When confronted with the need to promote their employees, most companies want to believe they live in a meritocracy (a system that rewards people for their merits, promoting the best people forward). Sadly, most of the times it is not. At all.
I experienced several stages of the failed meritocracy while working inside these corporations as a consultant. The first phase is existing in ignorance and not understanding that employees might not be rewarded for their talent. Then, the discovery of understanding that corporate politics are ongoing. And finally, the hope that we can harness the power to skip the politics altogether.
A long and dark tunnel.
Being an outsider with the unique perspective of looking inside across several years of consulting, I believe I have identified different factors that can be key understanding what’s happening, and furthermore, what can be done about it:
Corporate personal fortresses.
Most of the time, power in a corporation is measured by budgets and manpower. Anything that means losing control of these two resources usually implies an internal roadblock. Innovation simply won’t fit in with the old reliable silos. No one wants to take care of new innovative departments, because even though they hold opportunities, they are dangerous. It’s as if the old guard feels like they’re playing Russian Roulette with their power quota. What’s more, the old guard is reticent to share their limited resources, enabling new, innovative departments to be effective.
Power in a corporation is most of the time measured by the budget and manpower under your direct control.
These structures reward status quo, but not talent. You know this is happening when you see hints of a fear-to-fail culture, quite common in traditional corporations that have a political hierarchy legacy.
Numbers are inoperative to the lower layers.
Big organizations manage people as if they were numbers in a spreadsheet. Of course this is needed it’s complicated to keep track of each and every one of your employees when there are thousands. The result of this status quo system is that setting the terms that define when someone deserves a promotion is complicated.
Goodhart’s law: “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.”
Setting the terms that define when someone deserves a promotion is complicated. Furthermore, once the terms are set they start instantly to degrade. Following Goodhart’s law: “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.”
I’m not saying that measuring success this way is bad or completely unfair. In fact, these numbers can be tailor made and useful for the highest layers of a company. But they are usually meaningless to the lower layers. Generally speaking, this is an effective reward system to upper management, but punishes those who sit waiting to be promoted in lower rungs of a company. And, instead of being valuable to detect talent at the lower levels of an organization, this acts as a deterrent.
Inverse gravity.
A common complaint in most big corporations is that employees can only fall upwards. Here’s an example that illustrates this, and it happened during a contextual interview with a product manager from a huge corporation. This product manager, a middle manager himself, explained that to keep his team productive he needed to keep the most talented people under his command, and get rid of the most inefficient ones. Sadly, he or the other product managers had only one tool to remove the unwanted people: by promoting them. The flip side of that coin is that these middle managers will try to avoid promoting talented employees, as it would mean losing them for their teams.
The result of this? Talented workers get stuck at the bottom of the organization.
Over management.
Corporations usually have dense middle management layers that require a lot of alignment. Middle managers evolve to become ‘external team managers’ and ‘political navigators.’ Some weeks before writing this article, a client, who had stopped a promising organizational transformation project, confessed to me that sometimes he forgot about the politics he had within his own department. Given this, he felt it was not the time to take a new project forward.
These middle management agendas transform into a never-ending succession of meetings, and they lose connection with operational tasks. This results in a management style that requires hiring external consultants… which, of course, adds up to even more meetings.
Peter’s principle: “An employee is promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent.” Sounds like a joke, but this effect is something that managers have identified as problematic for a long time. Quoting the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz:
“There is nothing more common than to hear of men losing their energy on being raised to a higher position, to which they do not feel themselves equal.”
This helps to explain why the kind of talent we usually refer to as talent usually gets stuck at lower levels, or withers as it gets promoted, acquiring new responsibilities.
Bias, bias everywhere.
Finally, when promotions are to be earned, our meritocracy finds its oldest adversary… bias. Maybe it’s intentional — “it’s my friend I’ll make sure he gets promoted” — or unintentional, as in gender discrimination. When talking about talent promotion, bias is the final boss every organization has to address — not an easy monster to defeat.
