Jeff Standridge (Intro):
Are you ready to change the trajectory of your business and see massive improvements Each week, we’ll share strategies and practices to generate sustained results and long lasting success in your organization. Welcome to the Innovation Junkies podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, Jeff Standridge here. Welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, it’s Jeff Amerine. It’s great to be back.
Jeff Standridge:
How you doing, man?
Jeff Amerine:
Good, good. What are we going to talk about today?
Jeff Standridge:
Well, a few weeks ago, as we were talking about, in the domain of operational effectiveness, we talked about this concept of how to get the right people in the right seats and have them focused on the right thing. You want to kind of just touch on that, because we’re going to shift and talk kind of ancillary to that today.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a general thought and Gino Wickman in Traction talks a lot about this. It’s one of those sort of fundamental issues. And there’s been other assessments that say one of the top three reasons why an organization fails is wrong people, wrong seats. And so it’s really important to understand, as Gino Wickman would say, do they get it? Do they want it? And do they have the capacity or the capability to actually do it? And so when we think about that, that kind of sets up this whole idea of how do you know where you are in that regard? What kind of assessments can you…
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. So that’s a component of right people, right place, and focused on the right priorities as part of our operational effectiveness domain. Well, from leadership effectiveness, as you said, how do we make sure using Jim Collins’ vernacular from the Good to Great, how do you make sure if you’re driving a bus, you got the right people in the right seats? And that requires a degree of leadership. And I know that we’ve worked on some assessments to help executives actually make those determinations. And we’ll talk a little bit about those today. One of the things that I have found very, very valuable is this concept of what I call the total team assessment. And the total team assessment, basically, let’s say you have an executive team of six or seven people, all of whom report to the CEO, so effectively your C-suite, having each and every one of those rate each and every other of their colleagues on a series of questions that really help those executives understand how they’re viewed by their peers.
Questions like, does this person build constructive relationships with members of the executive team? Does this person demonstrate quality leadership character traits? Does this person live and breathe the core values of the organization? Would you want to work for this person? Do you trust this person? So what I would call very direct questions that lead to how well is this person viewed. And so you rate them on those questions, but then you require every person to also provide a comment or two of most impactful information that they would like to share about all of their colleagues. And so each individual gets a report and they see, this is how I rated on all of those, say 10 questions. This is how my collective rating compared my average rating across all of my peers on those 10 questions, how it compared to the team average, and here’s my total rating averaged across them all.
And then here are the relevant comments or the salient comments that were made about me. And it’s all anonymous. No one knows who said what or who rated what. But you talk about a vulnerability exercise that really begins to open the eyes of people and then you can begin to stack rank your people based upon how their peers feel about them. And as we said in our previous episode, if you think you’re leading and you look behind you and no one’s following, then maybe you’re just out for a walk. Well, this tells you whether you’re just out for a walk or whether you’re actually being perceived as a positive influence among your colleagues.
Jeff Amerine:
And one of those things where you may have to swallow hard on that is you got to be ready for non-attribution, non-retribution. In other words, you can’t be thinking, “Gee, I wonder who said that,” and get spun up about that. And again, it’s this idea of, if you realize that people aren’t trying to denigrate you, they’re really trying to help you become better, then you can look at that in the kind of light that’s required in order to really make improvements.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, I’m glad you said that. I set that up in the email that I send when I do this. So just to kind of put some ground rules around this, I usually don’t have the CEO send it out because I don’t want them to think that he or she’s going to see the raw results. So I send out the email that says, “Here’s what you’re being asked to do.” And then I have them return their results even to a third party other than me so that it’s being compiled and analyzed by someone else. And then when I send out their individual reports to them, I kind of put some ground rules around it as well and say, “Look, your teammates have given you a gift. They’ve given you feedback that you ought to use as a mirror to look and see how you view yourself versus how your team members view you. It would be futile for you to try to figure out who said what.
