Jon Tveten

Value creation is at the heart of free enterprise.  A company  transforms lower value inputs into  highly valued outputs that customers are pleased to purchase because what they're receiving is worth more to them than what they're paying. That is the formula for a successful business model, but please, let's just keep that between us, ok?  It is clear that the core process of value creation in a company relates to value from a customer's point of view, but other value creation must happen in parallel, not least of which is talent management.Optimal value created by way of talent management is a high-performance culture: Not just high-performing individuals, but high-performing individuals who work together in a way that is energizing, productive, resourceful, affirming, and rewarding. Apparently it is news to many in the business world that high-performing cultures do not just happen, because they give no hint of lifting a finger to build one. No matter what business you are in, you are in the business of people, people who make possible the other business you're in. At least until the robots completely take over.High-performance cultures pay dividends right at the front end of the talent management process by attracting the talent that thrives in a high-performing environment.  High performers who somehow enter a low-performance culture are recognized by that culture's immune system and rejected in a foreign-body reaction - resulting in either conversion of high performer to a tolerable low performer or, more likely, departure of the high performer.  Similarly, low performers who fake their way into a high-performing culture will usually leave of their own accord due to the unreasonable expectations of their peers that they would be high performers, too.After hiring a high-potential employee, the next step in the people business is onboarding that employee so he/she is enabled to function effectively in his/her job.  This investment in a successful embarkation by a new hire is surprisingly uncommon; the prevailing wisdom being something along the line of "We hired a smart person. He/she will figure things out".  Risk management is a discipline not often deployed at this juncture.As employees settle in to their jobs, true talent managers take pains to keep them from settling into complacency by fostering their development with new challenges and growth opportunities. The psychology of optimal experience was described in the book, Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as occurring when the challenge at hand is an achievable stretch from current competencies.  When asked their preference, most will say, "Easy".  In fact, though, easy is not very satisfying; people are much more likely to find satisfaction in achieving something via effort and learning.Last but not least on the trail to high performance is performance.  Many of us got our start in performance management by way of parenthood, and many of us got on the wrong track early.  That primal instinct to catch them doing something wrong and correct that wrong behavior with negative consequences never quite seems to lead to the more desirable, self-motivated behaviors we had in mind. Yet we persist with our punishments, and they persist with their bad behaviors.  It seems that only by becoming grandparents do we learn to delight in catching them doing something right and combine positive consequences for the good behaviors with patience for the rest.We are beginning to recognize that the most significant positive consequences of doing good work are the opportunities for a sense of accomplishment at something worthwhile.  One of the very best things we can do in the business of people is to frame their work as meaningful and then support their efforts with coaching, training, removing obstacles... facilitating their means of achieving  valued results.

VALUE CREATION IN THE BUSINESS OF PEOPLE

If you want a thing done well, do it yourself: An old proverb that has its place, but that place is most certainly not in management.  Managers earn their way by helping others get things done well - leveraging their competence across a number of subordinates who can accomplish far more than any individual.  All too often, though, managers - especially new managers - forget their role of working through others and revert to the old individual-contributor skill set to get a thing done well. This happens because they know very well how to do it; they do not know very well how to get someone else to do it, do it right, and do it timely.Career paths are such that the way ahead often follows this pattern: demonstrate competence and commitment as an individual contributor → get recognized has a high-performer → get promoted into management. Not uncommonly, this career advancement comes without development - sometimes without awareness - of management competencies.  The default notion of how to manage seems to generally go something like this: tell people what to do, observe for any defects in the work or the approach to work, and admonish the people for the defects.  Have we mentioned the high percentage of workers who hate their boss? There must be a better way.Every organization under the sun would benefit by optimizing its capability for talent management.  From attracting top talent to selecting best talent + best fit to efficiently onboarding to effectively developing potential to managing performance, the components of talent management must be in place to enable high levels of organizational performance. This process is iterative: it applies to each new hire, but also to each promotion.  Our current focus on the job of management centers on the development component of talent management, both development of the new manager's competencies and the managers responsibility for developing his/her people."But, wait!" You say, "We have HR and Training to handle all that people stuff.  Just let me go back to work."  And therein lies the problem.  If you are in management, the people stuff is your work.  HR and T&D departments are tremendous resources, absolutely, but their ability to perform is contingent on a partnership with line management.  There is no chance for managing talent optimally if line managers abdicate their portion of the shared responsibility.  Rather, the line must engage in a business partnership with HR and T&D to develop their own potential and develop the potential of their workers.  A business partnership between line management and functional departments may represent a significant departure from business as usual; in other words it would require a significant organizational change. Before dismissing the idea due to a current overabundance of change in your organization, it might be helpful to consider the implications for such a change on workforce engagement.  This business partnership requires collaboration which means engaging with one another.  Managers will also have to engage with workers in order to bring about meaningful development - contrast that dynamic with the scolding boss described above.  Is it any wonder that study after study shows a strong positive correlation between workforce engagement and workplace productivity?Why go through all the pain and aggravation of having to learn how to teach others to do a thing when one is perfectly capable to just doing it and doing it better, faster, and cheaper?  Because the relative ease of doing it yourself is beneficial only in the very short term.  The effort that goes into talent development is a long-term investment that wise companies have been making for ages, and seeing justification for it with outsized returns.

