Cloud Computing: CIOs and IT Managers are now comfortable with the idea that employee information can live in a multi-tenant cloud environment. And they see the flexibility and advantages of inter-operable platforms and systems. This has not been an overnight realization; it’s been on a steady track for the last ten years. The benefits of a cloud strategy to organizations include reducing total cost of ownership and offering more flexibility to integrate and streamline services to employees and managers. Also, the pervasiveness of consumer cloud HR products like LinkedIn and Glassdoor continue to place external pressure on HR departments to select technology solutions that will streamline how current and new employees will choose to search for jobs, market themselves, and choose places to work.

Social and Performance Management: The Social Enterprise as a substitute for Performance Management is the uncharted territory and potential game changer for HR. To use the Silicon Valley term: disruptive. Mark Benioff game-changed the CRM business with Salesforce, and now he’s prepared to do the same to HR with the Social Enterprise. The success of this undertaking will come down to a tug of war between how HR and the business will want to continue to build on the concepts of the past (structured performance reviews tied to compensation, traditional recruiting, integrated metrics tied to the business), and how employees and managers will fight for and insist on a more organic and social approach to working together. If the value proposition of the social enterprise works (by empowering your employees to connect, share ideas and provide positive feedback loops, your company will soar), much of how HR does business today could change drastically. This will especially be true for companies in the Knowledge Economy.

The Future: The rate of technology change will not slow down; it will accelerate. Companies will succeed if they have an accurate vision for how their organizations will work in the future, and if they can connect the dots between their employees, customers and brand with ever improving cloud technology solutions.

Timberwolves rookie point guard Ricky Rubio is an everyday discussion topic for basketball fans in Minnesota. Actually, the young Spanish wunderkind has been a hot topic for years, having turned pro over in Europe at the ripe age of 14, later starting in the gold medal game of the Olympics as a wide-eyed 17-year-old and ably holding his own against the ultimately victorious team of U.S. superstars. He’s young, good looking (in a mop-topped early Beatles sort of way), a charming interview (fluent in Spanish, Catalan and English), and he plays with considerable flair, particularly in his passing and ball-handling. But more than anything else, Rubio is a hot topic because his greatest strengths are passing the ball, seeing the floor, facilitating an offense, and generally playing team-oriented basketball, a definite anomaly in the ego-inflated world of the National Basketball Association. Rubio has almost single-handedly made a “pass-first mentality” cool again. Now if only he could fix the performance review.

The other day, in a friendly game of foosball with co-workers, I decided I wanted to be the Ricky Rubio of foosball. In a two-on-two game I was on defense and I made the decision that I wasn’t going to try to score, instead I would focus intently on setting up my partner. Initially, my companions thought I wasn’t playing very well as I seemed to be hitting the ball with about half the force that I usually do and I wasn’t bombing any of my usual long shots careening off the wall and toward the opposing goal (the two-handed Blake Griffin over a Kia monster jam of foosball). But a funny thing happened; we won both of our games. The shift away from individual glory made me think about the way other teams work and how we traditionally measure an individual's performance.

Teamwork, spelled: R-U-B-I-O

In business, we tend to think of high performing employees as those that achieve the greatest results. But what about those around them? Do your high performers elevate the results of the rest on their team?

Consider a sales team where five individuals all averaged $500K worth of sales in 2010. That’s a total of $2.5M. In 2011, one member of the team left, and a new sales person joined the team, perhaps a highly touted top performer recruited over from a competitor organization. In 2011, the new salesperson sold $1.5M in business. Success! Right? Hang on a minute, the other four members of the team averaged a paltry $100K. That’s only $1.9M in business, 76% of what the team did in 2010. Would you say the new guy knocked it out of the park? Obviously such a situation would require a more thorough analysis of why the other sales people had such a tough year, but it could just be that the “high performer” was bad for the team.

The Timberwolves’ starting point guard is Luke Ridnour. Ricky Rubio has come off the bench each game thus far into his young NBA career. While only managing to score a little over 10 points a game, Rubio has the team’s best +/- ratio (the difference in points scored vs. points allowed when he is on the floor) with a mark of positive 52. Ridnour has averaged over 12 points a game, but has the team’s second worst +/- ratio, at negative 48. Sure, there are many other factors in determining how well a player is performing (assists, rebounds, turnovers, etc.), but it’s clear that to this point, the Timberwolves as a team have had much greater success with Rubio on the floor than Ridnour.

