In today’s dynamic environment, how does an organization prepare for the future? While companies manage to survive or thrive in today’s complex environment, are they thinking about the long-term? Are they well prepared to take on the upcoming challenges for the future? Organizations invest a lot of time in predicting the nature of these challenges – who will be the competitors, what new products should we launch and what kind of data or technology will lead to disruption. But not many invest or focus on assessing their capabilities and how well they are positioned to take on these challenges.  In such a scenario, how does one prepare for an uncertain future? There is only one certainty and constant to the future –  the need to change, innovate and overcome challenges. For an organization, the strongest armor for the future is its people and how quickly can they change, innovate and build new capabilities.  How does one then build this people organization for the future? 

Hire for attitude, not experience 

Most companies have interview processes that filter out candidates based on skill-sets or a set of experiences. It is important to step back and think if these skills would continue to be relevant in the future. What if the business is confronted by a new challenge where your existing workforce lacks the required skill and their existing skills are irrelevant? In such a situation, it becomes important to have a workforce that has the potential or the right attitude to build and develop skills quickly. 

Firstly, organizations must design their interview process to assess for potential or attitude. Ask not what the person has accomplished in the past, but instead what is the toughest situation they have handled and how did they overcome it? Young fast growing organizations often look for ‘energy and drive’ in people which often gets mistaken in the personality traits of the candidate e.g. if the candidate is a strong communicator, can talk passionately and articulate their projects well.

It is important to go one level beyond on energy and drive and understand what is the real attitude that you want the person to have. In this case, instead of energy and drive, it could be ‘Bias for action’ where the person moves fast on projects and can deliver results within timelines. The question you should ask the candidate then is to give an example of a project or a situation in which he delivered results under stringent timelines. 

Secondly, eliminate manager bias from the interviewing process. Team managers often say, “Let’s hire this person as s/he has handled exactly this kind of problem or has done similar work in her/his past role”. While that can get you speed and desired outcomes in the short run, what happens once that skill gap is bridged? Does the person have the right attitude to build new skills as required? One way to take away this manager bias from interviewing process is to have a cross-functional interview process/panel, where each one has an independent perspective and would not over-index a candidate on past knowledge or experience. 

Thirdly, it is important to keep raising the bar with every new hire. In any organization, one of the core values should be to hire better people than themselves. It is a very deep and nuanced concept to understand and internalize for managers given that in traditional organizational setups, managers tend to feel insecure if their team member is better than them. Managers who understand and accept that hiring someone better than themselves will give them the bandwidth to take on larger responsibilities, and are able to scale up faster in their careers. And again, better doesn’t necessarily mean in terms of skills but attitude and potential. 

Less is more   

When solving business issues, we often tend to throw people at problems. In such situations, many organizations end up over-hiring which becomes detrimental to the organization’s future and the individual’s personal development. How? Over-hiring is the root cause of internal politics within the organization. Imagine a role for which two people have been hired. There will be dispersed accountabilities between the two and over time both will end up becoming insecure of their roles. The diluted role and responsibilities would lead to each wanting to create a different perception about their role thereby leading to politics internally. 

Most organizations fall prey to such internal politics.  In organizations either logic prevails or politics. So when you think you need 100 people, hire 80. Leave room for people to stretch and do 20% extra. Let them build muscle and scale up. 

Over hiring or over staffing at different levels may help you in the short-term but in the long-term it creates lesser accountabilities and a more insecure organization,

Reward for potential, not performance 

All organizations strive to create annual review mechanisms which are fair, meritocratic, help identify the right people and reward them well. However, most organizations don’t end up delivering these outcomes. 

Firstly, performance reviews have become an annual event where managers have to force rank their team members on a bell curve to help HR decide on how to spend their increment and talent budget. This defeats the entire purpose of performance reviews, which should aim at helping individuals develop and grow. Hence, annual reviews should be treated as a means to an end. The focus should be on continuous personal development. Even organizations such as GE who pioneered the performance based review system are now moving to continuous on the job feedback, development and review mechanism.

Secondly, this performance-based one-dimensional framework for assessing people is restrictive, as you are only reviewing and rewarding past performance. This doesn’t give us any window or view into how well the person is positioned to perform in the future. What if the person performed average in the past 6 months but has focused on the right inputs and has the right attitude to set her/him up for future success? Does it mean that every high performer will sustain high performance in the future when business environment changes? It is therefore, important to add another dimension to performance assessment, which takes the future into account. Let us call it the individual’s potential. The potential here is not the absolute potential of the individual. It is rather the individual’s ability in the context of your organization to take on larger, broader or more complex roles and responsibilities in the future. It is a mark of the individual’s scalability within the organization. How does one assess potential? Potential assessment needs to be objective like performance with clearly defined criterion and data. One way is to measure potential is to assess the person against the organization’s values given that these values drive

One way is to measure potential is to assess the person against the organization’s values given that these values drive behaviours which will help the organization build a strong culture. At Rivigo, the Rivigo Leadership Principles (RLP) Score helps to assess people on 9 leadership principles. How is the data collected on this criterion? Live, real-time feedback on these leadership principles shared by individuals, peers, managers, team members through an internal mobile app. E.g. at the end of a project, your peer could give you a high score on ‘bias for action’ based on the actions and behaviors you exhibited during the project. This real time on the job feedback not only helps you improve continuously but also prevents any recency bias if this was to be captured through surveys closer to annual reviews! 

Assessing people on both performance and potential makes the actionable and next steps clear. e.g. a Medium performer but high potential employee needs to be engaged and inspired to improve performance, whereas a high performer but medium potential employee needs to be given opportunities to stretch and develop to increase potential further. 

It is important to reward for both performance and potential and perhaps over-index on potential as it is the true mark of preparedness for the future. Employee stock options can be a great way to reward and retain your high potential employees or future leaders. High potential people need to be aware that they are being prepared for future leadership roles. 

Such a framework of performance and potential is a very powerful tool not only in assessing our people capability for the future but also our businesses and even meetings. e.g. a function or a team or a business may be performing well but the question we ask is if the business is high on Leadership score i.e. is it being set up well for the future? This also allows managers to have difficult conversations with team members who may be performing well today but may not be making the right investments for future roles. This framework gets further hard-wired in the organization when it is linked to your interview assessment criterion itself. 

Great team managers spend a disproportionately high amount of time in selecting and building their teams. The quality of your team is your biggest source of reliability for dealing with future challenges. Having the right people in right places is a task no manager should delegate. Yet many managers fail to deal with under-performers. 

The future of an organization doesn’t happen by accident. It is the outcome of strong people processes and culture - having the right people in the right jobs, rewarding and developing them well. It is time organizations think radically about people practices and evaluate if these are setting them up well for the unforeseen challenges.