A wise man once told me, just because a cat has kittens in the oven doesn’t mean you get muffins. I think he was talking about the current state of succession planning systems in organizations throughout North America. In other words, we shouldn’t be so surprised when our succession management systems fail to turn up the leaders we need. It’s not as if we put the right ingredients into the mix in the first place.
For example, take the wide variety of HRIS (Human Resources Information Systems) tools available to enable the succession planning process. In years past, an incredible amount of time and money was poured into such software systems. The problem is, having the “system” doesn’t mean you have the “plan”; it just means you have the software. So before you go beating the nearest techie with an optical mouse, consider this: it’s not the expensive product that’s at fault, it’s the data you plugged into it that caused your woes. In the jargon of the industry, that’s a condition known as “Garbage In, Garbage Out.”
The same analogy holds for those who claim that they have a succession management system.
You may believe you have a rigorous performance management system or a variety of top-notch training and development programs or a kick-butt 360-feedback instrument. So what? Is the performance management data accurate and fair? Do all managers complete the process on time and with the same consistency? Does it get fed into the HRIS system in a timely fashion? Do the training programs have any follow up to see if the individual involved actually applied anything that they learned back on the job? Does your 360 instrument evaluate the behaviors that are vital for your business plan or just those that get dusted off each time there’s a review? Or, worse yet, are the behaviors you are teaching in your development programs not specific to your company’s values at all but very specific to one of a number of well recognized consulting firms!
Consider how most performance management reviews get completed. Usually, a manager approaches their direct report a few days prior to the annual event and asks them to “self-assess” their performance prior to the meeting. Sound familiar? I once asked the audience at an HR conference if it did to them. Most answered “Yes” and a few added that it’s what Human Resources taught them in their performance management training. Now, when most people self-assess they do so with a reliability of .20 on a scale of 00 – 1.0; while most managers are only accurate to the .40 range. A meeting of the minds between these two inaccuracies sends the end score up or down depending on whether the manager is overly critical or overly generous in their typical evaluation. To top it off, organizations then take that kind of data and feed it into their HRIS system. Presto! You’ve got Muffins!
Inaccuracies are also inherent when 360 assessments are used for performance management. The trend is tilted towards inflation for two reasons. First, if assessors know that a colleague’s performance review is linked to compensation, they don’t want to do anything to hinder that flow of income. Second, most people think that assessment is really the manager’s job anyway and don’t take it seriously as a result. On the other hand, if multi-source feedback is used for development purposes only, and managers do not have access to the actual results, participants tend to assess much more frankly and accurately, finding room for improvement in just about anyone.
In the end, whenever these sorts of inherent failings are part of the overall succession planning “system”, the people who get identified as top performers are really only a reflection of those who have been approved by their managers. In other words, the basic biases that we try to weed out through a more rigorous and controlled “system” get reinforced and reproduced – giving us not “Succession Planning” but “Replacement Planning.” Most managers have a hard time recognizing in themselves those behaviors that are irrelevent or insufficient for competitive advantage in the future. So most succession planning systems end up replicating today instead of anticipating tomorrow.
HRIS systems can do wonderful things when they integrate a variety of honest and relevant feedback and development activities into an overall succession planning strategy. But they do not, on their own or automatically, provide a substitute for that strategy nor do they function any better than the data that they process. If you want a system that perpetuates and validates existing management approaches regardless of future needs there are cheaper ways to do so. Just go back to the traditional means by which leaders were selected in the past and ask managers who they like. That way, everyone will understand the name of the game.
In the next column, we’ll continue this discussion to expose more flaws in traditional replacement planning, outline the basics for real strategic succession planning and show how you can tap the biggest source of underutilized leadership talent available to organizations today – their aging Baby Boomers.
David Cohen is president of Strategic Action Group, and author of “Inside the Box: Leading with Corporate Values to Drive Sustained Business Success”.
