Author Archives: Anne Hamill

I recently saw a talent management question on LinkedIn – “Do you use a basic performance curve to force distribution of performance grades? If so what are the pros/cons?” This refers to the practice of asking managers to plot their team against a performance curve, so that they are only allowed to put 10% of names in the top category, and must put 10% of the names in the bottom category, to achieve a normal distribution of ratings. In some organisations, the bottom 10% are routinely managed out of the organisation.

In a recent article we looked at the difference between training graduates together or separately, and the benefits of both approaches. Now I’d like to explore another idea which is emerging in graduate development – the idea that each graduate should be following an individual learning journey to best support their unique skills.

One question which has always intrigued me is whether people become stars because of their own skills or because of the teams they’re in. This book by Boris Groysberg set out to answer it through examination of the careers of more than 1000 Wall Street “star analysts”. Whilst almost entirely focused on Wall Street, there were a number of take-aways which I felt made the book a worthwhile read –

When building a talent pipeline within your business, the question many organisations focus on is ‘How many promotions has this person got in them?’. Typically this involves asking managers whether they feel the person has the potential to make one or two upwards moves. The problem is, most of the managers you ask to make this distinction may not make good judgement calls on this question.

One thing we find consistently when working with clients to develop their graduate programmes is that the focus is almost exclusively on training graduates together as a group, from welcome events and inductions to role specific training. The rational is that this enables graduates to develop a strong network across the organisation, helps them stay free of departmental “silos”, and adds value as they understand what’s going on in other areas of the business. However, this approach to training has some significant downsides.