In a large corporation, which employees are the most valued?
Bill Conaty, veteran of generating world-class talent for decades at GE, took the stage at the World Business Forum to discuss the creation of a corporate performance culture. He described a framework for employee evaluation which attempts to categorize employees into three buckets:
- Top Talent
- Highly Valued
- Less Effective
Bill laid out two methods of employee evaluation: (1) how well does the employee represent the corporate values, and (2) how well does the employee perform. These two categories create a 2x2 matrix for evaluating employees:
Ideally, a corporation should strive to move the majority of their employees to the upper-right quadrant. Bill stated that any corporation wishing to create a culture where this systematically occurs should have the following qualities:
- The CEO must be committed to this performance culture, and needs to be the arbiter that actively decides who moves up and who moves out in an organization.
- The corporate values must be clearly understood so that employees know what to shoot for! Employees must be aware of what it will take to succeed as well as what it will take to fail.
- Performance goals and measurements must be regularly communicated with candor and trust.
Therefore, a corporation must focus on the employees that meet the values of the corporation while performing. What about the employees that meet the values but don't perform? Work to improve their performance. How about the employees that perform but don't embody the values of the corporation? Get rid of them! Bill called them the "bullies of the organization".
Bill ended by revealing a typical ratio that is often seen for percentages of employees that fall into one of the three buckets:
Top Talent: 30%
Highly Valued: 60%
Less Effective: 10%
Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd
EMC Intrapreneur
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