What you really need to focus on is where were you surprised, affirm your strengths, what did people say about you that gives you confidence and comfort, makes you feel good, so to speak. What are some things that were a-has to you that surprised you that didn’t feel so good? Maybe some critical feedback both on the ratings and on the comments. And then number three, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it?” And then I end up having individual coaching conversations with each of those folks. And sometimes it’s a tough conversation and I’ve had to coach more than a few to say, there’s some comments here that you don’t understand and I don’t really understand. So are there a couple of people on the team that you really trust that you can go sit down with individually and say, “Hey, I’m not trying to figure out who said what, but I would like to understand more about what was said. Here’s the comment and I don’t understand it. Can you give me some examples or can you give me some feedback?”
And I tell them, do you have a couple of people that you trust and this is where it can really be a test is, are there a couple of people that you know have issues with that you’d also be willing to go to and have the same conversation? Not trying to figure out who said what, but here were some comments I didn’t understand and I’m just asking folks, would you mind helping me understand them and give me feedback and know that I’m just trying to get better here?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, I mean, it’s a very strong process if people are willing and willing to be open to that. And you can learn a lot about the real health of the organization based on just the comfort with that last bit that you talked about. If you find out there’s really not people that you trust, well, that’s telling you something. And more often than not, there are people that have issues with the way you’re operating. A lot of times there are people that will get into these roles and they will put themselves in the role of being what I would call a victim leader in that they assume that everything is everyone else’s fault. And that is where you really do have to begin to shine that mirror on yourself and say, “Listen, if all these things feel like they’re broken in the organization, that’s probably starting with me as a leader or as the individual contributor. It’s not everybody else’s fault.”
Typically, getting through that mentally is a difficult thing to do for most people. But once you do it, it opens up the world of getting positive feedback and then being willing to actually implement changes to make a difference.
Jeff Standridge:
Well, and if you put yourself in the shoes of the CEO and you have a person on your team who is not viewed well by his or her colleagues that there are trust issues, there are other kinds of issues, and then you share that feedback with that person and they’re really not willing to explore and get better, then it says that maybe you don’t have the right person in the right place. Maybe this person still has value in the organization, but perhaps it’s not as a C level or SVP, senior VP level executive in the organization. And that’s entirely possible. And not only is it possible, it happens, not in every engagement where we do something like this, but it happens more often than it doesn’t, is that we realize that we’ve got some person who’s been elevated beyond their leadership maturity. They’ve been elevated beyond their ability to sustain relationships and get the nature of the work done in that instance.
And so that’s the total team assessment. And then there’s another assessment that I call the talent review, and it’s better probably described as a relative team assessment. And this is where the CEO or the senior leader does it with his or her immediate direct reports. It actually can be done across an organization and it works fabulously. But you start at the top levels. And I effectively have the CEO evaluate his or her direct reports on four or five questions, four definite questions. Sometimes we add in a fifth and we standardize the rating on a scale of one to five, where five is fantastic, one is virtually none, and then any level in between. And so the first one is job performance. Do they get the job done? And how well do they get the job done on a scale of one to five?
And you go back and look at performance reviews and use it to validate your answers, but you standardize it on a one to five Likert type scale. The second question is their strategic contribution to the organization. Do they really bring strategic value? Do they challenge our directions? Do they have good ideas about our directions? Do they come in and make recommendations to me about strategic things we need to do differently, do more of, do less of, et cetera? The third thing is about their future potential. Could they take my job? Could they be a successor to me or could they succeed and move into other areas of the organization where they could take on more responsibility? And then the last one is their cultural fit. How well do they play with others? And you can use that total team to kind of validate whether that’s a five or a one. And so you’ve got a rating there.
