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Assessment & Evaluation

Published February 2007

Talent Measurement: A Management Necessity

 

  Chris Moore

By setting targets for your talent measures and collecting the measure on a recurring basis, you now have the foundation for producing a composite-level scorecard for each talent goal and indicator. Score cards commonly display progress in terms of stoplight-style images (e.g. red, yellow and green). These color-coded displays are a direct reflection of the proximity that the actual measurement value has at a point in time to the target that you set for that period.

In this model, that calculation is referred to as an "attainment score" and is reflected as a percentage. The calculation is rather simple: actual value or target value multiplied by 100. The attainment score for the objective level provides a normalized metric of how close you are to accomplishing your strategy.

To produce your key indicator metric, average all the attainment scores across the supporting objectives. This concept is derived from a model called the Oregon Productivity Matrix developed by the Oregon Productivity Center at Oregon State University. If some objectives are more important than others in accomplishing your goal, weight the attainment score higher when producing the average.

Example: The key indicator value for a goal is produced by averaging the underlying attainment scores for each objective.

Driving Talent Management Decisions

Just defining and collecting measures won't help you manage any better than before, unless you use the measures as a basis for effective decision making. As you prepare a set of candidate measures, it's important to put your measures through a simple test: If the measure goes up, what will you do? And conversely, if the measure goes down, what will you do?

This test will help you formulate a decision-making strategy for each measure and validate whether the measure really matters. You don't want to select measures that are easy to explain away, although some managers like to choose "soft" measures because they limit the level of accountability. Unfortunately, measurement alone doesn't change behavior, so tying in accountability is crucial if you want the process to improve.

If you deconstruct the word "accountability," you'll find the word "action." Setting targets and proposed actions is a key step in bringing together measurement and management. It is the action itself that drives talent management decision making. To create accountability, you have to reflect on these questions: What is the issue? What result is needed? What must managers or leaders do to deliver the results?

You can answer these questions by framing the issue in terms of a flowchart with inputs, processes and outputs. On one end of your chart, you have the inputs. Consider all the players involved, including the talent workers, beneficiaries, mentors and other contributors. On the other end, you have the outputs, the needed results. Results can take the form of knowledge, skills, abilities, behaviors, business outcomes, etc. Between the inputs and outputs, you have your talent management processes. By placing accountability on the inputs — those parties who influence the process — we increase the probability our actions toward building and managing talent workers will produce the intended results.