State of Talent Management: Turning Fantasy Into Reality
Tom Monahan
Lifting the performance of companies and organizations globally by discovering, growing and enabling exceptional leaders.
This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers analyze the state and future of their industry. Read all the posts here.
In my Big Idea for 2014, I noted that “the average corporate manager and/or leader brings more quantitative rigor to a fantasy football team or an Ashes test analysis than to actual teams at work.” When looking at the state of my industry, a large part of which is helping companies add analytics to their talent management processes, I took direction from W. Edwards Deming’s famous quote, and brought some more data with me to this conversation.
An exploding global industry, fantasy sports has come into its own. You’re likely at least vaguely familiar with the major league fantasy iterations for the NFL, Major League Baseball and the English Premier League. You may be less familiar with Badminton Star, the emerging fantasy league for badminton enthusiasts or the Fantasy Wrestling League. There is even a fantasy league for Congress, which allows you to draft members of the House and Senate and score points based on their productivity. It does not allow youto create a team of alternate congress people as I had originally hoped, but that’s a different story.
In addition to the emergence of a fantasy league for every conceivable recreational niche, an impressive array of third-party vendors has emerged to support players in their endeavors. And increasingly, fantasy sports talent management has become more than a hobby, verging on the commitment level of a part-time job. Fantasy players from across the globe spend an average of 8.7 hours per week consuming fantasy services, from strategy to research and interactions with their competitors. They also spent $656 million last year on information materials related to fantasy sports. Seventy-four percent of fantasy players consult four or more informational sources to gather relevant data.
Now, let’s contrast this with recent CEB data that gauged real-life experiences applying analytics to talent management: only 15% agreed with the statement that HR analytics have led me to change a business decision in the past year, while just 8% agreed that HR gets significant returns on analytics investments.
Now, think about your own management experiences. How many hours per week are you investing in managing talent? How much money has your company invested in analytics to drive insights about your people and talent needs? Do you spend time rigorously comparing and contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of potential hires with rich, predictive analytics, or are you hiring simply on gut feel? Are your training and coaching programs linked to rich data about the core levers of performance, or the received wisdom of long-ago leaders?
I’ve often wondered if companies’ nonchalant attitudes towards talent would persist if they understood how often talent issues derailed growth plans. In an important research study we conducted called “Stall Points,” we found that over half of the time companies experience stalls in their growth as a direct or indirect result of their ability to manage their own talent resources. Think of all the things executives worry about: disruption from upstart competitors, technology making their value propositions obsolete, new regulations making it more difficult to compete; and yet, the vast majority of growth stalls are due to factors within an executive team’s control. And within all of these factors, having the right people in the right places looms incredibly large. Ultimately, selecting, organizing, developing and mobilizing the right people has a disproportionate impact on the organization’s ability to succeed.
In an environment where having the right people in place to execute and innovate may be even more important than having a great “on paper” strategy, we see this disconnect between fantasy sports leagues and real life as a major opportunity.
Bringing rigor and analytics to play within this industry is where we plan to spend our time, and we are only at the beginning stages of what can be done. If we can get the world’s executives to apply the level of rigor and precision to their workforces as fantasy players do to their teams, the state of my industry will look very different and the workforce will be far more productive the next time I sit down to write about it.
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Enjoyed this post? Read what other Influencers had to say:
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• Alistair Cox on the State of Recruiting: Powering the World of Work
• Louisa Wong on the State of Recruiting: Imagine a World Without Headhunters
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Director of People Analytics & Insights at Cencora | MBA, SPHR®
10y(continued...) Over time, and after enough success stories, quantitative talent management will improve and take hold. One thing that might make it a bit easier to work with in the fantasy realm is the limited, much more manageable (not at Big Data levels) pool of talent to analyze and much more tangible/concrete, publicly available game-related statistics. Fantasy sports analytics have gotten pretty advanced and well-proven to correlate with on-field success. The next frontier in this realm is already being explored by the teams themselves who are beginning to try and regain the competitive advantage they may have had during the early days of "Moneyball" sports analytics by now attempting to quantify the difficult stuff corporate talent management has been struggling with for years - creating metrics like Clubhouse Cohesiveness/Likeability, Leadership Quotient, Off-field Risk, etc. to factor into their analysis of athlete's potential fit/contribution within their organizations.
Director of People Analytics & Insights at Cencora | MBA, SPHR®
10yI think most corporate initiatives start out with Executives asking for change agents to "Show them the money!" - demanding ROI analysis for new technology, processes, etc. When leaders/managers ask for increases in total rewards or recruiting budgets, BI tools, social collaboration tools, eLearning subscriptions, tuition reimbursement, or any number of non-HR related things, etc., they need to present a business case for their request - with some level of ROI. Quantitative talent management is still relatively new and "unproven" in the eyes of many Executives who probably still feel that their intuition trumps the still fledgling quantitative work being done in the area of talent management. They KNOW who should (i.e., they want) included in Succession Plans, why people leave their companies, where the best recruits come from (highest GPAs from the top colleges of course! ...even if the data says otherwise), etc.
Student-Centered Educator/Researcher/ Mentor/Community Outreach Leader/ Environmentalist/Perennial Learner
10yIf the executives will apply rigor and precision to their workforce not just to execute and innovate but to commit themselves to deliver quality services, engage in continuous research and interaction with their competitors and gather some relevant data, this will transform the industry and the workforce will be far more productive.
Co-Founder @ PE-Xcelerate | Accelerating Private Equity Value Creation, Executive Impact & Transaction Timelines
10yWe're seeing more board and CEO recognition of this reality every day: " Ultimately, selecting, organizing, developing and mobilizing the right people has a disproportionate impact on the organization’s ability to succeed"
Sr. People Strategist ♦ Career Coach ♦ Labour Relations Leader ♦ Talent Leader ♦ HR Architect ♦ Transformation SME ♦ Absenteeism Management SME
10yTom Monahan, interesting choice of examples. It could be argued that many of us HR folks already function in "fantasy land." After all we are always after that elusive "seat at the table" with ambitious/passionate HR strategies concocted on paper that hardly ever translate into reality but seriously, I really appreciate the shift towards data analytics; it is much needed for HR decision making. The reality is that for the vast majority, the "HR house" is not in order to bring a high level of analytics into the game. I would think that HR leaders need to first ensure that they have the necessary infrastructure in place which includes strong governance processes, well defined and implemented HR processes and policies, engaged leadership, low change management and communication barriers and employee buy-in. It should also be assumed that for an organization implementing real strategic workforce planning or gap analysis, a reliable competency management system is aligned to position management. If those assumptions and criteria prove valid which I believe they do, a great deal of work needs to be done within the HR department to create an environment and accompanied framework upon which to build quantitative HR decision making models to affect change. To me this means big data is a long way off for many HR folks and the companies they represent but nothing is preventing HR depts from getting their own houses in order for bigger and better things.