I'm Sorry I broke Your Company

6. Stop Perpetrating Talent Management on People Albert Einstein Was Not an A Player

By now you may have realized that I haven't personally broken any companies, at least not that I know of. But consultants have broken companies, and I would like to talk about the most famous case — Enron. Although the role of Arthur Andersen in helping Enron with some creative accounting was widely reported, another consulting company that was deeply embedded at Enron, McKinsey, managed to escape the scandal relatively unscathed. I mentioned the book The Warfor Talent earlier, but I neglected to mention that one of the reasons this book has fallen out of favor is that it uses Enron as one of It's main case examples. Jeffrey Skilling was a former McKinsey employee, and he implemented many of the management principles written about in this book at Enron. (To be fair, the McKinsey consultants faulted Enron because the company didn't implement these principles correctly.)

While most of the recommendations in this book are relatively mild (create a talent mindset, develop and coach employees, be more creative in recruiting), one principle alarms me and is the one that contributed most to Enrons downfall — differentiate your employees and then manage them accordingly. The book recommends sorting out your A, B, and C players and treating them differently. A players (typically, your top 10–20 percent) should get most of the rewards and be given as much latitude as possible to pursue opportunities and advance their careers. A players determine the future of the company and because of their constant need to be challenged, are likely to leave if neglected. C players (your bottom 10–20 percent) should be coached until their performance improves or be let go. While most of the attention should go to As and Cs, В players should be affirmed that they are still worthy and should be developed as needed. This differentiation method is sometimes referred to as the «star system» or «rank and yank,» depending on whether you are in the top or the bottom rank. While I doubt that McKinsey was the first company to devise this kind of differentiation, it did create this popular terminology and propagate this philosophy as a best practice.

How this philosophy contributed to Enrons demise was that it created a highly competitive and arrogant environment that encouraged excessive risk taking and cheating, where stars were led to believe that they could do no wrong because they had «talent.» If you were a talented A player, you were given considerable leeway without oversight to start new business ventures. Failures were not considered bad, just a sign that you were indeed a risk taker, an affirmation of your A-player status. Malcolm Gladwell, in a New Yorker piece about Enron, cites examples of A players given extreme latitude, one of whom was Lou Pai. Pai created Enrons power-trading business, which lost millions of dollars, and then went on to run the electricity-outsourcing business, which lost even more money.

While this philosophy is, of course, unfair and even ruthless, my main problem with it is the assumption that there are definitive A, B, and C players. I am confused by the assumptions upon which the star philosophy is based. In The War for Talent, one chapter talks about how a poor performer was discharged from the Naval Academy but was given a second chance with a proactive mentor and then eventually became a great leader. So in this case, a C performer who should have been culled due to a track record of poor performance was given mentoring and became an A performer. Then the very next chapter recommends implementing the A, B, and C player system. So if C players could become В or A players, and В players could become C or A players, couldn't A players become C or В players? Especially with no oversight? Do you mentor C players until they become Bs or keep at it until they become As? If you mentor C players to become As, what about the Bs? Shouldn't it be even easier to make them As? How do you know when a player has reached his final destination?

Like almost everyone is familiar with the Enron implosion, almost everyone knows something of the life of Albert Einstein. His name and visage are synonymous with genius. He has been described as one of the most important physicists ever. In 1999, Time magazine named him the Person of the Century, not Scientist of the Century, but Person. His most famous work is his general theory of relativity, but he actually won his Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. In 1905, he wrote four groundbreaking papers on the photoelectric effect, specific relativity, Brownian motion, and the equivalence of mass and energy (E = mc²). Each of these was worthy of the Nobel Prize. He predicted black holes and wormholes. He was the author of over three hundred scientific papers, and the list of important physics theories he conceived is way too long for me to include here.