As the Spanish sensation continues to make headlines for his team-oriented play, I can’t help but salivate over the effect his popularity might have on young players developing their game. Basketball could use more players that get excited about passing. And business could certainly benefit from a renewed perspective on performance management, looking at individual performance within the context of team success. They say there is no “I” in team, but if you want to perform better as an organization, you’d be wise to look closely at how individuals are impacting the team’s overall performance. Who’s your Ricky Rubio of sales?

If you're thinking, "Enough of this Rubio nonsense, I'm just
here for the performance management talk!" click the icon below, amigo:

One of my favorite pastimes is looking through a well-stocked bookstore. The routine is always the same -- first look through the business books, then travel, next history, and finally fiction. It was during a recent trip through the business books when I realized how much professional progress I have made in the last couple years.

I spotted a book called ESPN: The Company written by Anthony Smith. I love this book because it provides a historical account of ESPN and it also tells about the many business decisions that have made ESPN the network it is today. Anthony has been a consultant with ESPN since the very early days. I have had the good fortune of working with Anthony on various projects over the last handful of years.

The next title that caught my eye was Toxic Workplace! by Mitch Kusy and Elizabeth Holloway. I was fortunate to work with Mitch and Elizabeth on the research for this book a few years ago and I am delighted to see it is still on the shelves today.

Drive by Daniel Pink was one of my favorite books in 2011. If you are interested in learning about what motivates people in the workplace, this is your book. Dan Pink and I have had a couple occasions to talk recently and I was honored to be the subject of one of his blog posts recently.

I have learned more about business from Harvey Mackay's best-selling books than probably any other source. I lend them to people looking to get into business. If you want to learn to network, sell, establish extraordinary employee, vendor, and customer relationships, pick up Harvey's books. I was thrilled to be the subject of one of his weekly articles in 2010 and flattered to receive an advanced copy of his latest book The Mackay MBA of Selling in the Real World.

Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone and Whose Got Your Back, and I were speakers at the 2011 PIHRA Conference in Anaheim. Tony Hsieh, author of Delivering Happiness, and I were speakers at the 2011 Florida State SHRM conference.

My close friend and mentor, Doug Lennick, didn't have his books Financial Intelligence and Moral Intelligence on display. The bookstore is two blocks from where Doug became a leadership legend at Ameriprise Financial so I assume the book store was sold out.

The trip through the business section was a good reminder of how fortunate I was to meet, talk to, and learn from these business giants. I can't wait to see with which giants I rub shoulders in 2012.

From whom do you plan to learn this year?

You’ve heard it before, "People leave managers not their companies.” It’s a simple adage that consultants love to use. It is also a load of bull. It may have been true at one point, it may be true at some point in the future, but it doesn't ring true now.

Modern Survey has been conducting panel surveys of the United States workforce for five years to learn how engaged workers are and what drives that engagement. Using data from the last three measurements (Summer 2010, Winter 2011 and Summer 2011), Modern Survey set out to find the items most strongly related to an employee's intent to stay with their organization.

The findings from these past three measurements unveiled “belief in senior leadership” and “belief in the future of the organization” to be the most strongly related to desire to stay. Manager effectiveness doesn't even come close. In fact, the relationship between belief in the future of the organization and intent to stay is nearly twice as strong as the effectiveness of employees' direct managers and intent to stay. We also know that people who indicate they intend to leave on the surveys we conduct are two and a half times more likely to voluntarily quit than those who do not.

Worker Disengagement  –  A Growing
Threat to Economic Recovery?

What may have been true in the boom years of 2005 and 2006 has to be scrutinized today. There is no doubt that employee needs and expectations around job security continue to evolve. A recession that left the United States with 10% unemployment and tens of thousands of people under-skilled or under-trained to compete for jobs in 2012 has scarred many people. Those scars have manifested into insecurities that have changed the psychological state of the workforce. Additionally, companies with stockpiles of cash in their coffers, but with CEOs unwilling to spend it on hiring new employees or investing in current ones are not inspiring employee confidence.

People want to know where their organization is going, they want to feel comfortable about that future, and they want to hear about it from their senior leadership. The days of employee retention being the sole responsibility of the direct manager are over. CEOs need to step up to the dais, tell us where we are going, and confidently lead us there.