Talent IQ

Identify Your Company's Top Performers, Improve or Remove Underachievers, Boost Productivity and Profit

Emmett C Murphy

• Publisher: Platinum Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781440517105
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Talent is a company's most valuable resource. Today, more than ever, the fate of your organization depends on your ability to recruit, retain, and, when necessary, replace talent. By the same token, talent management determines the success or failure of your own career. Talent IQ teaches you how to make the most of your own, your team's, and your organization's talent - from junior support staff to C-level executives. Based on an extensive ten-year study of best practices among 100, 000 TalentLeaders in virtually every type of organizational setting, Talent IQ identifies the concepts, skills, and tools any manager and organization can use to boost their Talent IQ and build a culture of achievement.

CHAPTER 1
Build a Culture of Achievement

DURING THE POST -World War II boom in higher education, with hundreds of thousands of servicemen taking advantage of the GI Bill, college textbook publishing was a growth industry, one that required talented people in every job. James F. Leisy, the founder and CEO of Wadsworth, one of the most successful and innovative startups of the time, knew that talent, more than any other factor, would make or break his fledgling enterprise. As a result of his ability to build a corporate culture of achievement, Wadsworth grew in a few short years to become a major player in its field.

Unlike many CEOs, Jim Leisy worked in the trenches of talent-building every day. Since acquisitions editors—the people who created new product—rose from the sales force, Jim would personally interview promising recruits. “He made you feel as if the company’s whole future depended on you,” recalls one former executive who flourished under Leisy’s mentorship. “His annual editorial retreats didn’t just teach and motivate us. They instilled in us the esprit de corps of an elite Marine commando unit.”

A lucrative profit-sharing program kept all eyes focused on productivity and profitability. When, however, talented editors, yearning for more power and independence, grew restless and were at risk of straying off to join the competition at an executive level, Jim would reward and challenge them with a startup company of their own under the Wadsworth umbrella. That retention strategy spawned such successful publishers as Wadsworth’s Brooks/Cole and Duxbury subsidiaries. Loyalty ran so deep at Wadsworth that not one key editor left during the 1960s and 1970s, with the exception of a few talented people who just could not improve their poor performance, despite intensive coaching by Leisy and his managers.

According to Thomas Martin, a Wadsworth author and the retired president of the Illinois Institute of Technology, “[Leisy] was phenomenally successful as a catalyst. He strongly embraced what was known then and now as ‘the HP way’ [the Hewlett-Packard way]—management-by-walking-around, close relationships with all employees, and assembling highly motivated people who felt personal ownership in what they were doing. Higher education publishing is a very entrepreneurial business and the Wad-sworth culture fostered by Leisy encouraged that.”

Creativity. Achievement. Loyalty. Productivity. Profitability. These results came about because Jim Leisy and his managers used their Talent IQ to create a culture of achievement.

Why build a culture of achievement? Because it performs better than one whose people define themselves, and the work, through affiliation and power. The former know that success depends on what you know and what you can do. The latter care more about who you know and what power you wield.

When, during our Talent IQ research, we compared the achievement-driven organizations with those dominated by a sense of affiliation and power, we found extraordinary differences.

Achievement-driven organizations:

• Were 250 percent more profitable.

• Experienced markedly higher rates of “customer willingness to return.”

• Offered incentive-based compensation to four times as many employees as did low-performing organizations.

Affiliative and power-driven organizations:

• Lost $300 billion in 2000 due to disengaged and irresponsible employees.

• Suffered from the disillusionment of managers and executives.

In addition, within those organizations:

• 76 percent of senior executives thought that their frontline and middle managers resisted responsibility for performance.

• 91 percent of CEOs thought that their frontline and middle managers resisted responsibility.

• 78 percent of senior executives felt that their managers lacked sufficient skill to manage underachievers.

• 90 percent of frontline managers believed they needed improvement in managing underachievement.

The results shown above underscore the significant advantages of achievement-driven organizations. The question is, how do you build such a culture?

To find the answer, we conducted an extensive Cultural Survey that measured culture-building practices in more than 1,100 organizations representing a wide range of industries, from health care to high technology. As we analyzed the results, three dominant points emerged. Achievement-driven cultures:

1. Observe seven principles that guide the identification, selection, coaching, rewarding, retention, retraining, and replacement of talent from the frontlines to the boardroom.

2. Leverage achievement to create a Magnet of Influence. In other words, place those who achieve in leadership positions at all levels of your organization and emphasize their role in driving corporate progress.

3. Develop the three paths to achievement in the workplace: service, innovation, management.

The Seven Principles of Achievement

What is talent? The TalentLeaders in our study offered a simple and direct answer: achievement. Talent that has not achieved concrete and tangible results represents mere potential, a “maybe” at best and a deceit at worst, an unknown that is as yet unworthy of the trust required to move individuals, organizations, and societies from one level to the next.

Measurable achievement consists of a continuum of seven behavioral principles that Tal-entLeaders both preach and practice in their work and personal lives. These guiding principles (which we first mentioned in the Introduction) provide a blueprint for development that talent coaches can incorporate into daily operational management, as well as use for assessment of individual, team, and organizational strengths. Each of the principles includes a specific cluster of behaviors and traits that anyone can use for establishing performance criteria and measuring progress throughout an organization, from the boiler room to the boardroom.

Definition of Work

Physicists define work as pushing or pulling something through a distance. If you stand at the base of the Empire State Building and push until you collapse from exhaustion but have not budged the skyscraper an inch, you have not done any work!