One of the things that Einstein most regretted is that his father died in 1903, before anyone had heard of Einstein. In his fathers eyes, Einstein was a total failure. He left his primary school before graduating — on less-than-spectacular terms. The story of his failing math is apocryphal but is based on one of his teachers’ declaration that he would never amount to anything. He failed his first entrance exam to get into the Zurich Polytechnic School. After remedial work, he was admitted to the school, but his unconventional thinking and tendency to skip classes irked his teachers. When he left the polytechnic, none of his teachers recommended him for a job. Stuck with low-level tutoring jobs, he was fired even from those. His personal life was also a mess. A Jew, he wanted to marry a Christian woman against his parents’ wishes, and they had a child out of wedlock, whose fate is unknown today. (The couple did marry, but that marriage ended in a very messy and bitter divorce.) Eventually, a friend helped him get a job as a clerk at the Bern patent office. There, he was passed over for promotion, not having enough engineering experience. Bored, he wrote his four convention-shattering scientific papers and changed the world.

If one were to ask Einstein’s teachers about his chances of success, you would likely get some head shaking and tsk-tsks. Although his abilities in science and math were evident, he was by all accounts unconventional, free thinking, headstrong, and uncoachable, not the qualities people were looking for in academia at the turn of the century. However, it is exactly these qualities that made him an exceptional theoretical scientist. To boil it down, he would never fit in with the strict pedagogy of schools in the early 1900s and would not be a good teacher in that environment. He probably wouldn't have been good in an engineering job, either, not being known to follow instructions. Ironically, if Einstein had managed to obtain a more prestigious job out of college, he would have been deemed more successful, but he probably wouldn’t have had the time to work on his theories. Hence, he never would have obtained the ultimate success and fame he achieved. In many ways, he was lucky he found the position at the patent office.

Another famous individual with a track record of failure is Ulysses S. Grant. Before the Civil War, he failed at running businesses, failed at farming, and failed at real estate. However, contrary to everyone’s expectations, he turned out to be a great military commander, even against the renowned Robert E. Lee. Although history books write about the inevitability of the Union’s triumph due to It's industries, they don’t spend much time on how the best military officers of the time sided with the Confederacy. Lincoln had a hell of a time finding someone competent to lead the Union army. Grant’s name didn’t appear on any short list of potential leaders. Although he had a solid reputation after the Mexican War, his military career afterward wasn’t noteworthy. He eventually left the army when it required him to be away from his family for extended periods of time, causing him to drink heavily. He didn’t have much of a reputation when he volunteered early in the war to train soldiers. Mostly he was known for drinking, smoking, and losing money. However, he did have three unique capabilities that made him a great general: an uncanny ability to use the lay of the land to his advantage, a knack for supply logistics, and the ability to both instill discipline and inspire his men. He was unpretentious and greatly loved by his troops. Grant’s popularity was so great that he was elected president of the United States. Unfortunately, his administration was plagued by scandals and corruption, and his presidency presided over the abuses of the Reconstruction era. He was accused of being more interested in rewarding his army cronies than in rebuilding the country.

Throughout his life, Grant battled problems with alcohol and seemed to be drunk at the least opportune times, like at meetings with superior officers. After his presidency, he was still popular, especially in Europe, and was invited to speak and socialize among high society. It was a good thing that he had well-connected friends because he lost all his money in a family-run investment firm that turned out to be a front for a scam. His friend Mark Twain urged him to write his memoirs, and even though he was dying of throat cancer, Grant worked on his autobiography, driven by the need to provide income for his family after his death. He finished the book on his deathbed, and it became a best seller. In fact, it is still on bookshelves today, well over a hundred years later, and is considered to be one of the best military memoirs ever. So was U. S. Grant an A player, a В player, or a C player?

He was a great general, a good writer, a poor president, and a horrendous businessman, so he was a good performer in some situations and a poor performer in others. This is not unusual. We know from our experiences that people have their strengths and weaknesses. In certain areas, we excel, and in others, not so much. However, if you have management responsibilities in an American corporation, according to this talent management best practice, you are asked to evaluate your employees and put them into the high-, medium-, and low-performing buckets, where they are subsequently labeled as stars or dogs or mediocre players. Employees are tracked according to their performance rankings. Although this designation should be made based on a long history, there are times, like in the case of a new hire or a merger, when managers are required to rank their direct reports after just one review. Where would you rank Einstein in 1903? What about Grant in 1859?

