Upgrading Talent: A Miracle Drug that Many Avoid
Friday Reflection (No.85)
Upgrading talent is like a miracle drug with a grueling regimen—its results can be transformative, but the process isn’t for the faint of heart.
Medical advances in drug development over the last 100 years have transformed our lives.1 From penicillin to polio vaccines, chemotherapy to statins, birth control to insulin, the promise is clear—take the medicine, and it leads to longer, healthier lives.
What baffles me is that over 50% of patients prescribed life-saving therapies abandon their treatment. They find a seemingly rational excuse to quit, only to watch their condition deteriorate, a problem the medical community calls non-adherence.
As perplexing as non-adherence may be, a similar phenomenon happens in leading large organizations. Upgrading talent can relieve organizational pain AND accelerate performance, but too often, senior executives ignore the prescription.
Leadership Principle: Putting A-player talent in critical roles is like a miracle drug. It relieves chronic pain and accelerates performance if you have the resolve to consistently keep the regimen.
Replacing underperformers demands significant time and emotional investment, both before and after the decision. Developing B-players into A-players requires frequent feedback, thoughtful crafting of roles, focused coaching and advocating for them to get new experiences. Furthermore, talent that works well today may not be suited for future goals, often forcing heart-wrenching decisions to replace leaders who once delivered great results. No wonder adherence to this miracle cure is so low.
Similar to non-adherent patients, it's easy to rationalize inaction. "External hires often fail here” as the saying goes (the data backs this up, 50%+ of senior executives hired from the outside flame out within 18 months). And the list of “who dilemmas” goes on and on (read more on this here).
Yet when you skip a dose of upgrading talent, you leave your organization exposed to the very issues that have caused you pain in the past. Moreover, strong, high potential talent gets poached by your competitors, weaker talent “survives”, and over time, the entire organization atrophies and struggles to deliver the desired impact.
On the flip side, the relief and lift in performance that comes from sticking to this regimen of upgrading talent is undeniable.
A senior executive I coach made two key changes to their leadership team in the first six months, yet performance and her own bandwidth were still being weighed down by another leader on her team, who we’ll call Carla. Carla was valued by the CEO for her strengths, but the role required decisive execution, and she was more of a consensus-driven strategist. Knowing her boss’s (CEO) fondness for Carla, the senior leader I coach began hesitating to make the tough decision she knew was necessary.
During a few early morning discussions with me and others that she trusted, she came up with a script for the conversations with Carla, a list of potential A-player replacements and a plan to get others, including the CEO, on board with her decision. This gave her the confidence to act.
Ultimately, she followed the prescription and replaced this leader with an A-Player. Within weeks, the team felt renewed, and within six months the company was set on a stronger path for growth. In this moment, her sentiment echoed a line from Eminem’s Hallie’s Song: “It’s like the greatest gift you can give, the weight has been lifted.”
Relief…followed by improved performance…I think we all could use more of that.
Take Action: Practical and Proven Steps
Identify the blockers: Take a hard look to understand who is underperforming in critical roles. These individuals are “blockers,” because they are holding back performance AND they are in a leadership role that other high potential talent within and outside your organization could have. Make sure to look beyond your direct reports; sometimes, the blockers can be skip-level leaders in high value roles. Be sure to differentiate between who needs to be replaced and who has coachable development areas where they can improve.
Challenge your “story” for why you can’t upgrade these “blockers” now. Just as patients rationalize their decision to stop taking a medicine that helps them, it’s easy to come up with a story to delay action on talent decisions. Speak with a confidant you trust to help you see all the angles and come up with a plan and timeline to take action. If you don’t have that confidant, consider leaning on the multi-verse of perspective to really test whether your story is a good enough reason not to act. (It usually isn’t).
Follow a disciplined process. Whether the solution is an internal promotion or an external hire, match capabilities and skills to the specific scorecard for the role. In some cases, external hires are necessary to inject new capabilities. To get the hiring decision right, especially with external talent, you need to follow a science-backed process.2
Overinvest in onboarding: A lack of a rigorous onboarding process is one of the top three reasons why external hires fail (and can even affect internal hires). Don’t leave their “integration” to chance or delegate it solely to HR. Be clear about the key relationships your new hire needs to foster and guide them through the unwritten rules of your company culture. For some ideas on best practice onboarding, you can check out this article I co-authored with my amazing colleagues Karen Welt Steeves and Dina Wang.3
Reflect: Some Questions to Consider
Who are the blockers in your organization that you’ve been hesitant to address because of how hard it will be? What are all the costs of inaction?
When was the last time you reassessed the talent in your critical roles? How aligned is each individual’s capability and skills for the next chapter of growth?
How can you improve the onboarding experience for new leaders you hire to ensure they don’t trip over any unstated cultural norms in their early days?
If this week’s Friday Reflection was practical or enjoyable (or maybe even both!), please share it with your colleagues and friends.
It’s hard to imagine our lives without so many of these breakthroughs. As I pondered this thought, I wanted to read a more fulsome list of the most important breakthroughs. Perplexity.ai, which I’ve started using as my search engine instead of Google, came up with a great list. Could this be the downfall of Google? I doubt it, but I do rely on it much less now.
Two books that can guide you in setting up the right process are: Who by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, and a new book that I’ve just started to dig into The Five Talents That Really Matter by Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton.
It’s oriented around “virtual onboarding” because we wrote it at the height of the pandemic, but many of the principles apply regardless of if you are in a hybrid setting or not.
If you work in a smaller company, I also recommend sharing this series of articles with new hires:
https://paulstansik.medium.com/a-letter-to-a-small-companys-new-hire-part-i-97f6c8fcd17e
https://paulstansik.medium.com/a-letter-to-a-small-companys-new-hire-part-ii-faf77382a4f6
https://paulstansik.medium.com/a-letter-to-a-small-companys-new-hire-part-iii-99b2f67198e4
https://paulstansik.medium.com/a-letter-to-a-small-companys-new-hire-part-iv-36759e7ad2