Not the dishwasher detergent. Actually I’m talking about the concept of the goal cascade. In most cases, this means a manager pushing her goals down to her employees. For many, that’s all it is. Honestly, that’s all I thought it was, too.

But earlier this week, I sat in on one of the all-hands training sessions we had and I realized there’s actually more to it. Technology enabled Goal Alignment doesn’t only have to be a mechanism for a manager that enables her to say “hey employee, this is what I’m working on – you work on it too.” It can actually be a far richer and more dynamic process.

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Gautam has a list of the top 10 reasons why people leave organizations. Remarkable how many would fall under the banner of performance and talent management.

I was directed to this very good article from WPS magazine called Succession Planning: The Nuts and Bolts of the Process which is sort of a primer on succession planning. A couple of its most enlightening observations are that 1. people often make the mistake of biting off more than they can chew with Succession – meaning that they try to collect too much data on too many people and 2. the best place to start a succession planning process is during the performance management process.

The author also points out an important decision: the one on which group will own the succession process. To me, the obvious place is HR, because succession fits so snugly with other responsibilities, but alternatives are a corporate strategy group or even a wholly separate succession group. A quote:

Once an organization has established all of the skills and competencies for every key leadership role and formulated a plan that works to take them from the current state of succession planning to the desired future state, the company must decide which department should own the process. “There’s not one cookie cutter answer in the sense that some organizations may have a corporate strategy group,” Kondo explained.

The 2006 talent management survey, conducted by IHRIM and Knowledge Infusion, found that 77% of the HR professionals think that talent management will only increase in importance over the next three years.

Some of the factors, according to Jason Averbrook of Knowledge Infusion, are “the looming talent shortage, the increased focus on redeploying internal employees rather than recruiting and the realization that organizations must link training, knowledge and performance.”

The most interesting piece, I thought, was this quote from Averbrook: “Many organizations roll out a performance management system or workforce analytics system and simply just put it out there. They don’t do a good job of making sure that people know why these systems are implemented, show people the value of the systems, etc. So if organizations don’t market these systems to their employees, the employees will just think of them as another online tool and won’t actually use them to their full advantage.”

Employees can themselves get real benefits from performance management initiatives. And there’s far more to it than just making reviews easier. ( I refer you to a previous post on the topic.) But making those benefits clear to employees and explaining why usage of the system will help THEM is an important part of a successful deployment and not to be overlooked.

We’ve all experienced it. The loss of motivation at work. Sometimes it comes in waves. Sometimes in perpetuity. But why? What are the factors that influence motivation?

This is the question posed (and answered) by this article by David Sirota, recently reprinted in HBS’s Working Knowledge.  It’s often said that employees leave jobs because of their managers, but that’s just at the end of the line. Managers also have a tremendous impact on motivation levels. Regardless of whether organization wide policies are healthy or not, individual managers can, all by themselves, motivate or demotivate people.

But there’s lots that can be done to make sure things stay positive. According to the article, there are three separate and equally important spheres of influence for motivation – Equity (the need to be respected and compensated fairly), Achievement (to be proud of the job, one’s achievements and company) and Camaraderie (good relationships with coworkers).

The article goes on to outline 8 tactics for maintaining and enthusiastic workforce. They’re worth both reading and doing.

Here’s an article at Baseline that talks about some of the ins and outs of talent management applications by showcasing some of the companies that have chosen to implement them. We’re mentioned in there, as are competitors Authoria and Vurv.

My most favorite bit includes a quote from (our customer) Gary Short of Kimberly-Clark:

Human-resources professionals caution, though, that it’s important not to use such systems to replace face-to-face meetings, which are vital for evaluating candidates or reviewing employees. “You want an efficient process,” says Gary Short, senior consultant for talent management at paper-goods maker Kimberly-Clark, “but you want an effective process.”

This hits on something I’ve been thinking about lately – the idea of “conversations.” Technology is an excellent enabler, but I’m moving towards the belief that the real point of any of these HR related applications is to support more and better conversations between people. Results come from conversations.

The technology serves, among other things, to provide the supporting data to enforce a process. But the value will remain in the conversations that take place as a RESULT of the technology. The better, more sophisticated and more usable the technology, the better and more sophisticated the conversations.

Jason Corsello of The Yankee Group (who writes a blog in his spare time and has a nice looking dog called Larry) in his growth forecast for the talent management market says: “”As the workforce becomes increasingly mobile and global, companies that invest in talent management solutions and examine it from a worldwide perspective will reap tremendous benefits for their business organization and operations.”

As such, Jason’s firm is forecasting that the market for talent management applications will be growing by 25% year over year (from $2.3 Billion in 2006)for the next 4 years, reaching $4 Billion by 2009.

That’s some wave.

Interestingly, the release also mentions that while Yankee’s definition of of talent management includes “Recruitment management, performance management, compensation management, succession management, learning management and other (knowledge management, self-service, analytics and reporting),” the market is largely being driven by the “the performance and succession management segments.”

Everyone thinks they’re above average.

This tidbit found via the Damn Interesting blog where they deconstructed a report by some Cornell researchers on the topic. What they found was that the worst performers in a variety of tested categories often rated themselves on par with the best performers and in most cases far above average. Top performers are of no help either. Even they weren’t able to accurately assess themselves, rating themselves lower than their performance merited.

The reasoning for these behaviors is fascinating. Poor performers lack the skills to perform – which are the same skills required to evaluate their performance. They don’t understand that they don’t understand, and so believe their abilities compare positively to their peers.

On the other hand, Top performers incorrectly assume that their competence is shared among their peers – leading them to rank themselves lower than they deserve.

You can see what this looks like in the chart above. People that fall into the lower three quartiles believe they performed better than they actually did. The highest performers underestimate themselves.

There’s relevance here to self-assessments as the HR world understands them. When asked to evaluate themselves on a variety of competencies, it would seem that people can be expected to incorrectly rate themselves most of the time. Poor and average performers will overestimate their abilities, and top performers will underestimate them.

So what to do? I think that the importance of gap analysis makes itself evident here. It’s only through external feedback that people can understand the difference between what they believe to be true and others’ perceptions of the reality. There’s nothing clearer than a competency gap:

 When you can see what you think about yourself right next to what others think about you – there’s simply nothing more compelling to a change in perceptions and ultimately, in behavior.

Our new poll for the next couple of weeks is on the topic of employee engagement. Specifically, what, in your opinion, are the most important drivers of engagement?

The responses are based on a 2003 report from Towers Perrin called “Understanding what drives employee engagement.” (PDF) Based on some statistical analysis, they arrived at 10 workplace attributes that they determined to be the most critical in driving employee engagement.

Of these 10, which are the most important in your organization?

You may have noticed a poll in the left-hand column over the past couple of weeks. Though clearly not scientific in any way, the poll has provided some insight into what’s on the minds of our readers.

We asked, “What is your most pressing HR issue?” 

We had 50 people respond to the poll, and the results are interesting. Despite all the talk about succession and compensation, the core issue (28%) for our respondents was Performance Reviews followed followed closely by Goal Alignment (24%).

To me, it indicates that Performance Management and Goal Alignment are still the biggest pain points for HR practitioners. They represent the heart of talent management initiatives, and Succession and Comp. are just further down in the hierarchy of HR needs.

I’d be curious to hear what you guys have to say about the results. Do you think they’re generally representative, or are they skewed for some reason?