The science behind talent management

The science behind talent management with Marc Effron

Achieving goals with science-based processes

I am excited that you are joining me. I am here with Marc Effron from the Talent Strategy Group. Marc, welcome to the Talent Development Hot Seat.

I’m thrilled to be here, Andy.

This is exciting because I know you've got a lot of fans out there in the talent development community and a lot of great connections. Also, it’s slightly nerve-racking for me because I do most of my interviews virtually, and we’re sitting together in your office in One Penn Plaza in New York City. I happened to be up here for some client work and you happened to have some time free and we're able to make this happen, so far it's working.

It's fun stuff. I do a lot of these remotely and it's no fun not being able to see the person on the other end of the phone. An in-person interview is a cool thing.

I’m sorry for the readers at home that can't see this, but Marc has a pretty sweet view from his office on the 36th floor overlooking Manhattan and the East River in New Jersey. It’s pretty awesome.

If you’re looking for a role in the consulting firm, you could have this view as well. Let me know.

If you are looking for a role in a small consulting firm, Marc is looking to grow his team. Let's get to that. I'd love to hear more about how you got to where you are with this firm, so maybe you could share some of your backgrounds.

I'll do the high-speed version of history and tap the brakes when I get here. This firm is a culmination of me moving back and forth between corporate and consulting worlds. I’ve been learning and getting frustrated in both over time. The learning, which was incredibly beneficial for companies like Bank of America and Avon Products. When I was leading the consulting practice at Hewitt, it was about how companies and people interact both successfully and not successfully, and getting a frame around that. On the corporate side, recognizing that companies in no way were growing talent at the pace or with the accuracy they needed to.

I had this view that companies could radically simplify how they did this. They could apply more of the great science that we know is proven to work and be far more effective. When I published my first big book, One Page Talent Management, it was a put up or shut up moment for me which was, “You think you're better, why don't you go out and see if you can prove it?” That was what the firm started off as. It was only me consulting. A few years ago, I decided I was up to my eyeballs and I wanted more of this work to get more people and started to grow the firm.

There are a lot of people out there like me who think about writing a book. I know there's a lot of work that goes into that and that's what holds us back, but it has a lot of benefits too. When we talked before, it sounded like the book was a big catalyst to doing all this work you're doing.

Without One Page Talent Management, there will not be a consulting firm. For a few reasons, a book is a big business card at the end of the day. Most of the people who buy the book never read the book, they simply know that you wrote the book, which is fine. They gave you $3 in commission and you get some PR out of it. More importantly, what it allowed me to do was to synthesize my ideas in many ways that sell the firm. People read the book and they say, “Either I can do it myself,” which is the whole purpose of One Page Talent Management or, “This sounds good but I could use a bit of advice.” It was helpful. The challenge for most people who say, “I should write a book,” writing a book is relatively easy. It's a pain in the ass, but it's relatively easy compared to selling a book. The mistake most authors make is, “My publisher sells the book for me.” No, they don't. Your publisher puts ink on paper and makes sure that Amazon has some copies of your book to ship out when you want to.

Most of the people who buy a book never read the book. They simply know that you wrote the book. Click To Tweet

They make sure it's all done right with the distribution and everything.

Most of them, first of all, don't even edit, which is the biggest sin because most books are horribly written. They certainly don't sell for you, which is why when you talk to most publishers, the question that they’re going to ask you is, “Do you have a platform?” You say, “What’s a platform?” Which is, “Thousands of people listen to Andy every week. That's a platform. Why is anyone going to buy this book, author? We aren't going to sell it for you.” Writing, as much of a pain as it is, is the easy part of the book. Selling the book and being a shameless promoter is the tough part.

I've heard that a lot of people have these ideas and they'll write a book. They expect they're going to put it on Amazon and all of a sudden, people are going to go buy it. There are crickets because they don't know how to market it or sell it. I've also heard that the book is the new business card. When you give someone a book and a lot of people write these books with the point of, “I'm not going to make money from selling this book, but I'm going to give people the book and it's going to build my authority. It shows them my point of view if they read through it.” Maybe they tried to do it themselves, which you can at least say you help somebody. Most likely, no matter what the book is about, talent management, building a house or selling a house, they'll read the book and say, “I'm going to do this myself,” and realize, “I can't do this myself and I need help.”

