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talent management

The Valley of Despair and the Exodus of Talent

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In my June 14 post Banker Jones and the Last Crusade: Is Wealth Management the New Holy Grail? I examined the current trend of banks seeking greener post-Dodd Frank pastures by pursuing new wealth management initiatives.

In Ocean’s 14, I’m sure they’ll call this running a reverse Willie Sutton. Sutton, of course, was the man who robbed an estimated $2 million from banks and who apocryphally explained “because that’s where the money is”.

The top 1% hold 40% of the wealth, and banks need to find new sources of earnings… What could go wrong?

Plenty.

The Valley of Despair

Change management professionals often prepare organizations for the ‘valley of despair’ that usually follows the initial excitement that bubbles up when a change is announced. Anticipation and relief from the status quo typically give way to feelings of fear, threats, guilt and depression before acceptance and progress.

Similarly, Gartner coined the the term ‘hype cycle‘ and its similar ‘trough of disillusionment’ to describe the point where emerging technologies fail to deliver on their anticipated hype. (See my post Remember When Laptops Revolutionized Financial Services?.)

I suspect that many financial institutions that are currently so excited about the potential of the affluent, high net worth and ultra-high net worth segments are currently approaching the ‘peak of inflated expectations’, unaware of the rapid downward descent that awaits them on the other side. It’s not that those segments aren’t truly attractive. It’s that most organizations won’t be able to capitalize on the opportunity.

The Exodus of Talent

Readers of this blog know that I am a big believer in leveraging innovation and technology to enhance the advice provided by advisors to clients, but I am not among those who think that a better algorithm is all we need. Wealth management has been, and remains, a talent-driven business. This peak of inflated expectations comes with an often insatiable appetite for the ‘best and brightest’ talent.

There are already signs of firms rearming for another battle in the war for talent. Job postings in the wealth space are picking up. Headhunters are brushing off their cold-calling skills and smiling and dialing again. Consultants are preparing new decks full of advice.

At its worst, the war for talent becomes a mindless bidding war, and even the unproductive dolt down the hall swaggers in to dangle an unsolicited job offer in your face, nearly daring you to match it. If you feel threatened enough, and if you have not been treating talent management as the permanent part of your job that it is, you probably will match it.

At its best though, the market brings exciting new opportunities to bear and true talent, like capital, will flow to its most efficient use. And maybe the unproductive dolt down the hall will become someone else’s shiny new unproductive dolt for 30% more pay

Why Top Talent Leaves

So how do retain your top talent (even if you do lose a few dolts along the way)? Forbes had a great post this week on Why Top Talent Leaves: Top 10 Reasons Boiled Down to 1. The punchline is:

“Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring.”

The article goes on to describe two things to do to keep your best people:

1) Create an organization where those who manage others are hired for their ability to manage well, supported  to get even better at managing, and held accountable and rewarded for doing so.

2) Then be clear about what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization – not only in terms of financial goals, but in a more three-dimensional way. What’s your purpose; what do you aspire to bring to the world? What kind of a culture do you want to create in order to do that?  What will the organization look, feel and sound like if you’re embodying that mission and culture?  How will you measure success?  And then, once you’ve clarified your hoped-for future, consistently focus on keeping that vision top of mind and working together to achieve it.

I certainly agree with both of those recommendations, but I recommend starting with the first one. In this hype cycle, we are going to see a lot of high performing individual contributors become poor performing managers. Either because they aren’t really cut out for managing others, or because their organizations won’t support them in becoming the managers they need to be.

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I hired your resumé, and I ended up with you!

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I’m really not much of sports fan. I just figured out that the Florida Marlins are now the Miami Marlins when I saw their gorgeous new stadium on TV on opening day.

This fact may be surprising to people who hear me a lot, because I love to use sports analogies.

Not in that failed former athlete, Glory Days kind of way. My couple of years of kicking a soccer ball around and one year of high school track doesn’t really give me too much gravitas in that department. (I purposely chose the 100 yard dash because the gap from first to worst was only a few feet. I probably would have been lapped in a mile run.)

No, I just like the classic allusions to pulling a team together to achieve a common goal, giving it your all in the quest for victory and the various subtleties of acquiring, managing and coaching talent in a people-driven business.

The always insightful Steve Jones of Curtis Buck Associates is no sports analogy slouch (plus he has the athleticism to back it up), and his April 13 post  “Petrino and Ozzie – You Get What You Hire” made a great point:

Well, in the last week we have seen Bobby Petrino fired and Ozzie Guillen suspended and clinging to his job.  Neither of these scenarios should come as a surprise to anyone, yet both the University of Arkansas and the Miami Marlins organization’s acted as if they were taken completely by surprise.  There was an absolutely massive and very public record for both Bobby Petrino and Ozzie Guillen – the organizations knew very well who they were hiring.  And that is the issue – you get what you hire.  You get ALL of what you hire.

