#HRTechChat: 58,000 Assessments and 18 Key Learnings

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As part of researching The Five Talents that Really Matter, Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton, the co-authors, conducted and reviewed 58,000 talent assessments. Their research was global in nature, and they studied leaders at every organization level. Their findings challenge the status quo and call out for leaders, at times, things they may not have wanted to know.

The key learnings offer us insight into how we have been making decisions, unaware of their impact. Understanding these insights can help us make better choices and deliver better business performance.

Let ‘s look at just a few of the learnings here…and then listen to the podcast to get the whole story.

For example, when we are selecting candidates, we think of ourselves as objective—looking for whom we think would be the best candidate for a given role. If you ask leaders if they intentionally select people like themselves, they generally disagree. They think of themselves as seeking talent diversity. In fact, just the opposite was true, leaders had succeeded in “self-replication.” Even though it has been known for decades that “talent diversity predicts stronger collective performance advantages.”

Have you ever heard leaders profess that they welcome all points of view and love to be challenged? Well, the reality is that dissention is often not welcomed. How do you know if this is going on in your team? If your team is discussing a complicated issue and no one is speaking up—then disagreement is not welcomed—yet leaders perceive themselves as welcoming dissent. If team members are having a meeting after the meeting to talk about the real issues—the leader does not welcome dissent and may not even see it.

Do organizations have a bias for action-oriented leadership versus those with a keen eye for strategy?

Would you ever hire someone you personally dislike even if they were highly talented?

How often do you hire for likeability and are not even aware of it?

Why does it take some leaders a longer time to terminate poor performers?

In this podcast we will discuss the 18 insights and how you can use these findings to make better talent decisions—both in how you select and develop leaders.

 

The Five Talent that Really Matter is available on August 27th. The Five Talents That Really Matter: How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance: Conchie, Barry, Dalton, Sarah: 9780306833403: Amazon.com: Books

 

Our #HRTechChat Series is also available as a podcast on the following platforms:

See a service missing that you use? Let our team know by emailing research@3SixtyInsights.com.

Transcript:

Pamela Stroko 00:00
Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining our third podcast in the five talents that really matter series today, we have with us again, the two authors of the five talents that really matter, Sarah Dalton and Barry conci, and we’re going to be talking about what they’ve learned from their exhaustive research that actually became a good part of the book. And so we’re going to be talking about 58,000 assessments, and what they learned from those assessments. And these assessments were done around the world, and people either did it because they were part of a process where they were a candidate for a job, or they just wanted feedback. So you know, you’re you’re Barry and Sarah, and you’re sitting there and you’re like, we have 58,000 data points. What do we do with that? Well, we start looking for what the key messages are, and that’s what we want to talk about today. They had gleaned 18 key messages from these 58,000 assessments, and let’s start talking about those. So let me ask of all of the things that you had learned, and by the way, you do a great job of condensing these in the book and and telling us about them, and getting people to really look at how they could have these things challenge, perhaps their own assumptions. Tell me what was, you know, the one or two or three things that surprised you?

Sarah Dalton 01:35
I think as people read through that chapter, one of the things they should be cognizant of is these same trends will play out at different levels in their own organizations. One of the surprising findings for me was that in in every organization, there’s this list of high potential leaders, right? And there is no doubt that leadership potential can be predicted way earlier than people might often realize. So we get brought into companies to study these high potential people, and what we would expect is this group really is the best of the best. We’d expect that when we assess them on our leadership assessment, that they come out really strong, very talented, higher scoring leaders. But it’s not what we find. When you look at the range of scores of that high potential group, it typically conforms to what you would call a normal curve. They are not as good, they’re not as talented as those companies think. And so this gets us back to the issue of likability, where sometimes the people that we’ve worked with the longest, we we feel the most positive about them. We want to do the right thing. We want to keep promoting them up into the company. But there are limits to what some people can achieve, and just because I perform really well and the role that I’m in right now doesn’t always mean that I’ve got the potential for the next job, and that’s exactly what we see when, when we assess these lists of leaders. So basically,

Pamela Stroko 03:06
their high potentials were, you know, probably some high potentials in that, in that group, but essentially they were normal distribution. And I think

Barry Conchie 03:18
about, think about this panel, because you’re absolutely right. How did they get nominated to this list? And typically what happens is either each division or each functional leader gets to nominate one, two or three people from their organizations. Now, when people talk about calibration around leadership potential. That word lacks the precision that is intended in its use, and what you end up with is just a distribution of, you know, there might be the best people from each part of the organization, but that doesn’t add up to a meaningful prediction that these are the very best people overall. So that’s the reason why we find this situation, but it is surprising when you see it played out in real life.