What I love about One Page Account Management is my coauthor, Miriam Ort and I wrote it to be a handbook. My goal of writing the book wasn't, “I'm going to sell work because of it.” It was, “This isn't that tough. Here’s a little bit of science to explain why it should work. There's a lot of practical advice to explain why it should work and how to put it to work. Go do it.” I was surprised by how few people say, “I want to go do it,” but also I've got a ton of people who will come up to me at a conference or something else with a dog-eared copy of the book. They're like, “I've been through four chapters on everything. We're working on chapter five.” It's cool. That is exactly the point of the book. If you want to apply yourself, you should be able to do this yourself.

The Science Behind Talent Management

Let's get into the science behind talent management because that's a lot of what the book is about. It’s a lot of where you provide value for clients. Can you tell me a little bit more about your philosophy there and what went into that?

Both in One Page Talent Management and the book, 8 Steps To Higher Performance, the foundation is there is so much behavioral and psychological science that if not directly tells us, it strongly guides us as to what to do at work to be more effective. When I got to business school, I had no academic background at all. We were assigned to read an academic paper. Anyone who knows an academic paper, it normally starts off with a summary of what we already know in this field. I was reading this paper for the first time. I'm like, “This is cool. It gives you all the answers up front. Professor, are there other things like this?” They’re like, “There are about 100,000 the library next door.” I was like, “If we already have all these answers, why aren’t we using them?”

I still have that sense of amazement that we know how to do all this stuff, but we don't do it. Our philosophy at Talent Strategy Group starts with the science of what we know is already conclusively proven to be true about how people and companies operate. Let's start there. Let's not make stuff up. Let's not benchmark and not go, “I work with companies.” Start with science because our view is the work that we do has to impact on people's lives. We don't want to play fast and loose with people's lives. You want to say, “If I'm going to develop you, Susie and Sam, I want to make sure I'm doing things in the way that is going to yield the best benefit for you.” When we’re writing the book or doing consulting, I always start with, “What's the best science out there?”

The challenge is most of that science exists is what I call bricks not wall. A lot of times, you have to get a bunch of bricks together to build your wall. The average person doesn't have the interest or the time in doing that. Hopefully, the value that we add is to say, “We're going to sort through all that science.” I got emails from the Academy of Management Journal and Journal of Applied Psychology. It shows what a geek I am. I'm excited that I got those emails. It was four articles that will help me to learn something more. In the second step, how do we translate that into easy to apply steps? It’s difficult enough to learn the science, it's even more challenging to say, “How do I take those bricks and build a wall that can be useful in my organization?”

I'm thinking about the challenge with some of that science is it's often written by academics. It's not as relatable sometimes to the everyday person working in a big company, office building or in a city that has all these other things they're dealing with. It’s beyond within that controlled environment of talent management when you've also got crazy people that you work with coming and demanding things from you and causing distractions. Are you taking some of that academic research and connecting it back to the real world?

That's the heart of what we do. We know that setting big goals works. Exactly what gets in the way of most managers doing that? Let’s take a perfect example. There's so much great science around the power of goal setting to increase individual performance. Most companies are horrible at goal setting for no good reason. What we found was it's not about saying, “You should use this methodology. Here's a cute acronym go do that.” Most managers get paid based on the long list of things they say they did. If you go to Andy, the manager, and say, “Highlight the three big goals you want to get done.” “Marc, I do a lot of important things.” “I know that, Andy, but what are the three big things when you're done?” “Marc, I get paid for the other things outside the three. I want to make sure the manager knows about that.” Part of it is understanding why don't people do it well.

Can we teach people to do a few things? Collapse tasks into goals, help people to understand a goal isn't a thing you're trying to achieve. A goal is a promise you're making to your organization about what you're going to deliver. Elevate the concept a bit and also radically simplify it. You don't need to write paragraphs of a goal. Tell me what you're going to do, by when and how am I going to know if you got it done or not? Let's do our best to talk in human language to other humans about, “We know this works. We also know there are probably some good reasons why you don't do it. We're going to give you some good reasons to do it, probably until you have to do it, but we're also going to make it easy.”

Talent Management: A goal isn't just a thing you're trying to achieve. A goal is a promise you're making to your organization about what you're going to deliver.

