Training Magazine - June 2008 - (Page 46)

KEEPING FORCED RANKING OUT OF COURT words such as ‘attitude,’ and make certain that if you are going to evaluate workers based on ‘productivity,’ that you define what productivity means. For a call center employee, for example, maybe productivity means he needs to spend a certain number of hours on the phone each day. For a salesperson, maybe it means she needs to generate a certain amount of revenue.” • Be a legal eagle. Once the goals are established and understood by all, it is time to teach managers how to rank. To do so, Schwartz advises taking the tool you will use and carefully explaining each part of it, while stressing the importance of utilizing it consistently, fairly, and equitably across the board. Then, walk managers through the risks. As with any performance appraisal tool, it’s impossible to remain 100 percent objective. But your training can and should give managers tools to guard against allowing stereotypes and personal bias to creep into the process. Amalfe accomplishes this task by conducting sensitivity training—including real-world scenarios, role plays, interactive hypothetical situations, and an overview of common stereotypes. The training, she says, is designed to make managers aware of their inherent biases while reminding them to avoid any indication of disparate impact against protected classes of employees when using the tool. Another way to avoid age discrimination, in particular, adds Grote, is to clearly define what “future potential” means before any ranking takes place. “If you are projecting more than one job level up or more than two to three years out, it is going to have an adverse effect on older people. So when managers talk about talent, they shouldn’t talk about ultimate potential, such as who has the goods to become CEO within the next 10 years. Instead, they should talk about each individual’s projected ability to perform at a fully successful level at the next highest job level, and within the next two to three years.” Beyond these tenets, focus on the basics. “Train them how to “In today’s world, forced ranking as a term has acquired such a stigma that no one uses it. Companies still do it, but now they call it something else—such as a ‘talent management process’ or a ‘leadership assessment process.’” —Dick Grote, former General Electric executive and now president of Grote Consulting Corporation 46 do a good job, which includes not doing boneheaded things that will get them into legal trouble,” says Grote. “They need to know all the legal risks before they sit in a room and start ranking.” For example? As an employment lawyer, one of the first things Moore says opposing counsel examines when a lawsuit tied to forced ranking arises is which factors were taken into account when ranking decisions were made. Thus, whenever groups of managers get together to begin talking about people and ranking them from high to low, she says, they need to understand the importance of sticking to the criteria, avoiding any gray areas, and focusing on the task at hand.“Stay away from the sideshow,” says Moore. “Remember, there will be five to 10 people in the room, and chances are that each one of them will remember slightly differently what took place.” Last but not least, provide your managers with all the tools and documentation they need to be successful, advises Rashid.“If the process is laid out and even the smallest things are spelled out so managers have a Bible to look to that tells them exactly what to do in a given situation, they’ll not only feel more comfortable with the process, they’ll be far more effective in administering it.” When Rashid’s team at Sanofi-Aventis instituted forced ranking, for example, the group created a “nuts-and-bolts” procedural manual for managers that outlined every element of the forced ranking process in painstaking detail, including goals, steps, how to handle various scenarios, and how to have forced ranking conversations with employees. The manual also detailed exactly what would happen to each employee once rankings were assigned. Those identified as C players, for example, immediately were funneled through a “Four R” process that included four steps: re-supply, retrain, refit, and release. If an employee were ranked as a C under this system, explains Rashid, managers first were required to examine the situation to determine whether the employee’s performance was lacking due to a supply issue—such as insufficient budget or work overload or under-load. Once any necessary “supply” tweaks were made, the manager established new performance objectives and associated timelines for the rep. If these interventions didn’t do the trick, the manager re-examined the rep’s performance to determine if he or she lacked any skills necessary to perform the job, in which case the company provided additional training. The third step, “refit,” empowered the manager to transfer the rep to another area of the company or to a less-demanding product line if the first two interventions weren’t effective. “If all this didn’t work,” says Rashid, “we proceeded to the fourth and final step and released the rep.” One of the overall upsides to this process, says Rashid, is that it allowed her company to level the playing field and drive more fairness into employment-related decisions made by sales managers. t For more tips on how to stay out of court when using forced ranking, visit www.trainingmag.com/ranking. w w w. t r a i n i n g m a g . c o m | JUNE 2008 t r a i n i n g http://www.trainingmag.com/ranking http://www.trainingmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Training Magazine - June 2008

Training Magazine - June 2008 Contents Online TOC Editor’s Note Live & Online Training Today Soapbox How-To World View Changes With Penguins Keeping Forced Ranking Out of Court Across the Board Certify Me Meetings CPR How Secure Is Your Data? Training Leadership Summit Wrap-Up Tools of the Trade Inprint Questions for Covey

Training Magazine - June 2008

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