Pamela Stroko 04:06
It is especially when a lot of organizations go through these succession planning processes or talent review processes, and they have a nine box, and we know that the best place to be in a nine box is the upper right hand quadrant. Nobody wants to be in the lower left hand quadrant. And so you’re right. They talk about, who’s high potential in my business, who’s high potential in my group, and then they get populated in these boxes. And then at some point you have to step back and say, Are these people really high potential. And I think it’s great that you took a look at that, because I think every organization has to look at that conversation that they’re having about potential and how they’re really going to measure that.

Sarah Dalton 04:55
Well, when you talk about the nine box, what about the people who don’t. Make it into the top right quadrant, but who might be brilliant in the next role, and yet, the talents that they have either aren’t being surfaced where they are right now, or it’s being suppressed by the people above them, right and that’s some of the most rewarding work that we get to do, because when we assess high potential populations, or when we assess broader populations to figure out what talent is in the organization, we sometimes uncover people who’ve got the talent to be the next brilliant leader in that company, and yet they were never on anybody’s list.

Pamela Stroko 05:35
I want, I love what you mentioned just a moment ago about they were suppressed, and I want to share with our audience, just as you have phrased it in the book, in every organization, we find outstanding leaders, often women and minorities, deeper in their structures, who are being held back, undermined, suppressed and generally mismanaged by weaker, typically male leaders and executives. I haven’t been in an organization where I haven’t seen some expression of that play out,

Barry Conchie 06:08
I think, in the in the example that we gave. I mean, it is surprising to see this, but I don’t know whether you remember when McKinsey brought out the water talent, yeah. Oh, yeah. And, you know, this was essentially a treatise that said the companies that get the most talented people are the ones that are going to win in the future. Satisfaction, you know, a lot of people got really excited then about talent, even though they couldn’t really define it very well. Well, our thesis is a little bit different. The war for talent can actually be won inside your own organization, if only you open your eyes. Now, it’s not always the case that there are hidden gems in every company, but it’s nearly always the case that people aren’t that bothered looking for them right? Now, you can look and not find, which is fine, but what we tend to find is that there are brilliant people hidden in organizations, and they tend to be suppressed. Now we mentioned women and minorities, as you know, the two groups that tend to suffer the most from this. I’m not going to go into projections as to the reasons why, because it would be it would just be my own subjective perspective, but the data is pretty clear. Some leaders struggle with highly talented leaders on their teams, and they suppress them. They either get poor performance reviews, they don’t get any oxygen or publicity through the organization, nobody knows who they are. In the preface to the book, we tell the story of a company that we worked with during an acquisition where we found this brilliant woman that was hidden under a male leader, who was a shopping leader, just a very, very poor manager of people. And she called the experience of going through our assessment liberating with respect to her career, because she was promoted above this guy. But it didn’t last very long. He was cast aside during the merger acquisition. She was put into a leadership position. She was brilliant. CEO never heard of she was only four steps down from the CEO. CEO had never heard of her executive team. Had never had her on any list. Now, I’d like to think it was an exception, but it isn’t an exception. Now, I’ve got to say some companies are really good at spotting talent early on, and they do fast track people. They do take risks with people. We’d just like to see more companies doing it. So that was shocking to me finding that out.

Pamela Stroko 09:05
The other thing that as I was going through the 18 things that you highlighted, one of the things that really stuck out to me had to do with leadership deficits. And you found that there is a significant leadership deficit in strategic thinking and growth orientation that is a product of poor initial selection decisions for first and second level managers. And the reason I think this is so important is if you look at organizations today, what do they say we want strategic thinking. We want a growth orientation. We want to growth grow the company. They all pick growth orientation as a competency if they’re using a competency model. But yeah, you found that. You know this is a deficit. Could you say more about that?