THE JOB OF A MANAGER

Information management is the process of creating value by transforming data into information into knowledge into wisdom. Within the concept of knowledge, there is also a value progression: book knowledge, applied knowledge, and experience-tempered knowledge.For example, would you prefer a high-performing medical student or an experienced surgeon to perform an intricate operation. Medical education produces a knowledge worker—a physician, and the process of accumulating medical knowledge provides a clear example of the value progression.During its first two years, medical school is traditionally similar to all prior classroom learning experiences, with the exception perhaps of volume and intensity. Young medical students absorb enormous amounts of anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, pathology, genetics, histology, pharmacology, microbiology, neuroanatomy, human development, and so forth. The resulting understanding of the structure and function of the human body provides context for managing human health. Having completed the first two years, medical students know a lot, but they are by no means physicians. They are students who are prepared to take the first of a three-part licensing examination.The second half of traditional medical school is a significant shift from classroom instruction to clinical rotations in which students join residents, fellows, and clinical faculty as they provide patient care, largely in hospital settings. Students learn mostly by watching and, occasionally, doing. Students use the exposure on various rotations to determine the specialty they will pursue in post-graduate training.Successful completion of four years of medical school and passing the second of the three-part licensing exams earns the student a Doctor of Medicine degree. The student has become a doctor, but a doctor ready to be a PG-1 (Post-Graduate year 1, formerly intern), not yet your personal physician.Residency programs do a superb job of translating a resident's book knowledge into applied knowledge. This process starts during the clinical years of med school, but accelerates as new doctors do less watching and much more doing—under the close supervision of the more senior residents, fellows, and staff physicians.Learning is intense because training typically occurs in a busy hospital with critically ill and injured patients showing up 24/7/365. The third part of the physician licensing exam occurs after the PG-1 year; a medical license is awarded if the student passes the test. Physicians at this stage are licensed and eligible to practice, but generally elect to continue at least two more years in the residency program and potentially more in a subspecialty fellowship.Now, we have a young doctor with book knowledge and applied knowledge, and typically we have a person who is well trained and up-to-date on the latest in medical science. The intensity of residency training crams a great deal of experience into the package as well, although most physicians value the additional seasoning gained over years of practice. Traditionally, this has been the pinnacle for physicians' knowledge, but there's tremendous potential for something more—wisdom.Wisdom can be distinguished from knowledge as the capability to anticipate what will happen rather than an understanding of what has happened. It takes the latter to achieve the former, but wisdom does not automatically follow knowledge. When I was taking care of diabetic patients, for example, we knew how well we were controlling the disease for any given patient. What I did not know was how well I was managing a population of diabetic patients; how I was doing compared to how I would expect to be doing or compared to how colleagues were doing in my medical group/city/state/country/world.Big Data holds the promise of extending the value progression from knowledge to wisdom in medicine, business, and everywhere. The ability to combine learning from individual experience with learning from collective experience, to assess observed performance against some yardstick of expected performance, and to analyze variances in outcomes to gain insights into what's working and what's failing all hold the promise of helping us better anticipate how to achieve better outcomes.

Jon Tveten

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