What is the job of a manager? This is not an easy question, and there are a number of possible answers. The talent management approach suggests that the job of the manager is to hire, develop, engage, and retain talented people. This makes a lot of sense to me—if you hire, develop, engage, and retain talented people, aren’t you pretty much guaranteed to get good business results?
When I teach talent management classes at the Human Capital Institute and MBA classes in management at Pepperdine University, I ask people to decide the extent to which they think managers should be held accountable for hiring, developing, engaging, and retaining talented people. Most people suggest pretty large numbers: 70 percent, 80 percent, and sometimes even 100 percent. Almost everyone agrees that the threshold should be more than 50 percent—in other words, such accountability should be the most important part of a manager’s job.
Here’s the problem: In most organizations, we do tell our managers that hiring, developing, engaging, and retaining people is important. But the same people who say that managers should be held accountable for these four talent practices between 50 and 100 percent report that managers are actually held accountable for them anywhere from 0 to 10 percent.
That’s a pretty big disconnect. Most people believe managers should be held accountable to a great extent for hiring, developing, engaging, and retaining, but in practice we barely hold them accountable for these functions. Why is this?
I believe that measurement is the biggest problem. Measuring a manager’s ability to hire, develop, and engage talented people is hard (measuring retention is easy). However, measuring traditional business measures—sales, revenue, profit, productivity, and quality—is much easier. While the traditional business measures are important, they are lagging indicators. They tell us what has already happened. If we could accurately measure our managers’ ability to hire, develop, and engage talented people, we would have leading indicators to help predict future results and course correct if we are not on target.
As I mentioned, measuring a manager’s ability to hire, develop, and engage talented people is difficult—but it’s not impossible. If we could do a better job of measurement, we could do a better job of accountability. And if we start holding managers accountable, we are much more likely to get the talent results we want.
This concept is so important that it actually encompasses two of the 13 talent principles in Aha Moments in Talent Management. Principle number five says, “Employees are smart and know how to pursue rewards. If you want to see certain behaviors and results, hold employees accountable. It’s irrational to expect employees to deliver outcomes if we do not hold them accountable.” Principle number six states, “If you’re going to hold people accountable, you must provide clearly articulated, measurable standards. There is no accountability without measurement.”
Learn additional talent management principles in Mark’s just-released ATD Press book, Aha Moments in Talent Management.