Barry Conchie 09:59
Well. Well, we quoted a CEO in this section lamenting the fact that as he looked at his top leadership levels, couldn’t find the strategists. He had plenty of people who could roll their sleeves up and get stuff done, but no real strategic thinking partner who could help him craft the future direction of the company. This company, by the way, employs 280,000 people, wow, but this is not an insignificant issue. And so he said, we’re all strategists. And had a conversation. I said, Well, I’ve got a thesis around this. Let’s go looking for it. And my idea was that because action orientation is such an important attribute in top leadership level, indeed, it dominates in many companies, action orientation, it can become a problem. My idea was that maybe people who aren’t action oriented aren’t surviving very long at lower levels. Yeah, we went deeper into the organization, we had a whole bunch of other other assessments that we conducted, and we found out that these people were getting terminated lower than the organization were good strategic thinkers, but that wasn’t what was needed in those lower level roles. Just a few minutes ago, Sarah was talking about the the nine box, and what about the people who aren’t in the top right hand side, but occupy one of the other boxes? Why don’t we ask different questions of them to see that whether they would fit better somewhere else and maybe opposite the up, you know, occupy the upper right quadrant in a different role? Well, it’s the same. It’s the same. Here we see just an overwhelming selection bias action orientation and a bias against questioners, provokers, pokers, prodders, the people who look at the world in odd ways that sometimes slow us down, make our brain hurt. I mean, think of all those meetings that these people have been in where discussion has been going on and on, and some people have just been sat there, either completely checked out or saying, for goodness sake, just choose one of the options, and let’s go right so we understand the action orientation and the urge, but what’s happening in organizations is that the real thinkers, the ones who aren’t the first to show up when there’s a crisis, because they’re thinking of the reasons why we couldn’t prevent it, and they’re getting terminated. And that was the answer in this organization, you know, it was about five or six levels below executive level, and these people were surviving.

Sarah Dalton 12:47
I think one of the other important things for companies to just get right in their mind is that when you talk about strategic thinking capability or a growth orientation, we’ve got to recognize that these are not training and development opportunities. These are ways of thinking. They can be measured. They can be predicted in people. It’s not just the case that we plug leaders into the role and put them through a training camp and expect that they’re going to come out as brilliant strategists. That’s never the case. Yeah,

Pamela Stroko 13:20
I was curious on a number of themes that you uncovered in the research. I was curious about the themes that talked about the differences between men and women, and particularly the first one, where it talked about the assessment scores of women versus men, and being a woman myself, when I read that, I was like, Well, of course, and and it was the scores of women executive leader in leadership positions scored considerably higher than those of their male peers. Say more about that, and then, in general, talk about the gender differences you found in the research.

Sarah Dalton 14:04
So just really quickly, and Barry, I know you’ll want to chime in on this. We’ve, we’ve amassed this database of over 58,000 global executive leaders, and track demographics on all of those candidates. So we know their race, we know their gender, and when we compare groups in terms of assessment scores, we see that the overall scores for groups are almost statistically insignificant, particularly when we’re just comparing men and women. Okay, so average overall assessment score for men in our database is about 37.7 mean score for women, 37.6 statistically insignificant, almost dead, even when you compare those groups. But the difference is in who gets selected, right? So when you look at the appointed male executives in top leadership. Roles, average overall score is about 42 for female executives appointed to top leadership roles, average overall score of that group is 45 now the difference in our world between a 42% and a 45 is actually pretty significant. So what we find is that female leaders who get these top jobs have to be measurably stronger to even be considered. And then, why is that?

