“What am I missing?” Janet, a concerned division leader, posed this question to me after reading a post I wrote about what leaders can do to get their employees to be accountable.

She continued, “It makes sense for me to check situational constraints, ensure capability fit and assess the willingness of my direct reports. Could you say more about situations when someone has the needed capabilities to do the work and competing demands are not an issue, but still does not perform as expected?”

As I picked her brain to get context, she explained she understood the importance of employee engagement and had taken action to enhance it. This had improved employee performance over time, but there were a couple members of her team that still were not delivering on expectations.

What I discovered upon further exploration was Janet had not missed something. She was headed down the right path. She just had not stayed on it long enough yet to get a read on what was happening with the two team members in question. As it turns out, she was dealing with the Ringelmann effect and a form of the victim mindset.

Countering the Ringelmann Effect

With the Ringelmann effect, individual effort decreases as team size increases. More specifically, team members exert less effort when there are others involved who provide needed effort. Those exerting less effort don’t feel as responsible for the output. Research over the years has shown this is due more to poor motivation than failing to effectively coordinate the efforts of all parties. Another term for this effect is social loafing.

So, what can be done about it? Here are tactics to counter the Ringelmann effect that helped Janet:

• Establish a standard for team performance that includes how individual team members contribute then set goals that can be used as a base for comparison regarding output
• Assign the task to a smaller number of team members (a subset of the team) to increase each team member’s level of accountability and identifiability
• Provide candid, constructive feedback on a consistent basis to make the link between effort and expected outcome clear (and coach team members how to do this for each other)

Overcoming the Victim Mindset                    

While the Ringelmann effect was at work with one of Janet’s team members. The other team member was dealing with something else. His confidence was shaken because of a negative outcome he had experienced. Since he was dwelling on the negative outcome, this was hindering his performance as a member of the team. In other words, he had succumbed to the “doubtful victim” mindset.

Janet was able to overcome this form of the mindset with steps to increase his self-confidence. Incidentally, be sure to keep an eye out for the other form known as the “arrogant victim” mindset.

For more information on handling these two forms, take a look at the following posts:

• How To Manage The Doubtful Victim Mindset

• How To Manage The Arrogant Victim Mindset

As you encounter your own employee performance puzzles, allow enough time to identify factors that contribute to them. The Ringelmann effect and the victim mindset could be the culprits. With the right tactics, these culprits can be eliminated or at least minimized.

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Ryan Lahti is the founder and managing principal of OrgLeader, LLC. Stay up to date on Ryan’s STEM-based organization tweets here: @ryanlahti

(Photo: Puzzle Part, Pixabay)

How did it go when someone was transitioned out of your company due to lack of fit? If you have not had to do it yourself, you have most likely been in a situation where one of your colleagues had to transition someone out of your organization who was not a fit. This is a specific type of offboarding (i.e., the process used to transition an employee out of an organization). In some situations, offboarding due to lack of fit is uncomfortable for the leader and the ex-employee-to-be. In many cases, offboarding of this type is a negative parting of the ways that results in ill will between the parting employee and the employer the leader represents.

While transitioning someone out of a company may not be a pleasant task, it can be done in a professional way that makes it easier for all parties involved to handle. Steps can also be taken to make it less likely that someone will need to be offboarded in the future.

Send Off Like You Welcome

Most companies recognize how important it is to effectively onboard leaders and employees to help them feel connected to the organization and become productive in a timely manner. These companies have an onboarding process in place (or at least are establishing one). An effective onboarding process creates a better experience for the person going through it while it benefits the organization implementing it.

The same amount of preparation should be put into offboarding as there is put into onboarding. Unfortunately, this is not that common. The general objective of offboarding should align with that of onboarding—create a better experience for the person as it helps the organization. This is more likely to be the case if the transition is done fairly and with dignity so both sides can move on in a productive way. Examples of fairness and dignity include treating employees as professionals as they transition out, talking about them in a respectful manner, and providing outplacement services. Granted, there occasionally are some less-than-optimal partings that may need to involve attorneys. Nonetheless, using a fair and dignified offboarding approach as an essential part of a talent management process can substantially reduce the likelihood of these less-than-optimal partings. A fair and dignified approach can also help a company maintain a positive reputation in the market via reviews on Glassdoor and commentary in publications and social media.

Check Your Fit Test

One way to reduce the potential need to transition employees of out your company is take an honest look at how your organization determines whether someone is a fit for a job and the organization’s culture. Besides reviewing an individual’s resume, conducting standard interviews and checking references to verify employment and past responsibilities, what else is the company doing to gauge job and culture fit?

