Talent Is Overrated (18 page)

 
Since your mental model is an understanding of how your domain functions as a system, you know how changes in the system's inputs will affect the outputs—that is, how the events that just happened will create the events that are about to happen. Two groups of firefighters, novices and experts, were shown scenes of fires and asked what they saw. The novices saw what was obvious—the intensity and color of the flames. But the experts saw a story; they used their mental models to infer what must have led to the current state of the fire and to predict what was likeliest to happen next. Note that these inferences and predictions are more than just interesting. They are evidence that the experts are far better prepared than the novices to fight the fire.

A mental model is never finished. Great performers not only possess highly developed mental models, they are also always expanding and revising those models. It isn't possible to do the whole job through study alone. In many fields, much of this work must be done through deliberate practice activities or through metacognitive processes in the work itself, as we've discussed. But in addition, significant building and enriching of mental models can be done through study and other knowledge seeking, and it would be foolish to leave these tools unused.

 
You can do a great deal as an individual to apply the principles of great performance in your own life and work. Applying these principles is always beneficial. No matter how many steps on the road to great performance you choose to take, you will be better off than if you hadn't taken them. There is no hurdle to clear before the advantages start accruing. This is pure opportunity.

That's for you as an individual. Chances are you work in an organization. To really turbocharge the benefits of deliberate practice, the principles need to be applied organizationally as well as individually. It can be done, and the fact that it isn't done very widely makes the opportunity all the more valuable. That's our next topic.

Chapter Eight

Applying the Principles in Our Organizations

 
 
Not all organizations want to be great. That's the hard truth. For those that do—that really do—the principles of great performance show quite clearly what it takes to get there. And for those enterprises that are paddling hard just to stay afloat, whose owners and managers may not feel they've got the luxury of thinking grandiose thoughts about greatness, these same principles can help make their performance much better. In fact, the principles of great performance can help improve such organizations to the point where they might actually dare to think about greatness. That is, the principles can do this if they're applied.

Yet the great majority of organizations don't apply these principles. In today's economy, that fact is more than just an opportunity. Applying the principles is becoming an imperative for all organizations that want to survive. We've seen in chapter 1 how the economy is increasingly based not on financial capital but on human capital, and how the abilities of the people in an organization—much more than traditionally important factors like economies of scale or patent protections—determine an enterprise's success or failure. And we've seen that, in a global economy, standards of performance are rising more quickly and more broadly than ever before, leaving subpar performers no place to hide. Those are reasons enough for organizations to start applying the principles of great performance in a big way. But there's more.

Today's best young employees, the ones on whom future success will depend, are demanding that employers help make them better performers. It seems that young people understood the new nature of today's economy before a lot of CEOs did, and they insist on employers who will keep developing them. Judy Pahren, senior vice president for development and diversity at Capital One Financial, which does a good job of applying the principles of great performance, says new employees consistently put continuous professional development at or near the top of their criteria for choosing an employer. Many other human resources chiefs report the same finding (and they all report that money is never among the top three criteria). General Electric, the best major company at applying the principles of great performance organizationally, is responding to the new environment by, among other things, getting high-potential employees to the company's famed Crotonville leadership development center much earlier in their careers than previously; CEO Jeff Immelt says that in attracting top prospects, “that's a strong selling point.”

Organizations are finding that the advantages of building a big reputation for developing people are even greater than they may have thought. Such a reputation grants these companies “a first-pick advantage,” as the RBL Group consulting firm calls it, an edge in attracting the cream of college and business-school students. By continually attracting the most promising graduates, and then developing them further, these companies become even higher-performing organizations, further enhancing their ability to attract the best—a virtuous cycle that makes a company more dominant every year.

The elite group of organizations that apply the principles of great performance follow several major rules.

 
Understand that each person in the organization is not just doing
a job, but is also being stretched and grown.

 
That is, the best organizations assign people to jobs in much the same way that sports coaches or music teachers choose exercises for their students—to push them just beyond their current capabilities and build the skills that are most important. John Lechleiter, president of Eli Lilly, describes a typical model: about two-thirds of people development comes from carefully chosen job assignments, about one-third from mentoring and coaching (which we'll examine more closely), and a smidgen from classroom training.

Building people through job assignments seems obvious in theory, but in practice it's tough. Organizations tend to assign people based on what they're already good at, not what they need to work on. The merciless competitive pressure on every company makes it difficult to pull accomplished employees out of jobs they do extremely well and put them into positions where they may struggle. That's a tension every organization must deal with in order to become more successful.

No company assembles careers on the principles of great performance better than GE. It holds an advantage over most firms, since its breadth of businesses lets it offer a wider range of experiences than almost any other company. It uses that advantage for all it's worth to create some of the world's best-rounded and most sought after executives.

One of GE's secret developmental weapons, an example of the useful assignments it can hand out, is the job of running GE Transportation, the business that makes locomotives in Erie, Pennsylvania. Consider all the ways in which it can stretch a manager: Buying locomotives is a big decision for the business's customers, so the person running the shop—recently John Dineen, a twenty-one-year GE employee—gets experience dealing directly with CEOs of customer companies. The business is unionized, so he learns about labor negotiations. The product is complex, as is the supply chain—more learning that's broadly applicable. Erie is sufficiently remote and unglamorous that the business leader can develop without national media scrutiny. And if, heaven forbid, the leader is a washout, GE is big enough to handle the trouble without much trauma to the bottom line.

