HR needs to simplify the complexities that have crept into it: Marc Effron

In the introduction to One Page Talent Management, you talk about feature creep. Isn’t HR going the same way?  There seem to be so many solutions out there, but nothing seems to be working…

I think feature creep is very seductive. When we go into a camera store, we all gravitate towards the most complex camera, which has the most dials and selections on it, because that must be the best camera.

But there is amazing research that shows that when consumers are given a choice, between that very fancy camera, a moderately complex camera and a point of shoot camera, they will almost always pick the most complex camera. But when they are asked to use the camera for one hour and then asked to pick again, they always pick the simplest camera. So complexity is very seductive.

And how is that linked to HR?
We treat complexity with quality. When the same thing happens in HR, we are not adding things that don’t work, but we are adding lot of little things that do work, but the process collapses under the weight of all those little things.

And I think it’s very easy to say, ‘Oh that’s a good idea and let us do all those things’. The part of the hard work that we need to do in HR is to sift through those 500 ideas, and say which three or four of those really matter the most.

Complexity is a great sell…
It’s a wonderful sell, but it’s impossible to operate.

Do you think complexity is also because of expensively priced human resource information systems? If you get down everything to one page as you propose to, you don’t require those systems…

It’s not controversial at all. It is true. This is one of the major problems I have with HR technology manufacturers, they basically paved the HR cowpath but they haven’t created the HR highway.

Technologies firms have been completely complicit in adding these complexities is that they have enabled us to store 800 million pieces of data and 800 variables, when those 800 variables may be interesting, are not necessarily leading us anywhere.

Talking about complexity in HR, can you elaborate on it a little more?
Let’s take a tool like the 360-degree feedback instrument, which is basically where managers get feedback from everyone else who works around them, about how they should behave differently. Well that’s a very simple process in theory. The goal is that a manager should behave in a way that is productive for the company. And what we have done is taken this very simple process in human resources and we have made it incredibly elaborate, meaning that you will be asked to fill out a 200-question questionnaire that will take you hours, and you will be sick of it.

When I get the report back, I get fifty pages of charts, graphs and things that demand an IQ to understand. And the entire purpose was simply to tell Marc what he should learn to be a better leader.

So how do you simplify that?
What we try to do in One Page Talent Management is to provide much simpler solutions to get people to the same outcome. For example, in the case of 360-degree feedbacks, if the entire point is to simply tell managers the right behaviours to engage in and to help them to do that, what we have done is to come up with a way to focus the manager on the three most important things to do. And give them verbatim feedback from people who work with them about how to do it better.

Can you give us an example?
Let’s say people say Marc talks too much in team meetings. So there is a very easy way to fix that, we are first going to tell Marc, you talk too much in team meetings. Then we are going to give him 10 suggestions that people who work with him directly have come up with, on what exactly he can do to stop that behaviour. So that’s a much shorter path between the goal, which is Marc behaves in a way, which we think is appropriate, and where we are today.

So what the manager will get back is hopefully one or two sheets of paper that say ‘Here is how good or bad you are at this particular behaviour and more importantly, to improve, do these exact things’.

But unfortunately, in many cases, HR has made the process very complex. What we do is strip away all those layers and all the things that were added in and go back to what is the simplest way to achieve that objective.

What are the barriers to building talents in organisations?
The primary one in any company is that the CEO or the managing director isn’t an active participant in building talent. One of the key things that I found during the course my research is that the CEO or a managing director is really is the key to all these practices working. You can do everything right, but if the CEO doesn’t say that growing talent in the organisation is a very important thing to do and I am going to hold my managers accountable for doing it, nothing else really matters.

Any other barriers?
Managers not being held accountable for developing leaders is another key area. They are very busy, especially in Indian companies that are growing very rapidly, and they have a long list of things they already have to do.

If you add one more thing — that now you have to develop leaders — the managers are going to priortise business activities before the people-development activities.

If we can make the people-development activities very simple and easy to do, then we can hold them accountable for actually doing it. If it’s going to take you 10 minutes of your time, then I am going to hold you accountable. If it’s going to take five hours, I am not going to feel good about holding you accountable.