With behavior-based interviews, topgrading, tools for assessing individual characteristics, and methods for understanding organizational culture, there are plenty of resources that can be used to more effectively gauge fit on the front end. This in turn will reduce the need to offboard employees down the road. The key is whether enough effort has been put into determining the right process for your organization and then ensuring it is successfully used on a consistent basis.

A mis-hire not only creates the unpleasant task of having to transition someone out of the organization, it is also costly to the organization. Research conducted by Brad Smart has shown that the cost of a mis-hire is much more than the salary that was paid to the person who was not a fit. The cost is actually a multiple of the person’s base salary. More specifically, the cost of a mis-hire is:

• 8 times base salary for a middle manager
• 15 times base salary for a vice president
• 27 times base salary for a senior executive

Using these figures, this means that a leader with a base salary of $100,000 who is not a fit could cost the organization well into the million-dollar range. This amount is likely to raise the eyebrow of anyone responsible for a P&L.

Make Patience Your Ally

What happens when leaders get anxious and feel they need to fill an open position immediately? They frequently shortcut the organization’s talent acquisition process (even if the organization has a robust one) and do a “warm body hire” (i.e., putting someone in the role who does not truly match the job or culture). Leaders do this because they feel that they need someone to take care of the responsibilities of the position in question sooner rather than later.

Although this enables these leaders to check the box regarding filling the position in the short term, it frequently creates more problems in the long run. In other words, this leads to the mis-hire costs previously mentioned and ultimately the need to transition this person out of the organization.

Therefore, the second way to reduce the potential need to offboard employees is to be patient. Succinctly stated, keep in mind the potential long-term and short-term impact to help ensure you take adequate time to find the person who is the best fit for the job and the culture.

Related insights:

Executive Role Transitions Are More than Onboarding

Are You Assessing or Guessing with Your Leaders?

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Ryan Lahti is the founder and managing principal of OrgLeader, LLC. Stay up to date on Ryan’s STEM-based organization tweets here: @ryanlahti

(Photo: Exit 2, Flickr)

If you are a CEO, an executive team member or a leader heading up a business unit or corporate function, there are some important questions to keep in mind regarding leadership continuity.

1. Who is your successor?
2. Who is your successor’s successor?
3. How often do you review your bench strength?
4. How effective is your pipeline that builds your bench strength?

In my experience, here is what typically happens when I ask these questions at organizations. Most of the senior leaders that I have encountered can answer the first question. The second question is a little more difficult for them to address. The third question makes them realize they should add a regular bench strength review to their “to do” list. The fourth question usually prompts a concerned “I don’t know” response.

All of these questions relate to succession management which is on the radar of human resources (HR), but it is not always a consistent item on the radar of senior executives. If this is the case in your organization, these points may help to keep it on executive radar:

• A bench strength shortfall is the third largest cause of stalls in corporate revenue growth (Corporate Strategy Board)
• Companies with stronger leadership benches are four times more likely to outperform their peers in revenue growth (Corporate Leadership Council)

By emphasizing these two key points, I have found that senior leadership is much more willing to give the appropriate amount of attention to succession management. This attention subsequently provides a way to ensure the execution of succession management is more than a mere popularity contest.

More specifically, succession management is not just a way to promote people who are well-liked by others or to identify backup candidates for top positions in the organizational hierarchy. Succession management is a systematic way of building feeder sources of candidates throughout an organization’s pipeline that enables leadership continuity. Based on the work of Mahler as well as Charan, Drotter and Noel, this pipeline covers the following progression through the organizational hierarchy:

• Manage self
• Manage others
• Manage managers
• Manage a function
• Manage a business
• Manage general managers
• Manage the enterprise

The feeder sources for the pipeline are especially important as you progress from manage others to manage the enterprise. Incidentally, succession management should not be the sole responsibility of HR. While HR should guide the succession management process, it should not necessarily own it. In order to make sure that succession management is an ongoing process and not just a periodic task to complete, leaders across the organization need to drive it and have metrics to gauge its impact. In order to give you an idea of potential metrics, here are some examples:

• Total number of distinct successors in the feeder source per critical position
• Percentage of positions without a “ready now” candidate
• Percentage of employees making cross-business unit moves in the past X years
• Utilization rate of development programs by high-potential and designated successor populations
• Designated successor retention rate

As you continue to consider the specifics for improving your leadership pipeline, be aware that effective succession management integrates other human capital components. These components range from leadership development to performance management. This integration makes sure potential successors are continuing to develop needed capabilities as they are accomplishing objectives in their current roles. Now that you have all of this information, here is one last question: How close is your organization to having a robust succession management process?

