Articulate The Connection Between Individual Contribution And Company Goals

I spoke to a very experienced people manager today about his management approach. He said that one of the most important things a manager needs to do is to articulate the connection between individual contribution and the goals of an organization.

He said that this articulation and the development of an employee, to help them contribute, should be the top priorities of a manager. He went on to say that only managers who achieved results using this approach, and demonstrated other company values, were promoted in his company. Managers who micromanaged to achieve results without articulating the connection between goals and contribution were not promoted.

Would you want to work for a manager who does not explain to you how your contribution helps your company achieve its goals?

Promote The Blogs of Your Employees On Your Recruiting Web Site

In the book Empowered by Josh Bernoff, the author talks about how the marketing funnel we all learned about in Marketing 101 has changed. People used to become aware of your company via your messages, consider your products and a few buy your products.

The new marketing funnel from the book "Empowered by Josh Bernoff"

But things have changed. Josh says that Mass Influencers among your customers are broad casting information about your products. Increasingly, new customers are listening to the voice of influencers who have already bought your product and not the listening to the your messages you spent millions to broadcast.

This suggest that sales is no longer the end point. You have to continue to delight your customers so that they broadcast your praises. You also have to empower your customers to broadcast their messages by enabling them with appropriate content and tools.

Most of what I said above is not news to anyone who understands the basics of Web 2.0.

How does this apply to recruiting people?
However I see the same situation applying to recruitment as well. Increasingly, new recruits have access to the voices of your employees and ex-employees via dedicated sites such as Glassdoor.com and LinkedIn. They also can quickly access the personal blogs of employees within the company. By following a company on LinkedIn, they get a remarkably accurate view of turnover in the company.

For example, if you want to know what is going on in the BusinessObjects division of SAP, you will get an accurate, timely and straight-from-the-hip information from Timo Elliot's blog. If you want to know what SAP is doing in the Web 2.0 area, you will get an accurate and indepth view from SAP Web 2.0 Blog run by Timo. In fact even SAP employees go there to get up-to-date information. Timo's content is a combination of original material he puts together and SAP official marketing messages he curates.

People executives, with some rare exceptions, think that their recruitment messages on their web sites are the only ones heard by potential recruits. Most recruitment web site content and messages are written by, let's face it, recruiters.

Here is what I suggest.
Why not list the top influencers who work for your company along with links to their blogs in the company's recruitment web site. Give them an incentive to share their personal blog there. List them by their area of work and encourage potential hires to visit the blogs and read them. Don't try stunts like ghost written blogs of executives. It takes 5 seconds to tell that a blog is not genuine. Do even think about hiring a traditional PR person to write a 'personal' blog. In fact if a blog is completely error free, I get suspicious.

How do I know who the top influences in my company are?
Most people who write about their work would have listed their blogs in their LinkedIn profile. Put some one on the job to collect these profiles and analyse them. If you are planning to hire a lot of engineers next year, reach out to your engineering bloggers. If you are planning to hire in Japan, find out if any of your Japanese colleagues blog.

So, Do I need to install a blogging software and hire a VP of Social Media?
No. you dont have to do that. You can do this without any IT investment. Don't force an tool chosen internal IT on your employee bloggers. Bloggers are using what they are using for a reason. You are going to them because they are the influencers while your recruiters are not. So, let your influencers make their technology choice.

By the way, you may want to keep such influencers from leaving your company. I guess you already knew that.

Lessons About Feedback From The Okra Salad Recipe

I cook South Indian dishes regularly. Last week I wanted to make Okra Salad and I looked up the recipe in the book Dakshin, by Chandra Padmanabhan. The author suggested that adding a bit of salt to the salad brings out the flavor and enhances the taste of the dish. But she cautioned that quantity and timing is everything. You have to sprinkle the salt over the dish at the end. If you add the salt in the beginning it will bring out the water in the okra and make the dish soggy, sticky and almost inedible. On the other hand, if you dump a spoon of salt after the dish is done and try to mix it, the okra crumbles into pieces and looks unappetizing.

There is a lot we can learn from this about giving feedback to a person about his or her performance. I have seen people, who in the name of feedback, pour cold water over every idea a person suggests. My colleagues do not open their mouth when such a person is around. Such people have good intentions. But they dampen the performance of everyone else around them.

