Do You Know Diddy?

I dislike reality TV but a few years back I found myself watching a show called, 'I Want to Work For Diddy' because it provided unexpected insight into team dynamics and leadership. 

The basic premise is that they pull a bunch of unlikely people together and give them impossible and annoying tasks to perform as a team. Someone gets voted off in each episode until one lucky winner finally gets to work for Diddy.  (Yeah, it’s like The Apprentice without the combover).

I found myself in sympathy with one strident young women on the team, who seemed to be the only one capable of getting anything done. She was pretty obnoxious in her critique of the other people on the team but then again, they weren't very good - plus inappropriately rude people are great for ratings.

Not surprisingly, when it came time to vote someone off, the team voted unanimously against her.

At first I thought this was kind of dumb because without her the others didn't stand a chance of buying a pack of cigarettes for Diddy and coming back with the correct change… but then I thought about it a bit more carefully.

It's clear that their decision to vote her off the team was an emotional one, which is a good reminder to all of us that competence will never trump popularity.

But there is a subtle logic to voting her off the team that reveals itself if you consider that over time it would become more and more apparent that she was the one getting the job done. In other words, her competence represented a threat to the collective.

My respect for the dum-dums rose when I realized this. 

We see variations on this theme played out every day in the workplace:

• Hiring managers and teams find reasons not to hire competent people (aka ‘cultural fit’). 
• Directors lobby for inceasingly specialised headcount to expand their span of control (aka ‘scalability’).  
• Executives choose successors that won’t pose a threat to themselves (aka ‘succession planning’). 
• People performing multiple roles get marginalised as the organisation grows (aka ‘organisational realignment’).

Not that this always happens – or is necessarily a bad thing - but the takeaway is this:

Don't expect people to make decisions that promote the greater good of their employer if it conflicts with their own greater good. Smart companies bring everyone's greater good into alignment.

That's talent management.

Somebody on the show apparently realized this as well, because Diddy’s factotum (a hard-faced girl who used to be his PA) bucked the popular vote by keeping the competent girl in the running with a stinging lecture about her attitude, kicked off the worst of the losers, and told everyone else to straighten up or take a hike.

That's performance management.

A leader who manages performance and takes action to correct behavior and prevent team dynamics from interfering with smooth operations is worth their weight in gold.  Unfortunately, few companies have a mechanism in place to reward the best leaders.  They may not even know who their best leaders are because they rely on performance ratings and talent reviews, which mostly measure how well people manage up.

The question is, how do you identify and reward the best talent managers in your own company to drive the right business outcomes, which is the reason companies pay people in the first place?  

This is a broader discussion around moving beyond spreadsheets and the annual performance review into the exciting realm of talent science, which we'll continue in my next post. 

In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about Diddy, check out his rules for success as well as his handy rap tutorial for aspring pop stars.

Picture courtesy of I Want to Work for Diddy.

Laura Schroeder is EMEA product marketing director at Workday, headquartered in Pleasanton, CA.  She has nearly fifteen years of experience envisioning, designing, developing, implementing and  evangelizing global Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions and holds a  certificate in Strategic Human Resources Practices from Cornell University.  Her articles and interviews on HCM topics have been published in the US, Europe and Asia.  She lives in Munich, Germany and enjoys cooking, reading, writing, kick boxing (well, kicking things) and spending time with friends and family. If you want to read more from Laura, check out her talent management blog Working Girl or follow her on Twitter @WorkGal.

Comments

[E. James (Jim) Brennan]

Good observations, Laura. One of the central principles of performance management is that people always do what they think is in their own best self-interest. The challenge for compensation people is to create a reinforcement system with a balance of consequences that best aligns personal motivations with organizational needs.

[Laura Schroeder]

@Thank you, Jim. And... right???

[E. James (Jim) Brennan]

P.S. Forgot to answer your last question. Suspect the best talent managers are the ones who graduate the key leaders. You shall know them by the results from their proteges. Maybe reward them with bonuses, increased freedom to guide/teach/train others, enhanced mentorship opportunities, more control over their own assignments, etc.