Pamela Stroko 15:30
That’s a good question. Why is that,

Barry Conchie 15:35
I would add to that, that the there is a perceptual bar that is applied to candidates that is unequal and uneven. And you know, fewer women get to executive level positions than we think should be the case because of factors that are being considered that are less to do with their talent and more to do with things like career gaps, where we see a lot of bias that affects women who can’t explain why they took seven years out of work or three years out of work when they were going through childbirth and early years of child rearing. But the issue for us when we look at our assessment is, you know, we have here a phenomenally fair and valid assessment when you think of it in terms of adverse impact. I mean, the scores between men and women, as Sarah said, are statistically identical, but the employment rate for women in all well that we appoint fewer women and they have to have higher scores. So the other issue in this which might be of interest to listeners is this, the range of scores that apply to men who are appointed to leadership positions is far broader than the range of scores for women. So not only do women have to have a higher score, but the range of scores for women getting appointed is a lot narrower. But what that tells you is, in our view, if you want to put it kindly, way more incompetent men are getting through the net the incompetent women, and that’s a price that companies pay without realizing it. You know, that comes back to the question, you’d be better off knowing this information before you make these appointments and understanding this data than blindly going ahead, because, you know, we don’t think these trends are changing pretty, pretty soon,

Pamela Stroko 17:45
exactly. You know, one of the things that both of you talked about in our last podcast, where we’re talking about selection, was likability. You know, you go through an interview process, and you can really see it start to happen, that people start building a relationship, and then they come out and they’re going, I really like this person. We had to hire them. I really like them. But when we looked at the 1818, insights that are in the book likability, and you talked about too many leaders, find it hard not to fall in love. I love that that a lot of times, you choose the person that you like, and they may have a lower assessment score than someone that would be more capable in this role, but you don’t like as much as this individual and and so it seems like we fall into the likability trap yet again.

Sarah Dalton 18:48
This is a funny one for me, because there’s definitely a place in organizations for leaders who’ve got a ton of relational sophistication, yes, in terms of how they invest and develop their people the way that they position and pick people, the kind of accountability that they show. You know, one of the areas that we measure in this assessment is around relational sophistication. How good are you at building a broad network around yourself and developing the people underneath you? So there’s definitely value in that. But if that’s all we’re paying attention to, I think we are ignoring a range of other characteristics that are actually really important, that that themselves add up to a broader picture of leadership effectiveness. So if we’re just falling into the likability trap, I think we might be missing other things.

Barry Conchie 19:40
There is a related point that I want to build on here, and I want to open up maybe three or four of these other findings of the certainly, as I develop this point, one of the findings that we had was that lower scoring leaders were more likely. Terminate people who challenge them. Wow. Now, you know, we we often look at issues of disagreement and dissent within organizations and low score in leaders struggle with the idea of descent. But here’s the interesting thing, when you ask them, Do you encourage disagreement, debate and dissent? Everybody says yes, yeah, for sure. He does. What we found was that low scoring leaders were more likely to retaliate against people who expressed a strong point of view if it differed from the leader’s point of view. And you know the issue, therefore, for us, open the door to looking at all the other characteristics around lower scoring leaders. So for example, lower scoring leaders take significantly longer to terminate poor performing team members, and they often never do terminate them. Then we see with higher performing leaders. So if you’ve got moderate leaders in your organization, it’s likely that you’ve got survivability bias amongst your employees, because nobody’s leaving. Now that might be misrepresented in some HR organizations as we’ve got fantastic turnover rates. We would look at that situation and say, your turnover rates need to get way worse before they get better, and you need to clear out a lot of dead wood in the organization. So, you know, in those circumstances, low performing leaders are a disaster. By contrast, we found that higher scoring leaders are more likely to take longer to fill vacancies than lower scoring leaders. Then you might think, Well, that sounds bad now it’s what Sarah was referring to before you got a hold out for the best candidate, and a lower scoring leader is less talent focused than a high scoring leader. So they fill vacancies quicker. They often refer to the speed with which they fill vacancies as an asset, supporting why they believe they themselves are are stronger leaders. And it’s really quite it’s really quite staggering to me. You look at data like that, and you think, Oh, my goodness, not only might we be measuring the wrong things in the organization and exacerbating the findings that we’re talking about here, but we might be building an organization with more moderate leaders than we could ever really afford to live with. And, you know, the consequences of disastrous. Just wanted to add those two points to that.

Pamela Stroko 22:55
No, I think, I think that’s a great point. How many times have we seen goals or KPIs for recruiting that that are about days to fill, not about the quality of the candidate, not about that. They’re about days to fill. And you see that as well. You see that some leaders are compensated and have goals around how long it takes for them to fill an opening, and it could have nothing to do with that ability, the ability of that person to perform and lift the performance of the organization. It’s just that we filled it in 30 days. Club, club, club.