Dineen's prelocomotive career is a typical example of what GE can do and many other organizations strive for. He was a manager in the company's appliance and plastics businesses, both highly valued developmental posts, one of which makes consumer products and the other industrial products; he has worked in a couple of finance assignments, which also develop skills that are very important at GE; and he has held two large jobs in Asia, one staff and one line. You can't do much better than that.

Deliberately putting managers into stretch jobs that will require them to learn and grow is the central development technique of the most successful organizations. It won't work by itself; it requires the other practices described here to be effective. But these companies understand that for employees trying to improve, making real decisions in real time is the central practice activity that produces growth. Some firms follow detailed rules about which experiences are required; an executive may need to work in at least two territories, for example, or two lines of business. Others are more informal but still observe the principle.

Executives consistently report that their hardest experiences, the stretches that most challenged them, were the most helpful. A. G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, was in charge of the company's Asian operations during a major Japanese earthquake and the Asian economic collapse. He says that's when he discovered that “you learn ten times more in a crisis than during normal times.”

His crisis experiences happened by chance, but while crises can't be engineered, crisis experiences can be. A crisis was in progress at GE in 1988, when compressors in millions of GE refrigerators were found to be faulty and had to be replaced. CEO Jack Welch and human resources chief Bill Conaty decided to put Jeff Immelt in charge of the recall, though he had zero experience with appliances or with recalls. “It was a hurricane,” Immelt says. “But Welch and Conaty knew exactly what they were doing. And there's no question I wouldn't be CEO today if I hadn't had that job.”

 
Find ways to develop leaders within their jobs.

We've seen the value of domain expertise in any field. In business, that value seems to be increasing. Many top-performing organizations report new tension between their need to develop people by moving them through different jobs and the need to develop their expertise in certain domains by leaving them in jobs. This may result from the heightened competitiveness of a global economy; a division has a tough time competing when the boss moves on every eighteen to twenty-four months, a typical pattern in many companies. So the challenge is to give people the growth benefits of new stretch assignments without moving them into new jobs so often.

Eli Lilly is one of many companies trying harder to do that. One technique: short-term work assignments. Managers don't leave their jobs, but they take on an additional assignment outside their field of expertise or interest. That increases the burden on the employee, who is doing not just different work but additional work. Managers seem not to mind because they realize they've been identified for extra development. The company says the approach has been a big hit. Nokia is trying the same thing and reports a similar response.

 
Encourage their leaders to be active in their communities.

 
The advantages to the company are many. Most companies have enunciated values that include respect for the individual, good citizenship, and integrity. When company leaders also become leaders of charities, schools, and other nonprofits, they show their commitment to those values, encouraging and inspiring employees.

Other benefits are more pragmatic. Community leadership roles are opportunities for employees to practice skills that will be valuable at work. For example, most employees will never serve on the company's board of directors or on any major corporate board. But many of them can serve on a local nonprofit's board, and the experience is an excellent opportunity to develop strategic thinking, financial analysis, and many other skills. At General Mills, an explicit part of many employees' development plans as set by their bosses is to serve on a nonprofit board.

 
Understand the critical roles of teachers and of feedback.

 
We've seen that great performance is built through activities that are designed specifically to improve particular skills, and that in many realms teachers and coaches are especially helpful in designing those activities. At most organizations, nobody is in the role of teacher or coach. Employees aren't told which skills will be most helpful to them and certainly aren't told how best to develop them. But most top-performing organizations have explicit coaching and mentoring programs. At these enterprises, careful job assignments and other large-scale programs determine the general direction of an employee's development; mentors provide detailed advice on which subskills need attention right now. Many of the CEOs of these companies, when asked how they reached the top, tell similar stories about the importance of a few key mentors who consistently guided and helped them. Jeff Fettig, CEO of Whirlpool, is typical: “I am here today in part due to a handful of people who, before it was in vogue, provided coaching and mentoring to me early in my career. That helped me to develop.”

The other side of this coin is feedback. We've examined at length the importance of frequent, rapid, accurate feedback for improving performance. Most organizations are terrible at providing honest feedback. The annual evaluation exercise is often short, artificial, and mealy-mouthed. Employees have no idea how well they performed and thus no prospect of getting better.

Yet nothing stands in the way of frequent, candid feedback except habit and corporate culture. Of course cultures can be formidable, but they can be changed. Any enterprise that wants a culture of true candor can have it, and there's no excuse for not having it. The best-performing organizations have exactly this kind of culture. For example, Immelt of GE says that the people who report to him “get coaching from me every time I see them.”

Many of these companies could do even more to establish a culture of candor. A powerful tool with great potential for most organizations is the U.S. Army's after-action review. Colonel Thomas Kolditz, who runs the leadership development program at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, says that for the past twenty-five years “it has literally transformed the Army.” The concept is simple. After any significant action, in training or in combat, soldiers and officers meet to discuss what happened. They take off their helmets—a symbolic action indicating that “there's no rank in the room,” as Kolditz says. “Comments are blunt. If the boss made a bad decision, often it's a subordinate who points that out.” The session isn't about blaming; instead, it's “a professional discussion,” as an army training circular puts it. Part of its strength is that it yields very complete feedback. “The genius of it is that the junior people always know what's going on,” says Kolditz. “If you put them in a position to speak openly, they will.”