And then the last one, and this is particularly for a new leader coming in and they’ve had a few months under their belt and they’re really trying to understand everybody. The last one is trustworthiness. Do you trust them? Are they trustworthy? Do they behave in a trustworthy manner? I don’t always throw that fifth one in, but it’s a good one as well. And then you basically do a forced ranking and you stack them up kind of just mathematically, but then you go through where the natural breaks are, and I tend to do breaks at the top 20%, the next 30%, because that gives me the top 20% and the top half, the lower 40%, so the 40% that’s right below half, and then the bottom 10%. And so really what I’m going to be focused on now is where we draw those lines. And if I look between the top 20 and in the next 30, and I may say, well, you know what? I got Sally and Richard here together, and I’ve drawn a line between the two of them, but you really can’t tell the difference between Sally and Richard, but you can tell the difference between Richard and Bobby.
So I’m going to move that line down and it’s really the top 27%, maybe not the top 20%. And then they’ll go to the bottom and say, okay, I’ve got one person in the bottom, but I really can’t tell the difference between this one person, the one just above them, and so it’s actually the bottom 15%. If you do that across an organization and everyone does it with their direct reports, and then you roll them up and you aggregate them into an organization level chart, now who roughly the top 20% or so of your organization and who the bottom 10% of your organization happens to be. And so then when someone comes and turns in their resignation and a leader comes in and says, “Jennifer’s turned in a resignation and we’ve got to give her more money.” As the CEO, I’m going to look at it and I’m going to say, “Well, where does she fall on our organizational relative talent review? She’s in the bottom 40%. Tell her we appreciated her contribution to our organization and we hope she finds what she’s looking for.”
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it’s powerful. And it’s not dissimilar to something Jack Welsh, the former CEO of GE, used to say, when you find people that are in that bottom 10%, it’s time to invite them to their career elsewhere. Or if you can’t coach them up, and if they’re consistently in that bottom 10, you’re finding something else for them to do, maybe outside the organization.
Jeff Standridge:
And it could be that they’re just … You need to have questions about why they’re there. It could be that they’re a six month employee, they’ve just been there six months and they haven’t really gotten to the point yet. It could be that they’re in an administrative role where they’re very critical to the CEO as an executive assistant or something, but across the organization, maybe they’re not contributing to a strategic level yet, or the future potential. And so having conversations to say, why are they there and then moving them based upon those conversations. But up or out. And I’ll tell you, I spent a little time in HR, and so I’m probably going to speak heresy here to a lot of HR purists. There are a lot of HR purists who will say, “Oh, that has no place in an organization.”
And my response to that is, if you’re an HR person who believes that, then you better step into reality because you’ve probably never made payroll, you’ve probably never been responsible to shareholders, you’ve probably never been responsible for the success or failure of the organization, and you better step into reality and understand that this is a critical thing that has to happen in organizations or you might find yourself having a conversation with a CEO about being in that lower 40%.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jeff Standridge:
Now, you do it respectfully, you do it confidentially. You don’t go tell everyone where they are, but it gives you tools that you don’t otherwise have into the inside of your people.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. It’s really important. The number one asset of any organization is the people or the talent, and understanding where they are in that spectrum of capabilities is really important. So recap for us a little bit what we covered, Jeff.
Jeff Standridge:
So making sure you got the right people in the right place. You can’t just do it off gut feel, you’ve got to gather some feedback. So one way to do that is through what we call a total team assessment, where you have each of your direct reports evaluate each other, and then you provide feedback to them in the form of confidential, anonymous feedback. The second thing is where the leader of an organization does a talent review or what we call a relative team assessment, where effectively you’re looking at folks across four or five categories, criteria rather. Their job performance, their strategic contribution, their future potential, how well will they play with others or cultural fit, and then are they trustworthy? And then ranking them and adjusting those rankings based upon where you can really see delineations between your people. Two critical tools, happy to help organizations. If you’re a CEO or a senior executive of an organization and you want to begin to ensure that you got the right people in the right place, give us a shout. We’d love to talk you through the process.
Jeff Amerine:
Great stuff, Jeff.
Jeff Standridge:
Good stuff. All right. Hey, this has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Can’t wait to see you next time.
Jeff Amerine:
See you next time.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
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