I agree with all of that. Sometimes, though it’s even worse. Sometimes, you don’t even get what you THINK you hired. Usually, it’s because you weren’t really paying attention.

I hired your resumé, and I ended up with you!

A colleague of mine once asked me to interview a potential portfolio manager as a replacement for someone who hadn’t worked out very well. Within 20 minutes I discovered that while the new candidate was smart and personable and had interesting experience inside another wealth management firm; she had never managed any client portfolios directly, she had no meaningful client relationship management experience and she had never worked in a role with a sales goal.

I politely thanked her for her time and told her my colleague would get back to her. I asked my colleague why she had advanced the candidate to this level despite her lack of direct experience.

“Well, her resume was impressive, she’s very smart and I really liked her”, he said.

“Sounds like the same thing you said when you hired the last person. How did that work out?”, I asked.

We had a long conversation, and he began to discover that he really wasn’t interviewing candidates, he was jumping to conclusions based on limited information, then selling the candidate on the job for which he had just convinced himself was a perfect fit.

You’re hiring the person, not the title

In my 2/18/12 post “What is the Talent Density of Your Team?” I referenced some quotes from a Netflix presentation on Culture. Another comes to mind here:

Lots of people have the title “Major League Pitcher”, but they are not all equally effective

This got me thinking– what if baseball teams hired like most of corporate America?

“Well, I see here that you came up through the Indians farm organization, great way to start…. uh huh, a couple of years with the A’s… so why are you leaving the Yankees? I see. Well, let me ask you this– we are looking for someone who can really deliver late in the game. Do you have any experience in close games, runners on base, no one out? OK, that’s great! So, hypothetically, you’re facing a left handed power hitter in a full count– what pitch do you go with in that situation?”

Crazy, right? We would already have all of the player’s stats and accomplishments and we would know exactly why we were hiring him, for what role, and what he is worth relative to his expected contribution to the team.

Not that hiring is perfect in sports, either.

You could always end up with Manny Ramirez.

Then end up “surprised” when he misses a game because he decided to go swimming with dolphins that day. As Steve Jones said, you get ALL of what you hire.

But that’s “just Manny being Manny“…

Oh, by the way– my colleague ended up solving his hiring problems after reading the book Who: The A Method For Hiring, by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. I recommend it for any hiring manager.

What’s the Talent Density of Your Team?

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Even though some of the business decisions that Netflix management has made recently have not been well received, I still think that many of the firm’s cultural attributes are worth studying.

As Netflix is back in the news again with a new DVD plan, I thought of CEO Reed Hastings’ words in a 2009 slide presentation:

“The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding  values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.”

“Actual company values are the behaviors and skills that are valued in fellow employees”

The presentation goes on to describe in some detail the nine behaviors that are particularly valued by Netflix (Judgment, Communication, Impact, Curiosity, Innovation, Courage, Passion, Honesty and Selflessness); and details the firm’s uniquely demanding standards for high performance and other aspects of its culture.

But the part I found most interesting was the view that turns on its head the conventional wisdom that growing firms must add significant processes and procedures to deal with increasing complexity, simply because it’s “Time to grow up”.

Instead, Hastings sees the root cause as the decline of “talent density”, as the percentage of high performance employees typically falls with total employment growth. Exacerbating the problem, the increased focus on process actually drives more talent out of the company, as they feel stifled by the bureaucracy and process orientation.

The solution, Hastings says, is to increase talent density faster than business complexity.

” Avoid Chaos as you grow with Ever More High Performance People —

not with Rules”

Not that Hastings advocates absolute freedom from rules. In fact, he lays out two types of necessary rules– those around moral, ethical and legal issues, and those that prevent irrevocable disaster (it remains to be seen whether the public relations flap over the company’s price increases are irrevocable).

Financial firms operate in highly regulated environments, and the inherent financial leverage makes the cost of some errors unacceptable. This means a higher degree of process orientation and policy compliance than many industries, but I don’t think this negates the idea that financial firms should also focus on increasing their talent density.

Especially critical, in my view, is the concept that a company’s actual values are demonstrated by “who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go”.

While firms must reward results more than efforts, leaders have a responsibility to shape the culture of their firm by also celebrating and rewarding the skills and behaviors that led to those results, and sharing those to help improve others’ performance.

I have seen managers who act like hostages to data. “I have to give Joe the big sales award. He hit his numbers, even though he fell into that one big sale at the end of the year.”

Your incentive plans have to be driven by financial results, but if they force you to reward results while being blind to the requisite underlying skills and behaviors, you need to rewrite your plans.

Top performers want to be rewarded on results, but they also want a clear vision of how their skills and behaviors are expected to be applied to get those results.

It’s the leader’s job to set that vision and apply the rewards appropriately.

If you don’t, you will eventually help another firm increase its talent density. With your former talent.

What’s the talent density of your team?