Talent Liberation: The Blueprint to Performance Management in the New World of Work

By Deborah Hartung

Talent Liberation is the book for every business and HR leader who has been wanting to axe the annual performance appraisal process but is unsure of either how to do that or of what to replace annual appraisals with.

In this candid how-to-guide, Deborah Hartung clarifies and explains:
• The outdated attitudes and beliefs towards work, performance and culture that we need to permanently retire;
• The link between performance management methodologies and toxic workplace culture and how to break the cycle;
• How to manage and measure on outcomes instead of hours worked;
• How to improve performance and engagement through regular feedback and recognition; and
• How to use the DIRC model of performance management to improve both overall organisational performance levels and workplace culture.

By the end of Talent Liberation you will have a blueprint to implement in your organisation to help you unleash human potential whilst ensuring that you improve collaboration, transparency and accountability in your teams and reach new levels of organisational efficiency, innovation and profitability.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Aug 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781649691569

Book preview

Prologue

I’ve been working in HR for close on 20 years now and, just like all my peers, I used to train line managers on various concepts relating to managing work performance. As HR, although we could make recommendations and influence policies and procedures, for the most part, our hands were tied and we complied with the global status quo - the annual or bi-annual performance appraisal with the balanced scorecard or the subjective 5 point rating scale. By the early 2010’s, I was really excited to learn more about the progress that companies like Adobe and Deloitte were making and how they were reinventing performance management for a more modern workplace. As with everything else in life though, my thinking was influenced by my environment and my personal experiences. I liked what I was seeing coming out of these early performance management trailblazers, but I still wasn’t convinced that they had done enough to reform ‘ye olde performance management system’. 

My work in leadership development and organisational change management gives me a different lens. My early career experience in employee relations and labour litigation has an impact on how I approach the entire talent management ecosystem because I have seen what happens when companies and managers get things wrong. 

When I originally started out on this journey in 2014/2015, I didn’t know how this was going to turn out or what the final product would look like. All I really knew, was that I needed to find a way to help my clients - and maybe even the world - create a methodology that unleashes human potential and improves workplace culture and engagement. I was acutely aware of the fact that we were limiting our people and telling them what they could or could not achieve in their careers and their lives and we were focused only on short-term transactional job performance and profit gains for our employers. In my mind, this model was obviously not sustainable and there had to be a better way.

Fortunately for me, the tide was changing. Whispers were emerging from all corners of the world: maybe we’ve been doing this HR thing all wrong.  Not just certain portions of HR, either - all of it!

The more I immersed myself in Talent Management and the more I understood about workplace culture and organisational transformation, the more I started seeing a very clear link between institutional norms and workplace culture and performance management, succession planning and general attrition. I spent hours poring over competency dictionaries and trying to connect the dots in the complex maze that was emerging in my mind.

 Thinking back to the early years of my career, working at a premier employment law consulting company, I only ever really got involved in work performance matters when it was already too late.  By the time companies call the lawyers and the ’consultants who fire people’, the goal is to exit the employee and either avoid litigation or limit liability.

Once I moved into HR and started working more closely with an Industrial Psychologist and the OD function, I started to see many more factors and dimensions that impact poor performance in a role. I was really privileged to be included in broader HR capacity building and skills development initiatives and I learned all about competency based recruitment and behavioural interviews. 

I got to learn more about motivation and recognition and reward and 9 box matrices and career development in a couple of months as an HR Generalist than I ever did in three years of undergrad Industrial and Organisational Psychology at university. 

The challenge for me now, was to put together all I had personally learned and experienced and extract the best from the models being preferred by the trailblazers like Adobe and Deloitte, and find a way to keep shareholders and executives happy with performance and profits, whilst simultaneously ensuring that employees felt seen and valued and saw opportunities for growth and career development, while working in a pleasant (not toxic, soul-destroying) environment. So, you know, not really a big deal at all.

And then it happened. Like a lightning bolt, it hit me! I saw the four dimensions really clearly. I saw the competencies and the possibility for adjusting and customising the model. 

And just like that, one morning, the DIRC model was born. Of course it took me another four or so years of unhealthy imposter syndrome convincing me that I’m on the wrong path and that nobody would be interested in my little model. I did more research. I waited for technology to mature. I tested my model out with some smaller clients with 50 or fewer employees. I did some more research and sought to validate my theory, since I am by no means an academic and I don't have all the fancy letters behind my name. I made a few super simple videos to introduce the DIRC model, put some content on Slideshare and spoke at a few HR conferences and maybe even mentioned this model on a podcast or two. And here we are, at last! 

I’m not going to bore you with tons of detail and facts around what is wrong with performance management - I know that you know already and that’s why you bought this book.  Instead, I’m going to provide some context in terms of some of the dots I connected, so that you can put it all together in your own organisation and then I am going to unpack the DIRC model and some of the things that I know work in real life and that you will need in order to make it work in your company. 

I had wanted to write this book in such a way that you can actually open it at any chapter and start reading and it should make sense even if you didn't read the preceding chapters. To an extent, you could do that and you will find valuable insights in each chapter if you read it as a stand-alone piece of work. But there's a progression in thinking and research here and it is a bit of a journey from challenging some of our outdated beliefs to understanding the link between performance management and culture and how I propose we overhaul our entire talent management system to how we physically make this all happen in workplaces around the world. For me, talent management as it is currently known, is an entire ecosystem. As such, no one aspect of the ecosystem can successfully exist or survive without the others. There's an interdependence on various other core components of this ecosystem and we can't talk about changing the way that we do performance management, without also talking about HR strategy or talent acquisition or learning and development. We can't change the ‘how’ if we don't also critically assess the ‘why’ or the ‘what’. We can't transform work and unleash human potential if we don't also look at critical factors such as leadership and workplace culture and the technology we use to monitor and measure all of these different things. So it's probably best to follow the chapters and get a comprehensive view of how I put this all together in the dark crevices and cracks of my always enquiring mind.  This book - like me - is authentic, candid, practical and entirely without pretence.

If you’re ready to say goodbye to the annual performance appraisal and to subjective performance