Misplaced Talent. Ungemah Joe

fast-changing workplace.

      The picture emerging from our work at the Centre for Progressive Leadership of the role that business leaders and top talent of the future will play in this changing landscape is very different from the one played out in organizations today. We live in exciting times, and the increasingly networked context in which organizations find themselves means that their scope will only become wider as complex networks of suppliers, partners, customers, and other stakeholders emerge and interact in increasingly sophisticated and unpredictable ways.

      Those at the top of the organization will, as I have argued elsewhere, need to become both “business model innovators” and “social facilitators,” while the way in which roles are continually reconfigured will present a challenge to those lower down in the hierarchy, even as those hierarchies themselves shift their shapes.

      Those charged with matching people to these new roles must align a more diverse set of people through networks of “open innovation” and, while we cannot predict exactly how the story will unfold, the only certainty is that the organizations of tomorrow will be radically different from those of today in ways that we have yet to imagine. Misplaced Talent provides a valuable resource for any practitioners faced with the immense challenge of responding to these trends as they negotiate their way through this rapidly changing backdrop to develop the dynamic capabilities upon which the organizations of the future will depend.

      One of the central themes of the book is person-environment fit (P-E fit), which is often misunderstood as being concerned simply with the degree of match (or mismatch) between a person and his or her environment. This is structural and static, whereas a more transactional framework has the potential to be process-oriented, taking account of the dynamic nature of the relationship between the person and the environment as the individual engages in “commerce” with that environment.

      Such a conceptualization engenders a systems view of people at work, with each component of the system being dependent upon the others. The adoption of a P-E fit perspective presents a challenge to both the practitioner and researcher. Compromises will have to be made in the short term, as currently available tools and techniques account for only a static perspective. While the profession of occupational psychology may be some way off from realizing the full potential of P-E fit, it does at least now have somewhere to begin in Misplaced Talent.

      The book represents both a valuable resource for the practitioner and a forward-thinking contribution to the profession as a whole as it begins rising to the challenge of a greater understanding of how an individual’s personal values, goals, and commitments express what is important to him or her in particular transactions with the work environment and what this, in turn, means for him or her personally, in terms of their significance for the values and beliefs that are held dear.

      In this sense, then, Joe offers the reader a chance to consider how people’s personal characteristics and belief systems act as a “perceptual lens” that enables them to create meaning out of their work lives. This focus on individual subjectivity and personal meaning goes some way toward providing a foundation for a fuller understanding of how people perform at their best at work, based on a genuinely cognitive-phenomenological account of human functioning.

      The book provides readers with an opportunity to consider how well they understand the drives and desires of those around them, and also invites a critical evaluation of how work is designed and how they select and develop those who do it.

      Professor Dean Bartlett, Ph.D., C.Psychol., FHEA, AFBPsS, HCPC, Registered Occupational Psychologist

      London, April 2015

      Preface

      I spend the better part of my day helping organizations make better people decisions. From redesigning a recruitment process, to running focus groups with leaders to define what good talent looks like or facilitating individual and group development, I am on the front line, working directly with leaders and professional talent managers to improve how their organizations are attracting and retaining the best workers.

      What has spurred me to write this book is a feeling that the tools and processes that I help set in motion swim against the tide of how organizations naturally operate. Tendencies like hiring the candidate who feels right or arguing that a department really is not like any other in the company (and, therefore, common job definitions don’t apply) undermine the architecture that I put in place.

      This had led me to question the work that I do. Are the tools and techniques that I promote really cut out for the job? Are there better ways to manage talent than what is accepted as common practice? Is the support that I typically offer inadequate to ensure long-term change?

      I have concluded that there is plenty of scope to improve how organizations make people decisions. I believe we are in a state of misplaced talent. At times, we park our best and brightest staff in the wrong places, where they are either not maximizing what they can do or become at risk of drifting away due to lack of interest in the job. At other times, we can forget what really matters to the organization, placing too much emphasis on jobs and functions that have minimal impact on what a company is tasked to do. And still other times, we bet on the wrong talent to lead and grow our businesses, overlooking employees or applicants who are more deserving and capable.

      By taking a step back, questioning what works, and becoming better advocates, we can make headway against bad practice. This book will help us do that. It is intended for anyone responsible for making people decisions in the workplace. Whether you work in an advisory capacity or as a people leader with full responsibility for your staffing decisions, the topics discussed in this book will have relevance for you. I use the term “practitioner” liberally, to designate any individual who is involved in advising or making people decisions.

      If, like me, you work in an advisory capacity, we have an obligation to promote the benefit of tools and techniques that are known to improve people decisions in the organizations we are servicing. Our job is to steer organizational leaders toward proven techniques and away from pseudo-science, while balancing needs for cost-effectiveness and efficiency.

      Leaders, too, have an obligation to ensure that they are valuing people decisions as highly as the other decisions they make. If leaders uniformly spent the same amount of time and energy on people decisions as they do on strategy or finance, I believe that organizations would look and feel very different than they do today.

      When it comes to the techniques that constitute good people practice, not much has changed in recent history. Competency design, assessment to inform hiring, and psychometric-led development are used as much today as they were five decades ago. Online technology may have increased tool accessibility and speed, but fundamentally, the job of a practitioner still involves conducting job analysis, recruiting talent, assessing capability and motivation, developing staff, and implementing change programs.

      What has changed is the desire and ability for organizations to question the return on investment that their people practices have on improved business efficiency, staff engagement, and performance. Like never before, organizations have at their disposal vast amounts of data on employees, customers, and financial indicators that can and are being used to validate whether people practices are adding value to the business. Coupled with a continuing need to save cost following the recent recession, only those programs that are able to prove their value are spared.

      A storm is brewing. On one hand, organizations are expecting more from us as practitioners, to demonstrate the value of what we bring to the business. Yet on the other hand, people decisions are routinely made without the rigor and discipline they deserve. I believe that now is the time to take a hard look at the tools and techniques we employ and determine which ones have the right to be widely adopted in our organizations. Only then can we engage businesses about the value we bring them through improved people decisions.

      In this book, I will take us on a tour of current people practices. This book diverges from an academic discourse on talent management by focusing on what those of us on the front line witness and advise our clients to adopt. I will lay on the line the potential benefits and drawbacks of various approaches, sometimes arguing that specific tools and techniques do more harm than good and should therefore be abandoned. More often, I will demonstrate