Speaking as someone who has usually been designated as a top performer — graduating near the top of my class, attending a prestigious school, working for a think tank, working as a management consultant, and then working for Fortune 100 companies — I would like to be honest about my own career performance. I have been in situations where I've failed miserably. The first time I performed poorly was at a manufacturing client where we needed to investigate It's costs. Due to an accounting change, product costs skyrocketed, and we were hired to calculate a better way to determine product costs. This was in the ’80s, and I was carrying around a «portable» Compaq computer, which was less like a laptop and more like a full-sized air conditioning unit with a handle. I hurt my back hoisting it into the trunk of a rental car. A local doctor prescribed Tylenol with codeine. That’s when I learned that I don’t react well to codeine. It made me depressed and weepy. Part of the job was to develop a huge spreadsheet to detail all the costs, and details are not my forte. Typical for a consulting engagement, we were working long hours, and I had to sit for long periods of time on an uncomfortable chair in front of a computer. In pain, fatigued, and reacting to the codeine, I kept transposing numbers in the spreadsheet and putting them in the wrong cells. I just could not enter my data correctly. Everyone was infuriated with me because my errors were invalidating everyone else's work. We had to double-check and triple-check everything I touched. Worse, I would cry whenever someone reprimanded me.

When I returned to my home office, I had to sit down with the practice head to discuss my performance issues. Even though I had other project successes under my belt and was requested by partners from other offices, after that one failure, I was suddenly a problem. The gist of the conversation was that I needed to improve or else I would receive a bad write-up at the years end. That meant no bonus and no salary increase and probably no future in the company. I was incredulous. I had a solid track record, but none of that mattered. I had been labeled. All it took was one failure. Afterward, I had to find work from the other offices.

Another time when I gave a less-than-stellar performance was when my kids were preschool age and my mother became terminally ill and needed constant care. On top of being ill, she had some big legal issues that I was suddenly responsible for. Between taking care of my kids, caring for my mom, finding the right doctors and treatments, and wrangling with lawyers, my job came in at fifth priority in my life. I think I spent most of my workday on the phone with hospitals, doctors, and lawyers and not too much on my work. Somehow, I managed to turn in an average performance that year. (I wrote easily achievable goals.) I remember talking with my manager, who wondered why I wasn't living up to my potential. Again, I was incredulous. How could all my personal issues not affect my performance?

My worst experience was the engagement I mentioned earlier when I had been assigned to improve the scheduling function but found the problem was with the business model, not the scheduling methods. The whole new consulting team arrived and insisted that I use their methodology, which I believed was inappropriate for the problem at hand. Aside from disagreeing on the approach, when it was clear that we would not be able to come up with the promised cost savings, the project management decided that headcount reductions could account for the rest. The awful task of determining which heads to cut fell to me although I had already assured the client that I wasn't there to recommend layoffs. I refused to name potential layoff candidates, causing even more ire. To make matters worse, I accidentally bad-mouthed the project manager in front of the client, a huge consulting blunder, and that got back to him. From then on, I was labeled not only as incompetent but also as «a loose cannon» and «not a team player.» I was told that I had no future in consulting, even though I had been a successful consultant for a number of years.

Even more mysteriously, I suddenly couldn’t do anything right. I was asked to put together a presentation, something I normally do well, and it was critiqued as terrible. When I put together a form to use to keep track of changeovers that the project manager liked, the credit for authorship went to another consultant. I had been labeled, and everything I did was seen through that label. My history of performance was irrelevant. On my next project, I was assigned a manager who oversaw and double-checked everything I did. It took a couple of months before he realized that I was neither incompetent nor insubordinate. I was quite capable but had just come from a bad situation.

Isn’t that how we naturally describe failure? We don’t describe ourselves as failures all the time, just in certain situations. Einstein was in a bad situation when he needed to fit in with the scientific orthodoxy and please his teachers. He was an iconoclast by nature — in most situations, that was his undoing, and in another, his gift to the world. Grant excelled at logistics but stank at managing businesses and, especially, money. He really did not have the right skills or inclinations to be a good president, although he was a brilliant wartime leader. I have strengths and weaknesses, too, and often they are different sides of the same thing. I am great at seeing the whole picture and at getting at the roots of problems. I am not very good at remembering details and following methodologies.

