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WSJ Pro: Why is data important to performance management?
Mr. Raman: There’s a phrase I’ve been using a lot: Humans are creatures of habit; data shows you the habit, therefore data has a window into the human soul.
How do they [employees] feel emotionally? How do they feel technically, in terms of competency and mastery? How are they actually producing? Do they feel respected in the organization? We can measure all that stuff. If you can go to each one of those people and see how individually they show up everyday and what their individual needs are, and it changes moment by moment as they operate throughout the day, you can go to them and say, “Let me coach you to a better place; let me invite you to a better outcome for what you’re doing as an individual.” It now gives you this ability to individually train, individually coach people to their best ability.
WSJ Pro: How can data help minimize bias in talent management?
Mr. Raman: You start to see what the superhero traits and capabilities of people are, because the bias has always been, “I’m going to put algorithms in place to tell me what KPIs are important.” When you decide these five KPIs are important, the KPIs that someone else is excelling at don’t even show up on the list.
When we take this data, they start seeing stuff that they’ve never looked at before–we call them empathy graphs. And as these things start coming [together] based on real, objective data, that is just what has been performed, they start finding that people have capabilities that aren’t pulling to the top at all. Then they [leaders] start to ask, “Why is this happening?”
WSJ Pro: Having the data is one thing, how can leaders act on it appropriately?
Mr. Raman: [With data, leaders] start confirming suspicions that they may have already that they couldn’t prove, and they start seeing things they’ve never seen before and they start asking, “Well what happened here?”
You start to see people who are less effective in certain areas and people who are more effective. So the question starts becoming, “Where do you want to focus your time and attention? Do you want to focus on lifting the bottom up or making more room at the top?” It usually ends up becoming more of a philosophical question that the leader or leaders have to opt into as to what do they want to fix.
WSJ Pro: Why should leaders focus on the workers who might not be stars or rising stars? What are the pitfalls to focusing talent development on high performers?
Mr. Raman: There are plenty of people who are good performers in the company that are actually a cancer within the company, because they treat everyone else with complete condescension and disdain. But they keep delivering and the company keeps them on board. At some point everyone else says, “This whole idea of caring for others, I don’t give a flying flip about anybody else, I’m here to do my job.” Those are toxic cultures at the end of the day. You focus on one dimension and say, “That’s it.” When people just focus on the stars, they are making very short-sighted decisions. And it’s not sustainable over time because you start to seriously hamper the other talent, the diversity that could actually increase the overall productivity of that organization. You can’t have all Michael Jordans, you need to have Scottie Pippens too. Are you focusing on building your Bs into As
and Cs into Bs? By laws of averages, that is where most of the people are.
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