My Talent Strategy Principles: Talent is Everything

Whether you are building palaces of technology or putting lipstick on a pig, what takes you to the finish line is talent.  Talent is the difference between cost center and strategic asset.  Talent is literally everything.

As our society continues to evolve in the knowledge worker era, we the IT people, are the vanguard.  We are the front lines of change.  We are the bearers of an awesome responsibility.  We are the builders and the keepers of the tools that give people the power to move mountains.  If we don’t recruit, retain, and develop the right technical talent, then those mountains might start to fall on people (or budgets).

And so we continue where we last left off…..

Do not make the mistake of believing that you compete for technical talent with the K-12 sector.. you compete with EVERY sector.
If you look out into the IT world for the K-12 education sector, you will notice one glaring problem that is so widespread it must be systemic… IT people in K-12 are not very good.  Before I get inundated with flame emails about the great IT people you know in K12, let me say…I realize this is a generalization and I know many IT people in K12 that are actually very good.  However, they are the exception, not the rule.  One of the major contributing factors to this unfortunate reality is the fact that management in K12 tend to apply the context of their own job market to other disciplines.  If I am a school leader, the number of potential positions at competing organizations is anchored to the number of schools at the other districts in my city.  If you think in terms of a metro job market, this is a very small number.  For an IT person, the job market includes every single company/organization within commute distance.  Everyone has IT and every IT function is growing.

When you believe that you only compete with the K12 sector, your good technical talent will leave and you will be left with those that could not transition to something better.

A high-end team is the cheaper option
When I say a higher-end team is cheaper, I am making a few assumptions:

• A high service level is non-negotiable
• You are actually getting high-end talent
• You are leveraging force multiplying technology

Technology is a labor intensive function and payroll is typically the largest single line item in your budget.  The tendency is to try maximizing value by reducing the cost of individual labor units (people) and increasing the number of bodies (particularly common in districts that prefer a tech person at each campus).  The problem is that you sacrifice quality and end up with a predominately reactive capability.

Imagine a team that has a high level of combined expertise, structured to focus talent on reactive and proactive functions, and equipped with a tool set that enables heavy use of automation and remote management (force multiplying technologies).  In this scenario you could easily centralize your staff and put your enterprise on a continuous improvement path.  This leads to dramatically lower total labor costs because you simply need fewer people.  If your school is growing every year (most are) you also have the benefit of dramatically reducing the slope of your growth-related cost curve.  As you continue to invest time in force multiplying tools/activities, your target labor ratios (Computers/IT Staff, FTEs/IT Staff, Students/IT Staff) will shrink.

Foster a sense of elitism in your team
Keeping your team motivated is even more crucial when you are trying to leverage small, highly effective teams.  Building a sense of elitism fits very well with this strategy.  Elite implies a “better than someone else” message.  It is important that the “someone else” in this case is external to your organization. The power of elitism in team motivation is not just that it drives a path to excellence, but that it drives sustaining that excellence.

Firing is far more important than hiring
Hiring is a crap shoot.  Even with the best processes and tools you are still rolling the dice.  The whole resume/interview/assessment dance is simply too easy to game and it takes months to see who you really hired.  The only way to compensate for this imperfect information quandary is to be rigorous in your termination process.  The moment you determine that an individual is not high quality and cannot be developed (“will not” develop is more likely), you owe it to the rest of your high-quality team to terminate them immediately.

How you fire people is also important.  There is no termination process that is secret and the rest of your team will have some sense of the “fairness” of the process.  Here are some of my rules for terminations:

• You must try to develop the low-performing team member.  If nothing else than to demonstrate fairness to the rest of your team, but there are other benefits as well.  You may discover in the development process that you have a potential high-performer in the wrong position.  If you keep them on the bus but move them to another seat they might start to shine.  In the past three years I have had two team members that were floundering on the Help Desk team and I moved them into different roles that seemed to match their interests.  Both of them quickly turned into high-performers and the value they have produced is immeasurable.
• When the decision to terminate is made, execute swiftly.  You owe it to the person you are going to terminate to do so quickly.  Every day that you wait is a stolen day of job searching.  Ignore people who say things like “Don’t fire on a Friday.  Let them have a happy weekend.”  What if they are happy that weekend because they are buying a new car or a house?
• Be generous with severance.  Two weeks of severance pay is the norm, but I don’t think it’s enough.  Two weeks doesn’t even cover a single household billing cycle and if they do not have a significant savings, then you have not given them any cushion at all.  I prefer to start with one full month of severance and increase it based on extenuating circumstances (i.e. bad job market, single household earner, medical issues, etc.).  It seems to take me at least a month to hire a new team member so the budget impact of a month or more of severance is minimal if not outright zero.
• Be gracious, present, and honest.  Not only should terminations be done face-to-face (I don’t think I really need to explain that one), but they should be done with grace and an honest conversation about why.  Do whatever you reasonably can to help them leave with dignity, even if they don’t deserve it.

Bad attitudes are infectious, abate the wound
A team member with a subversive or otherwise bad attitude is the worst possible poison for a team.  One that if ignored will turn the normal stresses of an IT team into debilitating drama.  The solution here is fairly simple.  If the root cause cannot be addressed, then the team member must be terminated, regardless of competency or past performance.

The story continues…

1. My Talent Strategy Principles: The Original
2. My Talent Strategy Principles: Compensation
3. My Talent Strategy Principles: Talent is Everything (You are already here)

Changed the Look again and Re-discovered a Cool Tool

OK, so I didn’t like the old style and began the search for a better template.  I didn’t find it.  This one is a little better but still not what I want.  Expect this to change again

In my blog template travels I was forced to change the banner graphic several times and my frustration with Photoshop reached an all-time high.  In an attempt to find a photoshop-like tool made for grandparents to use (this is my litmus test for intuitive UI… maybe I should hire a bunch of grandparents to work with our BA’s), I re-discovered a very cool tool.  Microsoft Research Autocollage 2008.

Wicked Smart!
Microsoft Research Autocollage 2008 is a very simple application that takes a set of photo’s and generates a collage.  Sounds simple enough.  Yet there is quite a bit of intelligence in this simple little product.  When you select your photos, the software runs a facial and key object recognition algorithm and figures out what is “important” in each photo.  It will also analyse the over all color matt and organize the collage to maximize the flow of color through the final image.

Not Wicked Smart!
This tool is not free.  Really Microsoft?!  You give away tons of applications, tools, and whathoozits as part of your value-add strategy.  Why on earth is this not part of that offering?  There is a 30 day free trial and I encourage you to play around with it.  Though I will not be paying $20 for it…