Fortunately, because of my strengths, I have more often been labeled as an A player than a C. This label sticks as well. On a project where I was improving capital investments, I had made the recommendation to hedge investments made in local currencies. This was advice that came from the clients own financial group that I recommended to top management. About a week after this recommendation was implemented, the pesos value dropped by half. The client had made large investments in pesos, and hedging the currency forestalled a potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. It was pure luck that I had made the recommendation beforehand. At the time, I knew little about finance and even less about the global economy. Yet I got the credit for making a prescient business recommendation. Afterward, I was treated like a rock star. I was included in all sorts of meetings, had easy access to the CFO, and was able to name whatever resources I needed. I also had my pick of assignments. Funny how easy it is to succeed when you can choose your assignments and your team and have access to all the people who can help you.

Another time I had been labeled as a star, I had taken over a poor-performing department, created new services, and turned it around. One of our tasks was to communicate our new services, and my team came up with several creative ways to advertise all our changes, including putting «commercials» on the corporate television channel. At the time, I was also known to coach people outside my direct responsibility. People would come to me for advice or ideas, and sometimes it was apparent that another person's work had my fingerprints on it. I was labeled as creative and supportive, a good label to have, except that whenever someone came up with an innovative idea, I got credit for it. People started attributing all sorts of accomplishments to my coaching or advice, even when I wasn't remotely involved. I also noticed that my colleagues were very forgiving of my mistakes. Forgetting to bring my report to a meeting was just a by-product of my creativity, while for the «dogs,» that was just further proof of their incompetence.

The labeling effect is another cognitive bias that is widely documented by psychologists and other neuroscientists. Rudiger Pohl, in the book Cognitive Illusions, defines the labeling effect as occurring when «a specific label is affixed to a stimulus and exerts It's distorting influence in subsequent judgment or recall.» In other aspects of life, we are very careful not to stereotype or label others. This is especially true in our schools. Two of the most famous experiments on labeling and It's consequences were done with schoolchildren. One famous experiment was made into a popular documentary called A Class Divided. In this experiment, a teacher divided her class by eye color. One day, the blueeyed children were told that they were superior to brown-eyed children, and as a result, they behaved that way, even performing better on tests. Then the teacher reversed the situation, putting brown-eyed children on top, resulting in the brown-eyed children performing better than the blue-eyed ones.

Another experiment with schoolchildren involved deceiving their teachers into thinking a certain number of kids were early academic bloomers, having scored high on an exam to determine academic readiness. In reality, the subset was randomly chosen. However, at the end of the school year, the children in this randomly chosen subset outperformed their peers. Both of these experiments show that labels result in different treatment, even when there is no discerning basis for the labels. Because of these types of experiments, children are no longer segregated by apparent ability in the elementary classroom. Other studies have shown that once something is labeled a certain way, we perceive it to be that way, even when the original label is proven to be false. We filter our perception based on labels. The impact of labeling is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

While our educators have been fully versed in the adverse effects of identifying and segregating high performers, this practice is touted by many talent management consultants to be critical to an organizations success. You have to identify and reward your stars because they are the future of your company! This means that businesses have processes and policies in place to specifically label and stereotype employees, not according to race or religion, but according to a number that is often biased by race, religion, gender, and other factors. A practice eschewed everywhere else in life is a talent management best practice! Besides being subject to the biases of the manager, the problem with the rating system is that employees must be labeled and sorted at a particular moment in time. Although a manager may be privy to the entire work history of an employee, that manager is compelled to give her own honest and often biased assessment of the employee. That's the role of a manager. The manager is supposed to evaluate, aka judge, the employee. Therefore, whatever moment in time in which you are asked to do the assessment has the potential of providing a label that can stick for a lengthy duration, especially if the employee doesn't change jobs or managers.

The purpose of the sorting is to find the employees with leadership potential so they can be groomed for the next management levels. The logic is that because this step is so important, it is worth the risk of alienating everyone else to lavish attention and resources on the A players to help them excel and keep them with the company. Theoretically, in the talent war, losing A players has a huge cost to the company. My experience at two different «best-company-to-work-for» Fortune 100 corporations has been that these policies can alienate the high performers as well. The worst example occurred when I was part of a women's leadership program. My business unit had particularly poor representation of women and minorities in leadership positions, and it had instituted some initiatives to address the problem. At one point, I was given the name of a senior-ranking woman who could potentially act as my mentor. We arranged a time to meet so she could share some career advice with me. Imagine my surprise when she spent the meeting complaining about the current leadership and told me to look for a job elsewhere if I wanted to advance my career!