The other extreme is managers who never give timely feedback and pour it all out during the annual performance review, leaving the employee wondering why the manager never shared his feedback throughout the year.

A good manager knows that the quantity and timing of feedback matters; very much like a good cook knowing when to add salt, how much to add and how to blend it in.

PS: In India the okra is called "ladies fingers". If you want to order Okra in a regular Indian restaurant in the US or Europe, look for "Bhindi Masala". Bhindi is the Hindi word for Okra. You will not find the Okra Salad that I make it any regular restaurant. I am afraid, it is a dish available only in South Indian house holds and select Indian vegetarian restaurants. Image Credit : Food.com

After I wrote this post, the Head of Customer Success at Rypple @dpriemer reached out to me via twitter and said that they have developed a suite of social software that enables managers to improve the performance of their team members by giving feedback. The Co-CEO of Rypple @ddebow liked the post as well.

I am not an active user of Rypple. But I have tried it. If you liked what I said and want a tool to engage your colleagues by giving them feedback, you may want to give Rypple a try. There is a free trial.

Performance Preview Instead of Performance Review

Prof. Samuel Culbert of the UCLA Anderson business school has written a book called "Get Rid Of The Performance Review". I read his recent article on the subject where he argues that the performance review process is ineffective because, the manager who delivers the review has no opportunity to influence the behavior of the employee and the employee has no reason to trust the manager.

He argues that instead of having a performance review at the end of the year, companies should have a performance preview in the beginning of the year where the manager, the employee and other colleagues have a meaningful discussion about a person's goals and talk about how the person can go about accomplishing those goals.

This approach makes a lot of sense to me and many of my colleagues. I plan to incorporate this concept into the software products I design.

A Person Contributing To Social Media is a Like a Ship Sending Out Beacons

If you are wondering if it is worth your time participating in social media sites within your company or outside your company, think about this this way. You are good at something. Your manager knows it. Your colleagues know it. Your friends know it. Your recruiter knows it. However, your managers, friends, colleagues and recruiter may not always have the right opportunity for you.

So you need to send out periodic messages to the world, beyond your geographic and organizational limits, about what you are capable of, what you are good at, what you have accomplished, the things you like to do, the things that you are doing, the people you know, the books you read, the people you met and so on.

In the book, The Power of Pull the authors compare social media participation to a ship in the middle of sea, sending out beacons periodically in all directions because it wants something. The ship may want some parts, may want to exchange something with other ships, may want to offier something, may want to let other ships know its location and so on. The key words here are periodic and freequency. It is not enough if you make a lot of noise in one event or to the same few people. It is necessary that you make this a habit and make yourself findable.

Talent Management or Talent Commoditization

I spoke to a renowned industry analyst yesterday and he told me that the dirty little secret of talent management is that companies are not trying to nurture talent or retain top talent. Instead companies are trying  to turn talent into commodity and ensure that when talented people do leave the organization they do not do much damage to the existing mediocre organizational machinery. He said that organizations believe that it is cheaper to commoditize talent rather than retain talent. This should alarm leaders who are trying to attract talent and drive business results.

Business leaders are left in a situation where they have a lot of well dressed, well behaved, mediocre people who show up every day, don’t take any risks, don’t do any mistakes, but cannot deliver results or drive business forward. It is not unusual to not find a single person who can deliver results, even when you have hundreds working for you. This should not surprise you because the systematic talent commoditization machinery in most organizations is designed to smooth out any unique or indispensable skill. The machinery is carefully designed to maintain consistent mediocrity. 

So what about the occasional excellence in organizations? Such excellence happens because of the initiatives of individuals and business leaders who drive results in spite of this talent-commoditization machinery.

While there are many visionary people executives who are driving change, I suspect that human resource practices are not going to change overnight. Individuals and business leaders need to take charge of the situation.


If you are an individual contributor, don’t settle for doing mediocre tasks that keep the wheel spinning. Seth Godin, the author of Linchpin says in his book, “The only way to get what you're worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.”


If you are a business leader, stop focusing on succession planning alone and focus on practices, tools and technologies that attract, energize and empower great people. When you invest in technology, don’t stop at tools that merely maintain HR records. Instead focus on tools that enable your people to interact with each other, share with each other, learn from each other and work with each other.

That is the only way you are going to attract and retain good people. And yes, you have to pay them their worth.