I'm big on goal setting and I set a lot of big goals. I've worked with people on that stuff as well. What I've learned is it's often not about the goal per se, but about the process that you put in place. You've got to set the big goal. You've got to have milestones and understand how you’re going to achieve that goal. If you put a great process into place, whether you achieve the goal or not, that may not even matter if you've established a great process. In fact, I heard a quote, it was from Jim Rohn, “The purpose of setting a goal is not about achieving the goal. It's about the person you become by trying to achieve the goal.”

I like that. That's a perfect example of what we call science-based simplicity. The science around goal setting is massive and conclusive, yet most organizations are horrible at it. I believe that corporations are the source of much good in the world if they're managed well. Things like goal setting is a way to ensure that corporations are managed well. If they're managed well, more people have jobs, more paychecks, more happy families, more strong communities, but all that starts with a company doing the right thing to make sure that it's generating the revenue to hire people.

Importance Of Doing Things With Data And Science

It’s setting relevant goals. You're digging a lot into the science and the data behind why people should be doing things. I'm sure you come across a lot of people like me, who make decisions on gut feelings and don't look at a lot of the science behind why we shouldn't be putting things in place. What are some of the mistakes people make of doing things without data or science, especially in companies?

A lot of your readers are probably familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the result of some cool experiments by Professors Dunning and Kruger. In a short description, they gave a large group of people with a variety of tests, some quantitative and qualitative memory, etc. They scored all those tests, sorted people into the various percentiles and they went back to the people who had scored lowest on the test, the bottom quartile. They didn't tell them how they did. They said, “We're going to show you some of the other answers that people gave to those questions. If you want to, you can change your answers.” What they were showing them were the right answers. Those lower 25 percentile people said, “No, thank you, I am good.” They said, “That's great. What percentile did you think you scored out?” They said, “66th percentile.” They also went to the people who scored highest in the test, the top quartile. They said, “How do you think you all did?” They said, “About 67th percentile.” The problem is twofold. People who aren't very bright think they're as bright as everyone else. People who are very bright think that everyone else is as bright as they are. Part of the challenge that we're all delusional around that, so we're all going to be inaccurate in our perceptions.

I heard a stat once that I always think is a good way to embody this is that 80% of drivers believe they're above-average drivers.

The challenge is going on gut. We need data for everything but the challenge is going on gut is, if you're smart, you might assume that everybody else is doing the same thing as you. Everyone would assume that we'll meet at Grand Central but you might be fundamentally wrong because of your assumptions. Less perceptive or less smart people will be drawing conclusions that are fundamentally wrong. What matters is to have data. If you're deciding what restaurant to eat at, go have a good time. Maybe it'll be good or maybe it won't. If we're trying to do things that are going to affect people's lives at work, my view is I want a belt and suspenders level of competence around that because I don't want to play fast and loose with somebody's career.

Can you give me an example of either client that you worked with or an engagement that you've done, where you leveraged a lot of data and science to make a decision about how they were maybe doing something in talent management?

Almost everything. I’m trying to think of one that wraps a lot. We've done a lot of work with a large pharmaceutical company starting when they became independent from a parent company. We started by saying, “Let's be clear about what the mission and vision are and how you manage talent going forward. Let's make sure that you're aligned around that.” By starting with that clear vision, we rebuild every human resource practice based on the clear science to say, “We have two goals in mind. We want to make sure you're achieving your mission and we want to make sure that everything you do is based on science.” We would do for something like performance management to stay on that goal setting topic. When we're designing performance management, we would list the 50 questions that science would say your answer can either send to the right direction or wrong direction.

Everything from how many goals you want to set, to how much coaching you want managers to give people. We asked every single question in the design process and said, “That's either within the science or outside of science.” Sometimes you step outside the science because there's a better/more valid reason to do it. For both that process and other processes we designed for them at every decision step, we said, “Does science have anything to tell us in this area? If so, what is the range of things it tells us?” It rarely says, “Do exactly that,” but oftentimes it says, “Go in that direction.”

If we’re going in that direction of how you want it to look or if you want to ignore the science, let's come up with a good reason why you're ignoring it. We do that with many of our clients where the decision process is informed almost every step by, “Do we know anything that's true? If we do, do you want to stay true to it or not? If you do, there are some ways to do it. If you don't, fine but let’s make sure we have a good logic stream behind why we're going to ignore the signs.”