The career path to the leadership ranks in our business unit was through Marketing, and this woman had moved up through Marketing into a country management position. Recognized as a potential leader, she was chosen for a development opportunity and asked to lead a global diversity project. This project lasted about eighteen months. By coincidence, while she was working on this initiative to improve the diversity of the leadership team, her male colleagues were slowly moving into positions of more responsibility and gaining more general management experience. In a stroke of bad luck the president had resigned, opening up slots at the top and offering the rare chance for senior-level promotions. When she returned to her normal job eighteen months later, all her peers had been promoted into superior positions, while she basically had nowhere to go. She couldn't move ahead until she gained more general management experience. Her career had been derailed by her leadership development opportunity. When we spoke, she was coleading another global initiative, not a position in line for advancement. She was also actively job hunting outside the company. While her situation was incredibly unlucky, similar situations occurred with other people participating in A-player development opportunities. Another woman from Marketing found that her whole management team had moved into positions with other business units while she was on a development opportunity, and she had a difficult time returning at all. She had to go back to the same position she left a full two and a half years earlier. Her colleagues who weren't being developed had all been promoted beyond her. Another A player found herself without a job after her department was restructured. When a group of us formed a womens leadership network, the first piece of advice imparted was «Don’t accept a development opportunity.»

My own experience with development opportunities at a different company wasn’t much better. My development opportunity was to lead a Windows/Office/Explorer upgrade. Not only did I have no experience with this type of project, I had no interest in it nor was I suited to it. I honestly don’t understand the thinking behind the decision. The work required an inventory of everything on everyone’s PC and then rigorous testing of how these programs interacted with the upgraded software. The success of this type of project depends on paying attention to all the details, testing everything thoroughly, and documenting it all. Although I wouldn’t be doing the testing and documenting myself, it would be my responsibility to ensure it was all done properly. I’ve already told you about some of my weaknesses, one of which is details. I also have a pretty good memory, which means I’m not in the habit of writing things down. What I’m bad at: details, checklists, following checklists, documenting details, and organizing details, all the skills needed on this assignment. Why on earth would I be asked to lead a project so completely ill suited to my strengths? I suspect someone thought I needed to develop «detail-orientation» skills, one of the leadership competencies. This ended up being my last straw, and I left the company after it had invested in sending me to a leadership training program.

I realize that these are just anecdotes from my career and not a statistically sound study of high-potential programs, but these involved two world-class companies that alienated some of their A players through the use of special development programs. I’m sure this practice is useful in some situations, but there is no guarantee that this is the best way to treat your A players. However, this is currently considered to be a leadership development best practice, to be imitated by all companies wanting to groom future leaders. The precept is that finding and developing your A players is worth the risk of alienating everyone else, but A players can be alienated by this practice, too.

The other purpose of the labeling system is to determine who is worthy of promotion. In most companies, you have to demonstrate superior performance at your job to get promoted into another one. The underlying assumption is that people who perform well at one job are likely to perform well at another. If you don't demonstrate mastery of your position, you are either stuck there or you have to update your resume. If you look at this practice holistically, an organization keeps It's poor and medium performers in the same jobs while promoting high performers until they no longer perform well. This is the Peter Principle. We all joke about the Peter Principle, but it does exist, and it ensures that you have the least effective workforce possible. For those of you unfamiliar with the Peter Principle, it was first written about in 1969 in a book by Dr. Lawrence Peter and Raymond Hull. The principle states, In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Basically, if you are competent in your job, you eventually get promoted to a new one and so on until you become incompetent and are no longer eligible for promotion.