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Ryan Lahti is the founder and managing principal of OrgLeader, LLC. Stay up to date on Ryan’s STEM-based organization tweets here: @ryanlahti

(Photo: Dollar Photo Club)

• I wanted to determine if there is consistency across the studies that might suggest meta-trends in the human capital field.
• As an evidence-oriented guy, I needed to see how much I could personally validate what these studies are saying.

The Sources

With these objectives in mind, I reviewed domestic and international studies conducted by respected global consulting firms, professional associations and applied research organizations over the last two years. More specifically, this range of sources included:

• Boston Consulting Group
• Human Capital Institute (HCI)
• McKinsey
• The Conference Board
• Deloitte
• Society for Human Resource Management
• KPMG
• The Economist Intelligence Unit

The Meta-Trends

As a result of this analysis, I did in fact find some consistency across the studies from these organizations that suggest seven meta-trends related to critical human capital needs of companies. Below you will find the meta-trends listed in descending order of frequency. Incidentally, some critical needs were discovered with equal frequency across the studies thereby creating a two-way tie for meta-trend #1 (identified as 1A and 1B) and a three-way tie for meta-trend #2 (identified as 2A, 2B and 2C).

Meta-Trend #1A: Develop leaders who can successfully guide the business and build the workforce to sustain it

Meta-Trend #1B: Create a work environment that engages employees so that they want to stay with the organization

Meta-Trend #2A: Establish a more effective HR operating model that is focused on business performance and in sync with business leaders

Meta-Trend #2B: Identify and acquire talent with the specific skillsets needed for key roles and onboard this talent in an efficient manner

Meta-Trend #2C: Define, monitor and hold all members of the organization (including HR) accountable to key performance indicators related to human capital

Meta-Trend #3: Revise performance management processes to ensure clear performance criteria are set, leaders provide ongoing coaching and development to meet the criteria and reward/recognition systems reinforce desired behavior

Meta-Trend #4: Design and consistently execute efficient, user-friendly talent management processes across the entire enterprise

In addition to the analysis identifying these global, meta-trends related to critical human capital needs, it also highlights that HR still has work to do in order to address them. Not surprisingly, the meta-trends represent the areas where HR had the largest capability gaps. As HR looks to address these gaps and become more strategic, the study done by HCI clarified some barriers that HR will need to overcome:

• HR lacks the ability to see organizational priorities (identified by 52% of respondents in the HCI study)
• HR leaders spend too much time on transactional tasks (43% of their day) compared to strategic issues
• HR professionals view themselves as influential but it is not clear whether others share this view

The Proof

Upon completing the analysis of the studies, I reality-tested the meta-trends with what I have encountered in my work in 20+ industries (especially with fact-based organizations). After doing so, I found I could personally verify the accuracy of each meta-trend. What meta-trends can you verify using your organization?

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Ryan Lahti is the founder and managing principal of OrgLeader, LLC. Stay up to date on Ryan’s STEM-based organization tweets here: @ryanlahti

This issue deals with where the talent management process is providing the most value to the organization and where it is not. With the work of Brad Smart and the International Coach Federation showing that the cost of one leadership mis-hire can range from 15-27 times the leader’s base salary and the median company ROI for coaching is seven times the initial investment, there are two questions worth considering:

1. How effective is the organization at “hiring” candidates into leadership roles versus developing leaders once they are in the roles?

To be inclusive, hiring is defined as both external hires and internal hires (e.g., promotions). Developing leaders once they are in the roles includes helping them get up to speed in new roles (e.g., onboarding) and offering ways for them to enhance their capabilities as they serve in the roles over time.

2. What elements of the talent management process are the most and least effective regarding leaders?

In order to provide more detail, each part of the talent management process from question #1 is considered. The most critical parts are then identified.

To obtain answers to these two questions, I interviewed leaders at organizations in eight different industries ranging from consumer goods to healthcare to the Internet. These leaders rated the effectiveness of their organizations on each of the following items using a 5-point scale (1 = Ineffective and 5 = Very Effective).

• Promoting individuals into leadership roles
• Hiring external individuals into leadership roles
• Enhancing capabilities of individuals as they serve in leadership roles
• Onboarding individuals into leadership roles

Regarding question #1, the results showed that hiring (internal and external combined) leaders is done in a more effective manner at the organizations than developing leaders. On average, hiring leaders was found to be “somewhat effective” whereas developing leaders was found to be “neither effective/nor ineffective.” These results align with those from the New Talent Management Network’s 2014 Enablers and Blockers Report that show companies do not adequately reinforce the importance of development.