Do you have a lot of clients who say, because I can imagine this happening, “I see what you're saying with the science, but I feel we should be doing something differently?”

Corporations are the source of much good in the world if they're managed well. Click To Tweet

Yes, unfortunately. We do have some clients where we compromise. An example would be, we run a small 360 business. It’s not part of our core work, but a lovely 360 business. Science is clear to what we're talking about the Dunning-Kruger effect. Most people are horrible at self-assessments. We’re the least accurate observer of our behaviors. Yet, most 360s include a self-assessment. People say, “There's a value in understanding the distance between your perceptions and others. The science there has absolutely no value in understanding that.”

What we need to understand is what do people want us to do differently? That's it. “Here's how you're perceived.” “I don't think I'm perceived that way.” “That doesn't matter. What matters is that everyone in the office thinks you talk too much in meetings, therefore, you need to talk less in meetings.” Your self-perception is, “I talk enough and I talk at an exact amount.” “That's nice, but people want you to talk less, so let’s figure out how to do that.”

That would be one of those easy things where we in HR think of self-assessments and give people a voice. There's no science that supports that self-assessments in any way help. In fact, in many cases, we get defensive because it reinforces our data point, “They don't understand me and some of those people don't even like me.” It doesn't matter what you think of yourself. This also goes over a bit of a tangent, it goes to the authenticity movement, “That's who I am.” Who I am might not be who you need to be the most effective leader. You want to choose between the unique and special you or the person who's going to succeed because they know how to flex.

“Do you want to be successful in this environment or go be yourself somewhere else?” We were talking about a paralegal lawyer. You're wearing a T-shirt and you want to be yourself, but if you happen to work in a bank, you probably couldn't wear a T-shirt to work every day. You'd want to be yourself, but they'd say, “If you want to be successful here, you’ve got to wear a suit.” It’s the way it is.

That's a great example of how the science tells you clearly something works. You can ignore that because you have a personal philosophy that you should do something else. I'm more concerned about the pseudoscience getting in the way. Pseudoscience is, and I'll call this out directly and purposefully, the copy of the Harvard Business Review, where they highlighted Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall's book Nine Lies About Work. They made some fundamentally incorrect claims about things like feedback and goal setting. The IO site community is up in arms essentially saying, “How does pseudoscience ideas that get out there when they’re fundamentally wrong information disguised as science?”

The challenge is, for those of us who understand what the truth is, we have to talk to our clients off that ledge. As anyone who's reading who sits in a corporate environment knows, at some point, leaders in action come to you with a torn-out sheet from Harvard Business Review saying, “Why are we doing this? These people say that feedback doesn't work. Why are we reinforcing feedback?” You have to fill in that hole before you can build anything. My concerns are much about companies ignoring the science as it is about them grabbing on to pseudoscience or bad science and saying, “This backs up the fact that I should only focus on my strengths.” There is no science that would back that up. There’s only an article that you're waving in the face.

You look at the data over time and it reminds me of what we always hear with food, beverage, dieting and stuff, “Every other day, coffee is good for you. Coffee is bad for you. Drinking a glass of wine every day is good for your heart. Alcohol is terrible for you.” There's always a new study and a publication because people want to get pressed to, “Don’t eat meat. Eat meat,” all these different things and it goes back and forth. If you look at the science over time, read the people who are investigating it and doing real studies with control groups and things like that, you can see what works in nutrition and you can probably do the same thing in talent management.

It’s also being a careful consumer. I was talking to a group about this. It's difficult for the average Joe to be a cheerful consumer in this area. A lot of the things that have come out that have been proven to be fads, power posing, risk and growth mindset are authored by Harvard, Stanford or Wharton professors. Am I supposed to say, “A Harvard professor says something, I probably can't believe that?” They have face legitimacy. Why wouldn’t I listen to it? Especially in general, it makes sense. It's difficult for the average person to say, “I'm going to sort through all of this information and make smart decisions.” That’s one of the things that hopefully we can help out with in terms of the books, articles and saying, “Let's work through that mess and come up with an opinion of what we think is more right.”