This principle results in an organization where most people are incompetent at their jobs. In fact, three students from Universita di Catania built an agent-based computer model to simulate this principle to see whether it was true. Using 160 positions in a pyramidal hierarchy, they assigned ages and levels of competence to their agents and created open positions by firing incompetent agents and retiring old agents. Then they tested three different rules to move agents to the next level: the most competent, the least competent, or a random choice. They also simulated two different ways of determining the new competency after a move: randomly assigning a new one or using the old one with a random fudge factor. Promoting the most competent worked well only when the agents retained a high competency after a move. An organization has to be sure that It's best performers will be the best performers in all jobs for this practice to be effective. When competence changed after a move, promoting the best had the effect of spreading incompetence through the organization. The least risky strategy under both competence change scenarios was to alternate promoting your worst and best employees! Just promoting people at random also worked well in both scenarios. These latter two methods allowed people to move out of jobs when they couldn’t perform, which is the only way to make sure the Peter Principle doesn’t apply. (Some companies require frequent job moves to prevent the Peter Principle from occurring, but I'm not sure that works. That policy randomly opens up new jobs for a random selection, so the probability of getting a job you are good at is low.)

The best way to deal with «incompetence» is to move that person out of that job. Yet this conflicts with the recommended treatment for C players; they need to be coached to improve and then demonstrate improvement or else be let go. (I guess being let go is one way to move someone out of a job.) Some companies have formal performance plans with action items and probationary periods that must be completed before the C players can be treated like regular employees again. In companies that don't have these formal punitive policies, the informal word of mouth about internal job candidates can have the same effect. The harshest treatment of C players is the aforementioned rank and yank or automatic firing of the bottom tier.

Professional services firms have a similar policy called «up or out»: if you don't get promoted within a certain time frame, you have to leave. Fortunately, this policy seems to have waned in popularity in recent years. At one consulting firm where I worked, the HR department instituted an «up or out» policy that we nicknamed the «up and out» policy. Basically, every year the bottom 10 percent were culled, including those who did not meet the promotion timeline. Senior consultants promoted to manager positions were required to sell client work in addition to managing project teams. Typically, new managers already had the project management experience needed, but the selling aspect was a new job responsibility. In this new role, some of the best consultants floundered initially, as it takes some time to learn how to sell work and to develop the relationships. However, with this cull-the-bottom-10-percent policy, they got fired before they could learn the new job. We were systematically culling our best talent upon promotion! This policy was abandoned after a couple of years but not without a loss of high performers. In addition to those who were fired, consultants on the cusp of promotion left in droves because they didn't want it to happen to them. Funny how people rarely submit passively to punitive HR policies!

So treating the A players like superstars or pushing them into development programs has It's risks. Culling the C players also has It's risks. What about the В players, the bulk of the organization? The recommended treatment is to give A and C players most of your attention and just affirm to В players that they are valued and offer them development as needed. In other words, those stuck in the middle are, well, stuck in the middle. Isn't the real impact of the differing ABC treatment to push everyone toward the middle? Cs get let go or coached to B. As are developed and promoted until they reach B, where they receive little attention. Only a few will continue to be A players all the way to the top. The Bs are left alone unless they move to A or C. The ultimate result of all these talent management policies is to push everyone to the middle of the curve where they get no attention, thus ensuring a mediocre organization!

This whole ABC player philosophy confounds me. To be honest, much of the talent management philosophy confounds me. Talent or potential is a constant. You either have talent or you don't. Talent is not the same as performance; only a subset of high performers have talent. However, high performance is a hallmark of having talent. High performers should have a solid track record of performance, except when they take risks and fail. So their performance should be variable and include failures. A history of failure is the hallmark of a poor performer. Poor performers can be coached to improve and even become high performers. Performance can be developed. Potential or talent can also be developed — except that talent is a constant that you either have or you don't. Managers should be rated on how well they develop their employees, but managers should not get penalized for poor-performing employees because it is the responsibility of the employees to meet their objectives. Am I the only person who is utterly confused by this conflicting logic?

This is what I do know about performance in the workplace:

1. Performance is conditional. Although a great variety exists in the abilities and achievements of people, most people can achieve high performance under the right conditions, and most people will perform poorly given adverse conditions. Hence, assuming that high performers will always be high performers in any job and any circumstance is just not true — ditto for the poor performers.

2. Poor performance is usually not due to incompetence. Although I’ve met my share of incompetent people, most performance issues are due to poor job fit, poor relationship fit with peers or manager, or poor culture fit with the company. Only a small percentage is due to the general incompetence of the employee.