Can you give me an example?
I will give you an example of a company, which moved each on these barriers to a strength: American Express, one of my clients. It has done a very good job at building talent very effectively. So let’s start with the CEO over the past 10 years, Kenneth Chenault.

He has done a tremendous job at truly educating himself of what it takes to build high-quality talent, and holding his leaders accountable for that as well. So he has really moved from a mindset of understanding to being actively involved in developing leaders. And that obviously creates a model for all the other leaders in the organisation to follow.

American Express now holds people accountable for evaluating people on their staff, which means being able to come to the table and say ‘Let me tell you about each of my managers, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are and so on, and how we need to develop them’. It also holds them accountable for developing those weaknesses.

Can you elaborate on that?
It is one thing to say Marc’s good at this, and not good this. But it’s something else to say ‘As you are Marc’s manager, you need to make sure that he is able to be a general manger few years from now.

You are accountable for development, and that means accountable in the paycheck — meaning your bonus will move up or down if you do this well or you don’t do this well — but it also means that you won’t get the big promotion you are looking for if you are not developing people on your team well.

That will send a message in the company that you care about having the skills to develop people. And the third thing they have done is made human resources practice very easy to understand.

They have really transformed all of their key talent building practices, to things like succession planning, giving feedback to managers, identifying who has potential to succeed, they have made those practices simple and easy to use.

Any other examples?
The company I formerly led talent management for, Avon Products, is the world’s largest direct seller of cosmetics and fragrances.

They really revolutionised each of the three barriers as well. The CEO there, Andrea Jung, understands and has been actively involved in talent building, meaning she shows up at every single senior leadership development course to speak to leaders there. She shares an amazing amount of time with people to coach and counsel them.

She holds all her direct reports accountable to be good leaders. She holds complete reviews for all managers and above designations twice a year, which all comes up to the senior team, and the senior team then has a full-day meeting twice a year to review the talent situation of the company.

Why do employees hate HR?
HR is a very tough job. HR tends to get all the work that nobody else wants to do and unfortunately, does not get the respect it deserves in most companies. Given that, what HR needs to do is understand what its true value should be to the organisation and focus more on that.

What that means is that HR needs to be much more strategic in their approach and much less tactic and operational. In many companies, HR is simply the group that writes the paycheck, ensures that the benefits are all taken care of and hires people. You are not going to get a lot of respect doing that. You are going to get respect when you help the organisation grow by thinking through what capabilities might be needed over the next 3-4 years.

If our strategy is to be more innovative, well, we don’t have innovative people right now. We don’t have innovative people right now. So we need to develop a process grow people, here is how it’s going to work.

And organisations where HR acts that way, they are incredibly well respected. It’s interesting the way there has been an evolution across three groups — HR, IT and supply chain.

If you look at each of those three groups, 15 years ago, IT was the person who came to your desk with a laptop to wire things up. Now IT runs the wiring in the organisation. You look at supply chain; 15 years ago they were into purchasing. You wanted a pencil, you went to purchasing and they gave you a pencil.

Now purchasing is supply chain and they are an extremely important link in the overall operation of the business. Fifteen years ago, HR hired people and fired people. They still do that. The other functions, which could have remained in the backwater have found a way to grow and prove their value to the organisation. HR needs to find that similar value.

That sounds very good in theory. But my personal experience tells me that the HR professionals are ones who jump around jobs the most. So at a very basic level, is HR really serious about HR?
That’s a good question. I think it differs by company. I can’t answer that for all companies. I know some very, very smart HR leaders who are incredible strategic partners and highly valued by their companies. I know others who are functionaries and aren’t really advancing their firms.

It’s like many other professions where you have some people at the top of the ladder, and some at the bottom. One of the challenges over the years has been that if you ended up in HR, it is because you couldn’t do anything else or you were a people person.

I can’t think of two worse selection criteria
for a professional than that he/she is really bad at everything or likes people. Liking people has got nothing to do with HR. We need to have different people in HR. We need to have business people in HR who simply see running HR as running any other part of the business.