Talent Pool Management

 

 The work of Elliott Jaques and Kathryn Cason over the past 40 years allows us to measure the size of a role, to measure with the same unit of measure, the capability of each employee, and to project the evolution of that capability over time. More objective Talent Pool Management becomes possible. Here is a brief overview of the main concepts involved.

  

            Size of a role:  Organizational research by Elliott Jaques has shown that the size of any role can be measured readily by determining from its manager what are the tasks, or sequences of tasks, in the role that have the longest targeted completion times. The longest of these targeted completion times is the time-span. The longer the time-span the bigger the role. All roles with the same time-span are the same size. Time-span objectively measures role complexity.

 

            Size of a person:  The size or current capability of each employee can be measured by his/her performance in his/her role. That performance can be readily and reliably evaluated by the individual, his/her manager, and his/her manager-once-removed.

 

          Innate and current capability:  The current capability of each employee is a function of his/her innate capability, of his/her mastery of the skills and knowledge necessary for the role, and his/her commitment to the role.

 

            Evolution of capability:  Organizational research by Elliott Jaques has shown that innate capability will mature predictably throughout the whole life, in contradiction to the general assumption that maturation ends around 18 years of age and learning takes over. Empirically determined maturation charts allow to project the evolution of capability with time.

 

           Management layers:  Organizational research by Elliott Jaques has shown that there is one, and only one system of management layers, he called them strata, for all corporations, with boundaries between layers identifiable by time-span measurement. When managers and immediate subordinates are in roles in adjacent layers, things can work well. If both are within same layer, the manager is “breathing down the necks” of the subordinates. If they are more than one layer apart, the manager is “pulled down in the weeds”.

Processing  complex information: Psychological research by Kathryn Cason and Elliott Jaques has shown that there are only four ways in which individuals process information and that there are, in the business life, two different orders of complexity of the information itself. The same four ways exist in the two orders of complexity of information. The order of complexity of the information as well as the way information is processed can be objectively measured.

Kathryn Cason and Elliott Jaques discovered in 1980, when working with the US Army Research, a 0.97 correlation between innate capability of an individual and the most complex way they could process information. This finding is holding up in further studies. Elliott and Kathryn concluded ”that the existence of managerial systems and of the universal underlying system of strata that we have found, is the organization expression of the four steps in complexity of information processing, at two different orders of complexity of the information itself. This is a psychological explanation of an organizational fact.”