3. Labels are a self-fulfilling prophecy. High performers are typically given more attention, more resources, and better opportunities, thereby enhancing their chances for success. Poor performers are usually put on a tight leash and given limited resources and opportunities, thereby limiting their chances for success. Average performers are only expected to be average and given very little attention. Given that most performance management systems with ratings demand that the bulk of employees perform at the average level, most of the employees will perform at the average level. In fact, this is what many HR departments demand.

4. The Peter Principle really exists. People will be promoted out of jobs they excel in until they land a job they don't excel in. People in ill-suited jobs typically are left to their own devices to find their way out of that position.

5. People like to control their own destiny, especially high-performing individuals. Plunking people in projects or jobs not of their own choosing is a punishment, not a reward. Encouraging someone to leave his comfort zone is very different from demanding that he do so.

With all the focus on putting employees in A, B, or C boxes, companies miss the conversation that has the most impact on the most people — job fit. While we spend hours rating people on a curve, arguing who gets $10 more in an annual pay increase, and nitpicking over the skills needed for development, we rarely ever talk with employees about their fit with their current positions. In my thirty-year career, I have never gone to a meeting where managers or anyone else got together to determine how the company could get more employees to be high performing. I’ve never been in a meeting where we discussed development opportunities for average-performing employees. I have never been in a meeting where the agenda was employee job fit. Sometimes this discussion is held for the A players or for senior levels of leadership, though often without their attendance. Most companies leave this conversation for the development part of the performance appraisal meeting between manager and employee. Yet managers on their own are powerless to move people into new positions and even less likely to recognize when they are part of the performance problem.

If you think about it, in management, this is the most important conversation there is. How do I get the most out of my organization? How do I get more people to be high performing? The answer is to help more people find their sweet spot — that confluence of the right work, the right people, and the right skills. It may not exist for everyone, but if you don't try to find it, you never will. Yet I have never had this conversation at work.

Instead, we spend our time arguing over the performance rating, begging managers to follow the curve, dreaming up development opportunities for others without their participation, documenting succession plans — even developing a human resource contingency plan if half the leadership team dies in a fiery plane crash — but nowhere near enough time on trying to bring out the best in most of our employees. Here's what we need to do to start: Abandon the labels. Eliminate the bell curves. Stop performing talent management on people. Allow anyone who wants to change positions to easily change positions. And above all, start having conversations with employees and their managers about how to find the best job fit.

Figure 4 Job fit sweet spot

I use the sweet spot diagram in figure 4 to explain how I understand the basic components of a good job fit. Keep in mind that this is my made-up model. (Hey, I'm a consultant. What did you expect?) The first two are environmental — fit with the company culture and relationship fit with the manager and peers. The second two are internal to the employee, which is why the employee has to be part of the conversation. The job should be a fit with the persons skills and interests. This effort wont result in a sweet spot for everyone, but imagine what a difference it would make if you found it for just half the organization. Instead of all the time spent trying to fit people into boxes, it is spent actually doing something of value — using your employees’ talents.

Having the job fit conversation solves many of the problems of talent management. It assumes everyone has some level of talent that can be developed. Talent and performance can be the same thing. Because no one is graded, the meetings and outcomes don’t have to be secret. Employees can succeed or fail without being labeled. Failures can be addressed quickly with a move and without shame. More importantly, rather than everyone else being responsible for a persons career development, the employees can take ownership of their own careers. They can request a move. They can come to the meetings prepared to discuss their abilities and interests and participate in finding their best fit. Managers don’t have to be saddled with the responsibility of employees’ career development, which is typically beyond their span of control. Instead, they can concentrate on improving their employees’ performance, which is within their span of control. Another advantage of changing the conversation from performance or talent to fit is that if a proper fit for a person cannot be found, it is less personal, less degrading, and less contentious to be let go because of poor fit than poor performance.

Another box that needs to be thrown away for this to work is the job description. Sometimes there are very good reasons to write a job description. I have done them myself. However, the practice of writing up the job and all It's requirements and then looking for a person who fits the box is much less productive than matching the work to the people. And here is where Einstein makes another great example. In Einstein’s day, if you were to apply for the job of physicist, it usually meant an experimental physicist. The norm was for scientists to work in labs and conduct experiments. Einstein conducted what he called «thought experiments,» not physical ones. Although Einstein was not the first theoretical physicist, after his fame it became the norm to choose work in theoretical physics or experimental physics. He created a new job description!