Debunking Fads And Myths

I have one that I wanted to ask you about. Before I do, the other thing I want to comment on is on what you were saying about relying too much on some people self-identifying things they need to improve or their strengths, as well. On both sides, most people that are doing things that are not working, are making mistakes, offending others or diminishing people. That's all accidental because they need to get that feedback to understand that they don't see it. They think they're operating the best way they can until they get that feedback to improve.

The flip side is you talk about the people that are at the 90th percentile, that don't realize it because they've got limiting beliefs around it or they don't see their strengths. They need managers or other people around them to identify those to say, “Marc, I noticed that you're good at dealing with data or you're good at doing these interviews. We want you to do more of these to represent our company.” Maybe you didn't realize it because you didn't have that much experience with it.

To your point, whether you're at the high-end or the low-end of the spectrum, you're unaware. I'm a big believer that self-awareness is the key to most success and leadership.

Talent Management: The challenge with some of the science books is that academics often write them. They are not as relatable sometimes to the everyday person working.

We're talking about debunking some of these fads and myths. One thing that I had written down from our last conversation was the 70/20/10 rule. I hear many clients and people in talent development telling me that they're using the 70/20/10 model. That's the key to everything they're putting into place. Yet, I don't know if I've ever heard anyone say to me, “Yes, this has worked well for me.” It's only that they're using it. Is there data to suggest that to back that up, does that work or people should be using it?

I know Bob Eichinger well. Michael Lombardo and Bob Eichinger were the ones who came up with 70/20/10. Eichinger will truly tell you there is plenty of science behind it. The original article that came out from the Center for Creative Leadership years ago was based on a small study of about 60 people where the questions were simply, “How did you succeed in life? What seemed to make the most difference?” They came up with five factors and someone told them, “Five is too many,” so they collapsed it down to 70/20/10.

Is there science? Kind of. More importantly, is there anything to refute it? No. That is helpful. Not because there's nothing to refute doesn't mean it's true, but there's nothing more where we can say, “There are two competing points of view on this.” There's a little bit of face validity as well because when most of us think about our development, maybe it's not a perfect 70/20/10, but probably we learned most from stuff we did. It’s part of the timing issue as well. I'm glad that my doctor went to medical school, but if all he had done was go to medical school, didn't have twenty years of practice and got certified, he’s not touching me. Part of it is a time thing. Education is super important at some point in your life, but when you look at the span of things you've learned, it probably doesn't represent the majority of your capabilities and skills over the years.

You've got to have the experience to learn from and those experiences could be experienced in real life. This is a bias question, but I run a lot of experiential learning programs. On the face of it, it's a training program, it could fit into that ten, but it's also a lot of experience, which people learn well from.

I completely agree. We’ll run an experiential learning program and I love the classic simulations. We drop you in day one in general manager school. Your product killed somebody. That is a wonderful way of fast-forwarding learning and especially giving you learning that you may not naturally get. Let's say product failure. That happens, it's disastrous and most companies aren't prepared. Spend 30 minutes on it in class and to give people a quick overview of, “What should my mindset be when that happens? What are the two things I should think about?” You can fast forward to the experience. You don't necessarily see the consequences of your decisions, but it's a pretty good substitute for things you may not naturally experience over 10 or 15 years.

The State Of Talent Management

What do you think is the state of talent management, in general?

It's better than it was years ago. There are a couple of nice trends. CEOs and boards get talent. Flat out absolute we work with a lot of CEOs and board members. They understand the value of higher quality talent. The challenge is, that's where their level of sophistication around it ends. They get those talents important and want more of it fast. After that, the question is, “How are you going to operationalize that?” We're getting somewhat better in most companies at saying, what type of talent production line should we have? How do we build better quality talent faster? Theoretically, if you think better quality talent delivers better results, you should want as much of that as quickly as possible, so how do we make sure we have a good pressure line to do that?

What I find in most organizations, unfortunately, there's a lot of good efforts, but what they haven't done is strung together that production line to say, “If our goal is to produce twenty country managers, what's the most efficient way we could do that?” Do we even know what we're trying to build? Do we know what a great country manager is? Do we know the most efficient way of producing a great country manager? Is every candidate for a country manager on a production line that is moving to the optimum speed?

It’s structuring it in that production way to say, “We know how to build them, great, let's make sure we're building them.” I find that's where things fall down. There are lots of independent efforts. The town assessment people are over here, the learning people are over here and the assessor people and we don't string all that together to say, “Our goal is to get Andy from being a smart 25-year-old to being a 33-year-old successful country manager. How do we get there?” We're focusing on a production-oriented way like that.