Regarding question #2, there are clear parts of the talent management process that are providing more value to these organizations. The organizations are the most effective at promoting individuals into leadership roles (internal hires) since this received the highest average rating of “somewhat effective.” These companies are the least effective at onboarding individuals into leadership roles since this received the lowest average rating of “somewhat ineffective.”

Given these findings, organizations need to focus more on helping leaders be productive in their roles once the internal/external hiring decision is made. Onboarding processes are a good starting point, and other offerings such as executive coaching and leadership programs can provide continuity. In order to ensure that talent management resources are used efficiently, appropriate methods and criteria should be used to assess the effectiveness of the leadership development offerings.

For more information, see Selecting an Executive Coach: The Three Critical Factors.

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Ryan Lahti is the founder and managing principal of OrgLeader, LLC. Stay up to date on Ryan’s STEM-based organization tweets here: @ryanlahti

As a starting point, consider what makes TM a legitimate business concern. If a company cannot successfully execute its business strategy, its sustainability is in jeopardy. A business strategy must be supported by a human capital strategy. Consequently, the top of the house has come to realize that TM is essential for strategy execution. According to research conducted by IBM and the Human Capital Institute:

• 80% of CEOs anticipate substantial changes for their organizations and their biggest concern is having a workforce in place that can adapt
• Talent is a board-level concern for 50% of organizations
• Companies that apply talent management practices demonstrate higher financial performance than their industry peers

Understanding your company’s effectiveness related to TM elements fundamentally involves using stakeholders and subject matter experts to assess the execution of these elements including how well they are integrated. In other words, determine the strengths (“+”) and areas needing improvement (“Δ”) related to:

• Workforce planning
• Talent acquisition
• Talent engagement
• Talent development
• Talent deployment
• Talent leadership
• Talent retention
• Talent metrics

Once TM strengths have been identified, discussions should focus on maintaining them over time. Once areas needing improvement have been identified, conversations should center on prioritizing the order in which they will be addressed and then executing a plan to do so.

As you think about your organization’s +/Δ related to TM, here are some questions to consider:

• How well defined is our human capital strategy?
• How effectively does our human capital strategy support our business strategy?
• Do we address all elements of TM?
• How integrated are the elements of TM in our company?
• How do we gauge the impact of TM elements over time?

• Stress on the job costs the U.S. economy $500 billion on an annual basis
• 550,000,000 workdays are lost each year due to stress
• 60-80% of industrial accidents are tied to stress
• 40% of employee turnover in U.S. companies is associated with stress
• 75-90% of all visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related issues

Considering that many leaders and employees experience stress resulting from work-related issues (e.g., tight deadlines, reorganizations, etc.), the impact of stress should be a topic of interest. At the individual level, poorly managed stress can contribute to a variety of negative health consequences including anxiety, exhaustion, ulcers, high blood pressure, heart disease and depression. As the preceding statistics point out, stress is not just a personal concern for employees and the leaders who manage them. It is also business concern that impacts the bottom line.

There are two forms of stress that deserve the attention of companies, leaders and employees. The first form is time-related stress which entails having too much to accomplish in a given period. This is the most common form of stress faced by leaders. Essentially, the workload is perceived to be excessive and results in feeling a lack of control over the amount of time and tasks.

The second form is interaction-related stress which involves interpersonal situations. This form causes more burnout than most other forms of stress, and it has a negative impact on productivity and satisfaction. It typically can be recognized as organizational roles being incompatible, disagreement about how to address a dilemma or individual personality clashes.

Managing stress may sound like a simple platitude, but it is worth putting forth the effort to make it happen. For example, time-related stress can be managed by focusing on important activities (e.g., a customer issue or career development opportunity) that result in desired outcomes instead of urgent activities that are perceived to need immediate attention (e.g., an email, a ringing phone or an unexpected interruption). Developing personal criteria to help determine what is truly important is integral to this strategy.

Furthermore, decreasing the amount of wasted time can lead to accomplishing more tasks and reducing stress levels. This could be accomplished by picking a typical week and recording in a simple spreadsheet how each hour of the day is spent in order to highlight inefficiencies in time use.

Interaction-related stress can be reduced by an individual enhancing his ability to recognize his own emotions and stress levels as well as those of others and then being able to control them. A national survey by a life insurance company found that employees with managers who were more interpersonally effective showed lower stress levels, less burnout, fewer stress-related incidents, higher productivity and more commitment to the organization than employees who had managers who lacked interpersonal competence. Succinctly stated, leaders and employees who have developed more emotional intelligence tend to be more collaborative, encounter fewer conflicts (or at least are better able to handle them) and experience less stress.