The Stacking Effect of the Pandemic
Given the current situation, you’ll forgive employees for not performing at 100%. There are so many stacking factors impacting people, on a personal and professional basis. Pandemic fatigue is a reality. Many people are reporting exhaustion, little energy to perform in their roles, and general mental malaise, related to living within the constant prescence of the virus and the conditions it imposes, according to the Employee Benefits advisory site. We need to be less harsh on our teams and on ourselves.
Your most talented employees are force multipliers. They raise the performance bar for their colleagues, and particularly for their direct reports, if they have any. That’s not necessarily a given! They enable the organisation to scale up rapidly, and reach opportunities that could not be achieved in any other way. They role-model behaviour and teach winning behaviours that shape high-performing cultures. Simply adding a force multiplier to a team boosts the effectiveness of other team members by 5-15%. No wonder, then, that study after study shows stronger financial performance in companies that make proportionally greater investments in identifying and developing top talent.
If you are going to invest in the right employees, the key question concerns who they actually are and what are the key indicators that signal star potential?
As academic reviews note, the first and most important decision is to determine “potential for what?” Unfortunately, most HiPo interventions focus on individual career success — “potential to move up two roles in five years” is a common definition — but the ability to advance one’s own career does not guarantee that one will make a crucial contribution to the organisation. Nowadays, there are flatter and more horizontal, flexible structures to consider.
Where it can go wrong...
Most organisational leaders fail to positively impact on their teams and organisations, with estimates suggesting that at least 1 in 2 leaders cannot engage employees and fail to turn their teams ororganisations into high-performing zones. They work transactionally, rather than transformationally, and can turn A-players into a B-team, and/or see their despondent talent leave. No only that, training budgets have reduced in line with the effects of the pandemic.
How to Support your Force Multipliers
- Allowing the flexibility to move in and out of teams to take full advantage of their knowledge transfer to rising stars.
- Using development interventions that improve their performance performers even marginally,because a slight increase in performance can lead to greater production than a more significant increase of the average employee.
- Creating a compensation system that conforms to the distribution of performance, which will help retention.
This infographic is credited to SHL - www.shl.com
As and when the economy improves, the retention of the talent required for organisations to recover and thrive will depend, at least in part, on how well employees were managed through the crisis.
Reflections Questions
Discuss:
How do you know who will leverage business performance in your organisation?
What evidence supports your development strategies?
Key Tips for Development
- Instead of using one-off programmatic activities for development, leverage the power of in-job learning to build skills needed for success.
- Instead of hoping that learning will occur on the job, provide the structure and support needed for on-the-job learning to succeed.
- Instead of focusing on multiple rotations without regard to individual needs, provide stretch assignments targeting each person’s unique development needs.
- Give managers easy-to-use tools to help them develop their people.
We hope this blog provides insights to help steer you through the uncertainty in development opportunities. You can always email for access to toolkits and development assessments.