I was going to ask you what makes great talent management? I can see a combination of things we've talked about which is leveraging data and science to make good decisions, putting a plan in place to get people where they want to get to. Also, having all of these different parts of talent management that they can often operate in silos and bringing them together. Is there anything else that you think people need to be thinking about for great talent management?

The common element across all of those is the quality and capability of your HR leaders. My colleague, Jim Shanley and I started the Talent Management Institute at the University of North Carolina's business school about years ago. We felt that in that independent process, you needed someone smart to string those pieces together to make sure that you are building talent faster. We recognize most HR leaders don't have good talent management capacity or capability. They were probably handed a deck and told to go into a room and facilitate a meeting, and that's how they built out management skills.

Who you are might not be who you need to be to become the most effective leader. Click To Tweet

We look at HRBPs as the foundation for the rest of talent management working. Business CoEs, the specialist can build good stuff, that's fine. Leaders can have good mindsets and attitudes around it, that’s cool. Who's going to make sure this stuff works? That's going to be the day-to-day job of that HRBP to say, “I'm going to make sure that the talent production line is humming because I understand how it's supposed to work. I’ve got enough technical knowledge to understand if the production line is built the way it should. I'm going to be smart enough to recognize people are progressing in the way that they should along that production line. I'm going to be influential enough with my managers to make sure that we're putting the people in the production line and we're taking the people off or we're never going to make it.” That combination of technical knowledge, influencing knowledge and the operational capability is what allows talent management to work.

How do people in talent development that might be designing developing programs or thinking about that talent lifecycle, how do they best support the HRBPs to make sure that the whole business is leveraging things that they're creating?

I can think of a few things. One is making sure that there is a great needs analysis. Talent development people probably have a better capability in that space than the average HRBP, but translating that assessment into real-world language and real-world products. Being able to speak to the HRBP as you'd speak to a line leader would be step one. It’s the ability to do a rate needs assessment and translate that into a clear plan, “If we're going to build Susie into a country manager, we're going to need to do these four things.” The technical ability to then build that out in a way that's simple, robust and works. My experience with some learning people is they love the big programmatic stuff and sometimes that's great. I run big programs and sometimes are effective, but that's not the only way to do things.

The more of an expert that talent development leader is across every element of development, from assessment to feedback to programs to coaching. Also, they can holistically integrate that to say, “What's the most efficient and effective combination of those elements to grow Susie from finance director to country manager in the period of time that we have?” It’s that holistic thinking and integrate the technical knowledge that you have straightened them together to say, “My job is to produce the best talent I can as quickly as I can, and here's how I would do it.”

Are there any other big trends that you're following in talent management or talent development that you think are starting to change the way people work?

I'm excited about the fact that AI in helping us to make smarter decisions will become more of a reality over the next few years. People have been talking about this for years and it's been all vaporware because no one has had any capacity.

It's already happening.

I'm starting to see it at least with companies that have a lot of ability to do this like IBM. Companies that have resources are doing not only some pretty predictive thing but also transactionalizing a lot of things. What if you could feed Andy's profile into the AI that would say, “Here's Andy's development plan?” We know based not only on Andy's history, his skillset, what he wants to do, his personality, his intelligence, his availability to travel that these three things are the optimal development activities for Andy. We'll be there in a short period of time. That's super exciting. It's going to take a big investment by some companies in the near term to do it, but I would bet there will be an Amazon-like entity that's going to say, “We've got a lot of computing power and we've got some cool algorithms. As long as your data fits into a reasonable framework, we can push it through and spit out some good answers.”

People are doing it because it’s reasonable at this point. You think about Spotify knows exactly what I like to listen to and can easily make new recommendations. Instagram and Facebook know the types of people that I like to connect with and follow, and will make recommendations based on that. LinkedIn does the same thing. There's no reason why we can't have something like that within talent management. There are some companies working on that. I interviewed Kevin Kruse, who has a company called LeadX that has an AI-powered coaching, which is powered by IBM Watson. There are probably a lot of other people developing things out there because the technology is there and it's available.

