Comments on: Building bench strength is a myth

By: Christopher Lozaga

Christopher Lozaga — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:40:49 +0000

Depending upon how you use your bench, you could actually lose talent. If you identify star players and start preparing them for advancement that never comes, they will leave in many cases.

You really have to challenge how you define bench strength, and how you define advancement to make the most of your bench. As Dr. Cappelli says, if you look at your bench as a talent development system rather than a warehouse full of “talent inventories” then you can be quite successful.

The SuccessFactors software does allow you to nominate successors, but it also allows you to plot performance and potential in a 9-box and perform internal talent searches within the company to make sure that you don’t leave anyone on the bench, and put their skills to work.

Christopher Lozaga
Research Analyst, SuccessFactors Global Research

By: John Carter

John Carter — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:04:09 +0000

Nice article, but I wonder… not everybody gets to be in charge all the time. In sports teams, in the performing arts, in the astronaut corps, you have people who might very well be capable of stepping up to the Big Show, often at a moment’s notice and maybe under max stress. In these industries, this is considered a necessity… why not in general business? It seems like a strong manager / coach / leader should be able to find ways to keep both the starter and the backup squad motivated, fit, and ready for action. Those ways could include creating special “understudy” duties or positioning the #2 as the quality assurance watchdog for the #1. Other uses of bench players include providing extra training, commissioning exploratory or pilot projects, whatever, as long as there is a genuine plan to bring the outputs or knowledge into “real production” later. Just as in non-human supply chain mgmt or computer data storage, there may be real benefits to the robustness that comes from some redundancy. I agree with the premise that sitting on the sidelines or attending gratuitous training classes is not healthy for anybody. However, don’t you think it’s possible to squeeze real work, useful work, bottom-line-enhancing work, out of people even when they aren’t on the critical path to next month’s deadline?

By: Building strong professional communities through Performance Mgt & HR initiatives « Is this Future Shock?

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 20:22:35 +0000

[...] Does your HR service give clear advice on how to develop your community members – perhaps sticking them in a development bench area? If that’s what they are suggesting, an interesting article by a performance management company suggests that might not be such a good idea, saying keeping people on a bench can *lose* you people. [...]

By: Peter Cappelli

Peter Cappelli — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:24:37 +0000

Following up on Erik’s note, it is important to draw a distinction between developing talent and maintaining “bench strength.” Employers absolutely should be developing talent, although doing it in a manner that doesn’t break the bank and risk employees leaving is tricky.

Maintaining a deep bench, however, is even worse than sitting on an inventory of products because inventory in talent can walk away. And the surest way to lose talent and the investments you’ve made in them is prepare them for bigger jobs and then ask them to sit on the bench and wait before they can do them. Managing the process of developing talent without creating excess inventory is the equivalent of managing a supply chain. And that’s the theme of my book.

Peter Cappelli

By: David Hawthorne

David Hawthorne — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:12:45 +0000

I know Prof. Capelli is familiar with our work (as we are with his). I wonder if he would agree that the only way to define “bench strength” is “underutilized” or “idle” capacity”?

As in “virtual supply chain management,” part of the game is knowing where you can find what you want/need. The supply chain manager doesn’t sit around waiting to discover that political disorders in Kenya are distrupting the supply of cotton, and then go out looking for a farmer elsewhere to raise some more cotton.

With Talent, as with other resources, agility and resilience in the supply chain is the key to getting most of the “best stuff.” The ‘best stuff’ is almost always in play somewhere. It’s not “sitting on the bench,” except metaphorically where a given employer is concerned. In many fields, especially technical fields, work has become “project-based.” Companies constantly form and re-form teams to get the best match of talent to task. Talent benefits through gathering diverse experiences, new knowledge, new competencies, and a broader professional network.

I know a studio executive, for instance, who keeps a list of special effects artists, the projects they work on, and where they are now. When he gets a new project, he goes to the lists and, first, checks “project” descriptions to see which ones most nearly match his upcoming project, or which ones contain some aspect that he’d like to use in his production. Then, he finds out “who” worked on it, and “what” role they played. Then he contacts them to see “when” or “if” they will be avaiable, given the window he has for his project. He says, “my best people are always in circulation.” (If fact, he also claims that when he contacts someone who is not avaiable, he asks them to identify someone “who is really good at (whatever)” and their contact information. In this way he builds his list and bench at the same time.

I’m not suggesting that things are this way in every business. Clearly, they are not. However, I am suggesting that having the information about deployed talent can be the near “equivalent” to having “a deep bench.” Certainly in Silicon Valley, Rt. 128., The Technology Triangle, and other places where there are dense clusters of similar talent, there is a lot of percolation that goes on, and most employers know picking up talent from an organization you admire is a good way to get the benefit of what they may have learned working in that organization.

Our technology tries to deal with this need from the individual’s perspective. It is designed to provide talent with the tools they need to “keep themselves in the game” and steadily enhance their market position and visibility in whatever field they happen to be in or want to be in. We emphasize a portfolio approach to continuous improvement both thorugh project selection and education. So if any out there has its talent cooling its heels on the bench, you’re wasting your money and their time. It’s a depreciating assets.

Professional sports works this way too. If you’re changing your game from a running to passing game, you trade for the talent. It’s not sitting on the bench. Fortunately, in sports, their’s a whole culture of scouting, agents, and performance statistics compliation. General industry is not there yet, but it’s not a bad model -for employers or talent.