Sarah Dalton 23:36
This is where we’re trying to get more sophisticated in how we partner with some of our clients, because if we get them really good data, and we can do this, recruiter by recruiter, around how talented their candidates are, how talented the candidates are that are ultimately being selected into the company, then we can help HR people have really good conversations with the business, around the quality of the hires that we’re bringing in. So it all goes back to, do you have good data coming in, and how are you using it?

Pamela Stroko 24:09
Exactly, exactly. You know, one of the pieces of data that I’d like to put on a billboard somewhere and and just to have it flashing as executives pass is that talented high scoring leaders are 5.6 times more likely than less talented leaders to promote a talented, younger employee across multiple levels, skip level promotions, And so many organizations say when we recognize great talent, we promote quickly. We do skip level promotions. I don’t know if as many organizations do that as say that they do that, but the difference it can make and the performance of the company is significant. It’s material. I believe. If you’re talking about some of this, five times more impactful than other decisions that you make.

Barry Conchie 25:05
So think of a series of connected themes here Pamela, which are really rotating around the variance we see between more talented leaders and less talented leaders. I mean, you know, I mentioned dissent and disagreement and how you handle that. And lower scoring leaders don’t handle it well. They tend to retaliate. Higher scoring leaders tend to encourage it. This particular issue on skip level promotions is predicated on a question that is very difficult for people to answer, or some people it’s very difficult to answer. And that question is, how do you feel when someone who reports to you get promoted, gets promoted above you? How do you not, does it happen? Not? Do you encourage it? Not? Do you think it’s a good thing. How do you feel about it? What we find, and it’s a massive difference, is that low scoring leaders hate it, yeah, because they think they’re next in line. They don’t think of their performance, they don’t think of their talent, they think of their entitlement, and if they stick around and you’ve got a newcomer in your team and they’re hitting it out the park, everybody else notices and thinks that person needs to be your boss or boss somewhere else, they find that a personal threat. And it’s a relatively small percentage of leaders who lean into that situation and love it. I worked with a I worked with a one of our clients. This particular person a client for 25 years, one of the best leaders of people I’ve ever seen. And I asked him this question. He said, I can’t wait till then my boss, they’re way better than I am. He said, My job is to make sure he doesn’t screw up and make mistakes and prevent himself getting there or her, but my job is to get that person promoted. Now, the interesting thing is that leader was known as a promoter of talent in his organization. And I would sit down with leaders in that business, and we would call out the names of people that were now in senior positions that once were on his team. There was about a dozen of them, and there were phenomenal people. That’s the exception, and we need to turn it into a rule, but we don’t find that. That’s what the data shows. It’s a major, major problem.

Pamela Stroko 27:55
Well, I think the challenge is you need a secure person to say, I want to help this person succeed. I want them, you know, they could be CEO someday, and maybe I can’t. And, and, you know, I I’ve seen it a number of times, where people say they want to, you know, grow talent, but they want to grow them up to the point that they don’t, that they don’t succeed beyond them. And I, I’ve seen that and and to your point, you miss out on a lot of great talent if you’re not willing to skip level, promote someone, if you’re not willing to highlight them, if you’re not willing to give them opportunities.

Sarah Dalton 28:35
This gets us back to the issue, though, the need for leaders to hire people who are stronger than they are. Yes, if you’re consistently hiring weaker members of your team, those people are never going to be credible candidates. Yeah, for other jobs in the company. And what leaders, I think, fail to realize is that they’re limiting themselves in the process, because built a weak team who is entirely dependent on you as the leader, you also aren’t going anywhere,

Pamela Stroko 29:07
right? Yeah, but, you know, here’s the The odd thing about that, some leaders are perfectly fine with, I’m not going anywhere, and neither are they. It’s a status quo sort of thing. I mean, you know, it’s kind of like, you know, the the world runs on down the middle, you know,

