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Thought Leaders
Industry Gurus Live
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Dear HR Professional,
Welcome to the Thought Leaders - Interviews with Industry Gurus Newsletter! You are receiving this email because as a member of the HR.com community you have expressed an interest in receiving our Thought Leaders update. It is our mission at HR.com to always provide you with the most relevant and up-to-date HR information. To alter your subscription preferences or noted areas of interest please update your online profile here. New articles are added daily. |
Thought Leader: Dr. Brad Smart on "Topgrading"
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Dr. Bradford D. Smart approached HR.com to do some market research about Topgrading. We are going to define what topgrading is, but what we found is that a large percentage of our members, 155,000 HR professionals who come to our site on a frequent basis, weren't familiar with the topgrading process and how to achieve or get A players into their organizations. After talking to Dr. Smart we came to the conclusion that this was a very effective methodology to make sure that your team had mostly A players on it or ultimately all A players on it. The cost of not having A players could be detrimental to your business and having only A players could be a significant competitive advantage.
At HR.com all of our managers read the book "Topgrading," which is one of the best-selling books in the HR space. It's sold over 100,000 copies, it is available at www.SmartandAssoc.com and we highly recommend that you get it because not only does it have some good case studies and examples of the methodology that we are going to talk about, but it also has interviewing techniques and tips and it has some forms that you can use. There is access to a whole library of other content or information that you could use throughout your organization to help you with the topgrading process.
DM: The first question is, how do we define Topgrading and what does it really mean?
BDS: Topgrading is a word I made up several years ago. I was talking with an HR executive at PepsiCo about talent and how the approaches that I have wanted to publish in a book were all about getting all high performers, not just some high performers but all high performers. At the time it was common to talk about upgrading talent, but if you had a team of 10 C players and replaced one with a B player, the team would still be pretty lame even though you upgraded talent. That conversation just evolved into the word topgrading. We define it in the book as filling every position in the organization with an A player, of course at the appropriate compensation level.
"A" player is defined as the top 10% of talent available. Topgrading includes hiring A's, coaching people to become and remain A players, retaining A players and the "tough love" part of topgrading which is the redeploying of under performers. We think the approaches that we have embraced over the years are highly ethical, certainly very legal, and they only enhance organizational cultures. From a practical point of view, you are a topgrader if you achieve 90% high performers, or A players.
DM: So we talk about the top 10 percent.
BDS: Yes. Probably the easiest way to think of a practical definition of an A player is someone who is in the top 10% of talent available. Available means willing to accept a job offer in that location of course, for the compensation, in that company, reporting to that individual. All those factors bear upon whether or not a true high performer can be attracted, hired and retained or not.
Suppose you had a position open, maybe for an editor at HR.com for example, and you did massive recruitment. Everyone you know, all the talented people came up with recommendations, you went to Monster.com, you hired recruiters and you sought out people who were employed as well as not employed, and you boiled it down to about 100 candidates. Next Monday 100 well-qualified candidates were standing outside your door, willing to come on board at HR.com. Suppose theoretically you could hire each one sequentially for one year. This would be a 100-year experiment. So you hire the first one, go to August 2007, wind the clock back to 2006, do it again and just keep doing it until you had every one of them employed for a year.
Then you look back after 100 years and say, who are the top 10 performers? Let's call those the A players. Who are the next 25? Let's call those the B players and all the rest are C players. That's a pretty practical definition. You could look back after 100 years and say 15 were truly outstanding performers, so the A players were top 15%, not top 10%. Some companies, Goldman-Sachs for example, consider the top 1% the A players, and everyone else really need not apply.
I had a meeting last year with heads of human resources at Global 100 companies, the largest 100 companies in the world, and I asked them to write down on a 3 x 5 card the managers that they have hired, what percent turned out to be the expected high performers and what percent turned out to be small to major disappointments. They said 20% were good hires and 80% mis-hires. Only 25% of those promoted turned out to be the high performer they expected, 75% were not.
DM: So, when people are actually going through succession planning initiatives and recruitment initiatives I think they honestly believe that they are hiring the top talent they have. But I think what we are questioning here is, are they using the right methodologies just to prove that those people are the top talent?
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Debbie McGrath, founded HR.com in August, 1999. She is committed to establishing the most helpful Knowledge hub, community and marketplace for human resources on the Web.
Debbie brings to this latest business an extensive background in recruiting, publishing and the Internet. She was President of The CEO Group, an international organizer of high tech career fairs, and developer of Internet recruiting software. Simultaneously, she served as publisher for a large recruitment journal, a monthly publication called htc. In August of 1998, The CEO Group was sold to Kaplan (now BrassRing.com), a fully owned subsidiary of the Washington Post Company. During her tenure she served as President of the Canadian and European operations, as well as Vice President of Worldwide Sales. |
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Sponsored by
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Join us for our next live Thought Leader interview with
Dick Grote on Turning Problem Employees Into Superior Performers
September 11, 2006
1:00 - 2:00 p.m. ET
In this live webcast you will learn:
- Goals for a discipline system.
- Why the traditional "progressive discipline" system doesn't work.
- Effective ways to conduct performance improvement discussions.
- When to start disciplinary action.
- Instituting a disciplinary process that works.
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Thoughts From The Top: A Collection of Interviews with Business Gurus
by HR.com Publishing
Thoughts From The Top: A Collection of Interviews with Business Gurus is an amazing anthology of higher thinkers including, David Ulrich, Kenny Moore, Marshall Goldsmith and Erin Brockovich. It's 348-pages of exclusive interviews with top experts discussing the proven strategies, the philosophies, and the best methods they have used to strengthen their organizations. Each chapter features a different expert who reveals his/her best practices to help professionals deal with the people side of business.
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