The Seven Principles of Achievement

#1	Embrace Achievement
#2	Be Pragmatic
#3	Practice Strategic Humility
#4	Partner with Your Customer
#5	Make a Total Commitment
#6	Be Optimistic
#7	Accept Responsibility

Principle 1: Embrace Achievement

Achievement means . . .

• Advancing through your own accomplishments.

• Seeking recognition for success based on your own efforts.

• Attaining realistic but challenging goals to get ahead.

Andy Grove, former chairman and CEO of Intel Corporation, has often been recognized as an achiever. However, such recognition emerged from humble beginnings. Born in Hungary, Grove and his family fled the tyranny of Soviet oppression for the promise of the United States, arriving in New York City penniless, yet motivated to begin their new life.

While moving to a new country that has an entirely different culture and language would overwhelm many people, it barely fazed Andy Grove, who immediately immersed himself in the new life his parents had given him. Through diligence and perseverance, Grove overcame the language barrier and worked his way through the City University of New York and, eventually, the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a PhD in physics. Success came easily in business, as well, as Grove became a world-class industry and technology leader, and one of the designers of a revolutionary computer chip. No one could deny that Andy Grove had put his talent to excellent use. He was highly successful by anyone’s measure.

But, in the fall of 1994, something went very wrong for him. At age 58, he learned that he had prostate cancer. After a series of tests, Grove’s urologist phoned him at the office with news that would alter Andy Grove’s life forever: “Andy, you have a tumor. It’s mainly on the right side; there’s a tiny bit on the left. It’s a moderately aggressive one.”

At first, Grove went into denial about the diagnosis of the life-threatening illness. He assumed a passive position, consigning responsibility for managing this drastic change in his life to the “experts.”

Soon, however, he became restless and disappointed in himself for not applying the life lessons he had learned as an immigrant, a business leader, and a scientist. He decided to reassert the achievement ethic he had practiced throughout his career and take control of the situation himself.

As Grove reasserted control, he developed a new daily routine that included in-depth searches in medical databases, online resources, and medical magazines for any and all information about prostate cancer. He applied his talent as a superb researcher to a new topic, tracking down articles and research reports that he passed on to the experts who were overseeing his care. Nightly, Grove’s wife trekked to the library for copies of the articles that her husband had catalogued during the day. Grove got second opinions, third opinions, and real-life accounts from others who had overcome prostate cancer.

Ultimately, he combined all his research, his own test results, information from ongoing conversations with prostate cancer patients, oncologists, surgeons, and other doctors, and created a chart of all the possible treatment options, their side effects, and the probabilities of recurrence. Just as he had organized resources to address other challenges in his life, he applied his analytical talent to help him decide how to tackle his disease and achieve a good result.

Andy Grove eventually settled upon a new, but promising, treatment option that involved implanting near the tumor eight pin-like tubes, through which doctors would insert radioactive “seeds” for a short period of time. After receiving this focused high-dose radiation treatment, Grove underwent twenty-eight daily doses of external radiation, which took no more than a few minutes each. He would walk to a local hospital at 7:30 in the morning and then arrive at work for a full day by 8:30.

Six months after the start of treatment, Andy Grove reclaimed his life—100 percent cancer-free. By refusing to allow external forces to control his fate, Grove embraced achievement.

Consistently, across every organization we studied, TalentLead-ers share the belief that how you choose to move forward in life makes all the difference between success and failure. TalentLead-ers have learned that self-reliance and personal competence precede self-respect and success, that success depends on personal achievement in the frontlines of work, that what you know and can do matters more than who you know and what power you wield. Achievement always trumps affiliation and power. Accomplishment always trumps manipulation and control.

The social scientist David McClelland noted that civilizations— and businesses—rise and fall based on the belief structures of their people. For those driven by the need for affiliation, advancement devolves into manipulation. Cultures in which control rules the day inevitably decline as the value of achievement gives way to privilege, and rewards for service to the many—citizens and customers—give way to rewards for service to the few.

Similarly, for those people in which a drive for power dominates, advancement becomes a control game. Cultures in which control rules the day also inevitably decline, as the struggle to dominate or be dominated destroys the bonds of trust that lead to a mutual commitment to service and progress.

By contrast, achievement-driven cultures define advancement as a consequence of reaching goals, attaining objectives, and getting results. Such cultures grow and prosper as accomplishment leads to progress, and as rewards for merit encourage people to serve, innovate, and organize to improve the common good.

Principle 2: Be Pragmatic

When it came to selecting engineers, Thomas Edison was extremely pragmatic. He’d give the applicant a light bulb and ask, “How much water will it hold?” Most candidates would calculate the bulb’s volume mathematically, an approach that takes twenty minutes or more. The smart ones, however, would fill the bulb with water and then pour its contents into a measuring cup, a procedure that takes less than one minute. Which engineer do you think Edison hired?

Like Edison, the TalentLeaders in our study are pragmatists. In a world of constant and even accelerating change, they know that adopting and taking advantage of change requires an unflagging ability to question and probe for solutions to problems. The ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Talent IQ
• Chapter 1: Build a Culture of Achievement
• Chapter 2: Select Achievers
• Chapter 3: Coach for Achievement
• Chapter 4: Improve or Remove Talent-on-the-Bubble
• Chapter 5: Communicate Commitment
• Chapter 6: Measure Responsibility
• Chapter 7: Improve Team IQ
• Chapter 8: Manage Conflict—Now!
• Chapter 9: Design a Leadership Talent Map for the Future
• Conclusion: The Talent Imperative
• Bibliography
• Appendix A: The Talent IQ Assessment
• Appendix B: The Global Demographics of Talent
• Appendix C: The Talent IQ Research Project
• About the Author
• Copyright