Spotting spiky talent in early talent streams
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It’s hard to pick out the most talented people in large organisations – especially in the early stages of their career. This applies when selecting people to join the organisation, and also when spotting internal talent for high potential schemes.
The tools that HR have developed to assist in this process are Assessment Centres, manager assessments of potential, and (rarely) self-nomination.
This article looks at why there’s a danger of choosing less talented people when using Assessment Centres.
We’ve discussed elsewhere the problems of using untrained managers to spot potential (especially when by definition, 50% of the managers are below the median in terms of their own performance!). This data is therefore often supplemented by assessment centre data, with the aim of achieving a more objective assessment.
Assessment centres have their own problems, which we’ve discussed. ACs often favour extraverts, and competency-based assessment can lead to bias.
This article looks at what happens in the AC wash-up. The wash-up is generally where candidate performance is discussed by all assessors, moderated by HR. The objective is to get a rounded picture for feedback, and to make an overall decision.
Wash-ups can take 2 hours at the end of a tiring day for observers – not perhaps the time for making the best decisions! There’s some interesting data about how Assessment Centre wash-ups work using big data from the Israeli military ACs, and also ACs run in large corporates. Firstly the data shows that results from a wash-up discussion don’t differ much from the result you’d get if you just averaged all the ratings numerically. Secondly, where they do differ, they mostly differ either because a senior person’s view is given more weight, or an intransigent observer refuses to budge or take into account other’s views. These data strongly suggests that the value from the wash-up is not worth the time invested!
This article however is concerned about another worrying tendency, and that is selection that favours ‘safe’ candidates – the ‘good-all-rounders’ who show solid performance, with no major weaknesses.
Yet if you look at senior people in organisations, they are much more more likely to have performance spikes than to be good all-rounders. They are people with a striking talent in one area, and weaknesses which they have learned to manage effectively. They may manage their weaknesses by role choice – driving careers where their strengths are very important, and their failings are not exposed. Or they may actively recruit individuals and teams who back them up with complementary strengths (think of Richard Branson, who famously claims he can’t remember the difference between gross and net profit – but clearly hires people who can!).
Does your AC deliver a good selection of these ‘spiky people’? With early talent, you are selecting for diamonds in the rough. At this stage in their career, a major strength may be linked to a critical weakness, and they may not have the experience to recognise, let alone manage, this weakness. The objective of your selection should therefore be different. You may need to select individuals with ‘something about them’ – people who have a high impact in one exercise or area. You may need to accept that they have noticeable weaknesses that showed up in other exercises.
To underpin these more risky selection decisions, you need to know whether they are going to rise to the challenge of accepting and overcoming the weakness. This means that you need to give them trenchant feedback on the AC, and see what they do with it. Is their immediate reaction to push back with excuses, or to listen hard? Right at the end of the AC, you might ask them to write down what they learned from the AC. Have they taken it to heart, or forgotten it already? Have they picked up any tips you gave them on how to improve?
You might also test their arrogance. I find it’s always a good idea to get the people who are servicing the AC (administrators and people not seen as decision-makers by candidates) to rate candidates. Arrogant candidates will show a difference in how they act around ‘important’ and ‘unimportant’ people. It’s a sure fire way to spot self-interest as opposed to valuing people. And our research into the graduates who were most successful long-term in 6 large organisations shows that they shared strong family values about talking to everyone with the same courtesy – whether that is the office cleaner or the Director.
Take Away
Is your AC designed to select spiky people who have the raw talent to contribute to the organisation by delivering top echelon performance in one important area? Do you test the ability to understand and manage the flipside weaknesses of that talent? How good is your AC at delivering very different people who will contribute in very different areas?
Or are you making safe choices that may exclude this early talent?