Judging Employee Potential Is Easy – Making Meaning of the Shades of Gray
By Michelle Malay Carter on April 21, 2008
I had my semi-annual dental visit last week. No cavities! As the dentist read my x-rays, I thought, how can he tell anything from that? It just looks like shades of gray. I had the same level of amazement during my children’s ultrasounds. I consider myself fairly intelligent, but I couldn’t tell a foot from an elbow. By the way, that blob on the left is my daughter.
I’m teaching a course this week called Judging Candidate and Employee Potential. As it turns out, managers are quite good at judging employee potential, when you provide them a contextual framework within which to make their judgments. Then, when we overlay a science-based, work-level complexity scale on top of their relative judgments, you’ve got a powerful tool for matching employees to jobs both today and in the future.
An Avoidable Problem – Role Mismatch
Our research shows that 35% of employees are cognitively mismatched to their roles – either underemployed and bored (20%) or over their heads and incompetent (15%).
Helping Managers Assess Talent
Our talent assessment process allows managers to make meaning of the shades of gray like medical professionals do with x-rays. Additionally, it shows them which inputs are relevant and which to exclude from their evidence base.
Why We Don’t Do Succession Planning
As I said in my succession planning posts, I think the reason organizations say succession planning is important but don’t do it is that they don’t have a credible process for distinguishing the shades of gray.
How do you bolster your managers’ ability to match employees to roles?
Filed Under Employee Engagement, Executive Leadership, Managerial Leadership, Requisite Organization, Succession Planning, Talent Management
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