Talent Management Deadly Sins

Spending the majority of time in Talent Acquisition I can say I have seen this most often in my career. A hiring manager or recruiter gets happy ears and falls in love with a candidate who is not a fit. This actually happens for a lot of reason which could include not having a well defined job fit. Not using an objective hiring process. Or just falling in love with a canddate because they love the same college football team as you! That last one I have seiously seen happen....   Our expertise includes helping dial in assessments for better selection, building interview guides to vet out what a candidate has actually done versus what their resume says did, help build a job profile to define what you actually need based on industry trends or things like cultural fit.

This is a grim description of an organization simply promoting the next best person for a recently vacated job. Reasons for this include a sense of organizational obligation, "Well Bob has been with the company for 10 years." Or panic, "We may lose our customer if we don't quickly fill that Account Manager role."  Battlefield Promotions always entail short term thinking and usually involves a level of selfishness, but over time they can cause more damage than the avoidance of the short term pain. Things like promoting someone above their competency level and you end up having to demote them or worse, fire them later. You will send the wrong message organizationally when you don't open up the job to someone maybe more qualified in another department. You risk sending the message there is no career upside or there is a "good ol' boy" networkk you have to be a part of to get ahead.  Taking a deep breath and mapping out clear goals to back fill your vacant role is always worth it. Sometimes the answer is internal and sometimes the right hire is external.

This one is probably at the top of the most personal/heartbreaking No-no's that we see. An individual that has been miscast in a certain role and company leadership leaves them there. Job satifcation lives at the intersection of 1. what we are good at and 2. what we are passionate about. Most of the time we see leaders steal not on an indivudals future but a division's future or even an entire's organization future by leaving someone in a role they are not competent to do. These usually come down to  an unwillingness to have a courageous conversation with the miscast candidate. In that scenario the leader is stealing the person's future by leaving them in a role they can't excel at which prohibits them from pursuing a role they better wired for - in other words a job they are good at and passionate about.

Tim Irwin, in Extraordinary Influence, addresses this issue the most  poignantly with the image of the 3 facces of a leader. Over time the most impactful of the 3 faces is our core and is it "healthy, average or unhealthy." ELI uses the Ennegram to help in this area. This is one of the most "touchy-feely" of the consulting we do. Things that lead to a broken core of a talented employee can be things like marriage problems at home, distrust of the employer, past hurts by a former boss, etc.  A broken core manifests themselves in behaviors we call career-stoppers (they can limit an employees upward progress in the cocmpany) and if the bad behaviors continue they become career-killers that lead to get getting fired.  We believe there is a path to help leaders change the trajectory of that person's career path with your organization.

This one is sometimes the hardest to know what is right for your organization, but the one that makes your cutlture the most vulnerable. Leaders have to get comfortable getting uncomfortable and creating an environment where feedback is expected and it is kind, specific and useful. This is accomplished by creating a talent language in your organization and then establishing enviroments for both formal and informal feedback sessions.   Some of the most toxic cultures are companies where employees don't know where they stand with their performance. What always happens is you end up losing the high performers and high potentials you don't want because they don't feel appreciated. On the flip side you end up stuck with the employees you wished would walk in and resign because you want to avoid terminating them!!