Tilting at a favorite windmill, again.....Assessment

Anyone who has read my posts and comments over the years or who works closely with me knows that I have a few pet ideas outside of my direct domains of recruiting software and yacht racing.

One of those pet ideas revolves around assessment, both pre-hire and post-hire.

The idea is stone simple, but it meets lots of resistance: in many cases, it’s a waste of time to assess individual performance with the usual success metrics.

Not all the time of course- as my friend (and mentor of things assessment) Joe Murphy of Shaker Consulting Group says, at small scale assessment can be descriptive and at large scale, predictive. If you are hiring for jobs that turn on individual performances and you are hiring a lot of individuals, assessment of individuals is a great idea with huge potential ROI. Naturally, that available ROI invites misuse of assessment too.

So what I am I really saying? I’m saying that you have to assess teams when the work being done is team based, and a great deal of the work of business is, in fact, team based.

As another in a long line of examples, meet Shane Battier.

Shane is a marginal NBA athlete. He does not score a lot of points. He does not grab a lot of rebounds. He lacks body control. He can’t create much offense.

Yet something funny happens when Shane joins a basketball team. That team starts winning- not just a little bit, but dramatically more often. Right now, Shane Battier plays for the Houston Rockets. From the article:

The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team’s elements.

And later:

There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group.

It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.

I would say peculiar both basketball and business.

Read the whole article- it’s a fascinating piece.

Comment by Jim Damico on February 23, 2009 at 12:27pm: Great post, very interesting, and long overdue for companies to really focus on team dynamics.

May I be so bold as to add one of my assessment beefs: please stop measuring just only your top performers to determine what skills, traits, competencies, etc, etc, etc. make a person successful. You have to measure your worst performers as well. When you do, you will often find that they share many of the same traits, etc. It is the few that they don't share that really make the difference.

Comment by Martin H.Snyder on February 23, 2009 at 1:11pm: Hi Jim- thanks for the comment !

Ya the "dark matter" of individual performance.....

Comment by Joseph P. Murphy on February 23, 2009 at 5:19pm: Actually, the validation strategy is to collect objective and subjective performance data and assessment results from a sample of 100 or more performers. The mix should span the full range of performance. The analysis then is faced with identifying the nature of the relationships between assessment and performance. Think of validation as calibration. Would you use a measurement device calibrated for another purpose to determine your business outcomes?

Joseph P. Murphy
Shaker Consulting Group
Developers of the Virtual Job Tryout®
www.shakercg.com