When talking about talent promotion, bias is the final boss every organization has to address.
Naturally, this bias does nothing to help to promote talent.
A light at the end of the tunnel.
So, is there something that can be done? I think there are several things. Take note that, as I’m the author of this post I have indulged myself into choosing a swing song for each topic:
1 Set your expectations into a correct time frame. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. The approach with most of these challenges needs to be systemic. If you expect anything related to a complex organizational challenge to reflect results in the short term, you are already dooming the initiative before it’s launched. Yes, you may eventually get results, but the timeframe needs to be changed from immediate to, at least, “soon enough.”
Short term goals have to be reconciled with long term ones. This is Cesar Astudillo’s Plumber Paradox: the need to change the pipes of your company without cutting the water supply.
This is Cesar Astudillo’s “Plumber Paradox”: the need to change the pipes without cutting the water supply.
This won’t be the first time someone experiences the need to achieve certain monthly levels on a KPI like Employee-NPS, while needing to implement complicated initiatives that will hurt those indicators.
2Focus on your employees. Ain’t nobody here but us chickens. So, anything you do aimed to identify, promote, or keep talent in your company, has to be understood by your employees. To be clear, this means you have to focus on encouraging bottom-up initiatives. There will be times when these initiatives will fail; there will be times your employees will adopt them in a way nobody expected; and there will be times when they will be enthusiastically embraced. That’s the way it should be, and your actions should be ‘restricted’ to cleaning up the initiatives that failed, trimming those that are growing towards places you don’t want, and nurturing those that were embraced.
A gardener cannot grow things by himself, decide how fast his plants will grow or when will they decide to bloom. But nevertheless, he is direly needed.
You should be like a gardener, and that implies limitations. A gardener cannot grow things by himself, decide how fast his plants will grow, or when will they decide to bloom. But nevertheless he is direly needed. Organizations, like gardens, needs constant tending.
3Empower your employees so they can have the initiative. There should be tools available so the talent can grab the spotlight for themselves; ways for them to shine and prove what they can do.
Allow them to Walk On the Sunny Side of the Street. They need places where they can create conversations, and have resources they can use to bring their ideas to light. Most of the time the solutions will be about allowing employees to freely share ideas, and give them spaces (both physical and digital) to learn and do.
4 Set clear paths for your employees to follow. As the song says… at the end It Had to be You. If you are going to empower people to have their own initiatives, you need to set a clear guide of what’s really desirable to the organization from a strategic point of view. Defining the paths your employees have for personal development is critical.
This, of course, means to guide top-down, so the strategy of the company is crystal clear and transparent to the employees. Follow this through and you will have what my colleague Ayal Levin calls a Sandwich Organization. Quoting him:
“Leadership works when you have a leader who is committed to moving forward. A style that is practical is felt more tangibly among the ranks.”
5Culture, culture and culture: We live in the digital era, and most of the solutions we implement have a screen as interface. But technology is just a consequence, a part of the solution, not the solution. And definitely, not the place where you should start looking around to transform your company into a meritocracy.
So, to expand on Peter Drucker’s quote: Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and technology is just a mid-morning snack. In other words, sometimes you have to take a Walk On The Wild Side.
Still a lot of tunnel until we get through.
There’s no universal formula for this transformation, because no two companies are the same. Some may share problems, like silo departments, but even the very definition of what talent is differs from company to company. The roadmap to a transformation that will allow companies to identify, attract, nurture, and retain the right talent will differ from company to company. It’s up to each to find their own path.
And remember that talent and culture are alive, so whatever you do, be ready to understand it as a continuous process that will have to evolve, shift and be refined as time goes by.
And, that’s it.
People, books and articles referenced here:
Peter Drucker: Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Stan McChrystal: Team of Teams.
Humberto Matas: Discovery takes place on the periphery.
Ayal Levin: Transformation is constant, Not Digital.
P.S: The song list I created for this article is collaborative for anyone to contribute :) Enjoy