Here’s the downside challenge. People are maybe not taking this into account when we talk about AI helping with talent and HR. We would probably make some fundamentally different decisions if we only made them on the facts. A lot of times it's like, “Those nine people are for the program. He's a nice guy, put him in the program as well.” I would say no, there are nine people qualified to be in that program. You need to go back to Bob and say, “Why are you not in the program?”

There's going to be a lot of those types of interactions where we've said, “They're good or let's give him another chance.” The AI is going to say, “There's no way. They have a standard deviation below the next worst person in the group, so they don't get to go.” In many ways, it probably appropriately de-democratizes developments, we're all going to grow. AI says, “You should go fast. You should grow fast. People, learn in your jobs.”

Talent Management: People who aren't bright think they're as bright as everyone else. On the other hand, very bright people think that everyone else is as bright as they are.

It's a trade-off because we know that it’s easy to say that humans can probably make a better judgment call on that person that's on the line. How many companies or humans are using poor judgment with the wrong people into hypo-development programs because they're basing it on their own biases and not on the data or the science that shows that this person is qualified?

We work with a large organization that's sophisticated in the space. They have the real hypo list than the hypo list that's talked about. The hypo list talked about, “My favorite person is on it.” They know who's good, plus a bunch of other people. AI would get us to, “No, there’s one list. We know and we can predict who's going to move farther and faster. Here's the list.”

There are pros, cons and tradeoffs to both, but I can see if I later on I look at a list of my top interviews or most popular interviews, maybe this one wasn't on there and it will be. I might think back and go, “Marc was a great interview. There was a ton of valuable content in that. I want him on that list,” so I want to be able to adjust that.

It’s not like or listens, then?

Maybe not. If you're reading and you like this interview, make sure you tell me about it. Two more quick questions for you, Marc. One is do you have a book that you often recommend or that has made a big difference on you, other than your own? We know everyone needs to go get One Page Talent Management and 8 Steps to High Performance.

For a book and a book by the person, Marshall Goldsmith has been a friend and mentor for years to me. I still think his book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There, is essential reading because it goes to the lack of self-awareness that we talked about. Marshall says, “Here's a bunch of excuses you're making about why you can't be more successful. I'm going to take those excuses away from you and give you in a wonderful Marshall-esque way advice about how to be better.”

It's a classic one that's often recommended. It should be a required reading for everybody on talent development. Last question, for anyone in talent development that's looking to find a way to accelerate their career and get better at what they're doing, what's one more piece of advice you would give to them?

Let's go back to our 70/20/10 conversation. If you believe in the 70, at least that experiences are a big deal, be planful in getting those experiences. In fact, in the book, 8 Steps to High Performance, I have an experience map, which is a way of saying, “I'm going to plan out exactly the few big experiences I need, both functionally and managerially.” It says, “We need to get good at stuff, so what am I going to do from an experience standpoint to get better at my function? Managerially, how am I going to prove that I can do that in a variety of different challenging situations?”

“Marc, you're a great HR leader in New York City. We’re going to fly to London, do it there.” “Marc, you've been wonderful with a small team. I've got a big team.” “Marc, you've always been in growth markets, now you're in a turnaround market.” How am I going to chart out those experiences to say, “What are the few largest experiences I need to most accelerate my career?” I find the more planful you are around that, the faster you're going to grow.

That’s excellent advice, Marc. This has been a great and valuable content for me. For anybody reading that wants to connect with you, get in touch and find out more, where should they go?

Go to our website which is TalentStrategyGroup.com or feel free to send me an email at Marc@TalentStrategyGroup.com. I’m always happy to chat with people.

Self-awareness is the key to most success and leadership. Click To Tweet

TalentStrategyGroup.com and the books are One Page Talent Management and 8 Steps to High Performance. They're beautiful books. Go out and check those out. I hope that this has been valuable for you out there. It has been for me. Marc, I want to thank you again for coming to the Talent Development Hot Seat.

I enjoyed it, Andy. Thank you for having me.

Take care.

• Talent Strategy Group
• One Page Talent Management
• Miriam Ort
• 8 Steps To Higher Performance
• Nine Lies About Work
• Jim Shanley
• Talent Management Institute
• Kevin Kruse – Previous Episode
• LeadX
• Marshall Goldsmith
• What Got You Here Won't Get You There
• TalentStrategyGroup.com
• Marc@TalentStrategyGroup.com