Barry Conchie 29:31
like Pamela on that, on that very issue. Let me paint a visual in everyone’s mind that I don’t ever want you to forget. Oh sure, oh yes. Tell me. Imagine you’re looking at an organizational chart. Let’s say the top five levels of your company, and each person is colored green, yellow or red. Yes. Now. So let me just explain what we find consistently is that those colors collect vertically, yes. So if you look at your executive team, Mrs. CEO, then you got eight direct reports, and three of them are red. There is a massive chance that those red lines vertically will be populated by other red dots. Yeah, that’s the visual you’ve got to hold in your mind. The problem that nearly every CEO has right now is that they are completely clueless about how to populate that chart. That’s where the five talents that really matter help, because the assessment we build creates that visual in a very, very effective way. And then to your point that people are comfortable, you know, they aren’t very good, and I’m okay, we’ll just survive. Well, you know, we get a nice, hopeful treatment of bleach to cleanse all that out and replace it with green. And I know I sound a little bit harsh when I say that, but companies are in business to succeed and make mine, we can’t tolerate huge red sections of organizations, but we find it

Pamela Stroko 31:28
that comes down to also one of the insights that you had from the research, which is while managers and leaders will say that I don’t hire people like myself. I look for people that are different, that think differently. Your research show that they exactly hire people like themselves. They look for their own characteristics in people that they’re that they’re hiring. And that’s how you get, basically, it’s how you get pools of mediocrity in many organizations.

Barry Conchie 32:04
It is, I mean, I mean, it’s a point we made earlier in a previous podcast. But we do pick people like ourselves, we find that a refreshing reflection on ourselves. We feel good about ourselves when we do that, and we have to encourage people to look at the characteristics, traits and dispositions of people on their team and get serious about really looking for candidates who are different. Because right now, everybody’s playing a game and they’re giving themselves a trophy for winning. Nobody’s winning this game.

Sarah Dalton 32:45
I think where this book is going to help is in clarifying a definition of what the best leaders really do and the different kinds of talents that help people be successful. Because right now, Pamela, to the point you just made leaders in making hiring decisions. We place a preference on the characteristics we know in our know and like in ourselves, because that, I mean, experience has told us that these things help us be more successful in our role. So when we look for and see it in other people, then that guides the decisions that we make. I think if we can broaden people’s definition of what talents actually predict leadership performance, and we can give better tools and methods of of identifying those in people, hopefully we start to reverse some of these trends and start getting more people into jobs that that just look and think differently than what we previously thought were placed of reference on

Pamela Stroko 33:46
Exactly, exactly. And with that, I do want to we talked about the talents people need to pay attention to. And I just want to list for our audience the five talents that really matter, setting direction, harnessing energy, exerting pressure, increasing connectivity and controlling traffic. In the next two podcasts, you’re going to hear a deep dive on all of those talents and how you look at them from the perspective of your organization. But before we leave you today, Barry and Sarah, what advice do you have for organizations? What do leaders need to pay attention to to make sure that some of these, some of these things that you learned, the pieces of research that that can sometimes be a stumbling block, how do they make sure they don’t fall into those into those issues.

Barry Conchie 34:42
Well, the the issue I want people to hold in their minds is that there is a significant Gulf in the effects of having higher scoring leaders in your organization compared to lower scoring leaders. So. So I want you to start there. And my advice to organizations is to, you know, have very good answers to the question about who our best people really are. Yes. And if I was to give advice to an individual leader, it would be that I want them to become obsessed with appointing people to their team who are demonstrably better than they are obsessed, not mildly interested, not well, I’ll kind of look at it once in a while. Or maybe I’ve got three vacancies coming up as these next group of mediocre people retire. I might look at it then I want you to be obsessed about it, because good things happen when we get higher scoring leaders into organizations. But if you don’t obsess about it, you won’t do it.

Pamela Stroko 35:51
That’s true. So everyone listening be obsessed with finding great talent, finding talent that’s better than you are, and a way that you can learn more about that is by pre ordering the book that’s available on Amazon, the five talents that really matter. It comes into the market on August 27 and we’ll be talking more about the five talents that really matter. And we’ll also be talking about in our last podcast, we’ll be talking about dei in the learnings from their research on Dei. Thanks again for joining us, and we look forward to you joining us again soon.

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