Books on managing/promoting people/identifying talent

May 4, 2024 9:38 AM

99% of books I look at on management seem like garbage. I am looking for resources (books, articles, etc.) specifically on how to identify talent within an organization and promote those people or find better roles for them.

I work in the financial industry and my company is paying for me to attend a multi-year graduate-level program specific to banking. Right now I'm working on the proposal for my thesis paper, which has to include a potential bibliography. I'm planning to write about how do we find talented employees in our large branch network who would do well in other non-branch jobs. This typically means some role at our corporate office, whether that's internal customer service, client-facing, sales, analysis, accounting, etc.

I have a lot of thoughts on this subject because I came up from the branch, and some of the best employees I've worked with also started as tellers. But we do a bad job of making sure branch employees are aware of the opportunities out there and encouraging them to try for them - we regularly have tellers leave the company for non-teller roles at other banks because they didn't know what opportunities they had here or didn't feel like they could apply for them. There is a decent chance that some of the ideas/solutions I come up with could actually be put into practice, so I'm excited to see what I can find.

There will probably be more questions in my future, but right now I'm just looking for books/articles/other resources that I can put in my bibliography list (I suspect like 80% of my paper is going to come from interviews with people at my company and others).

posted by skycrashesdown to Work & Money (8 answers total)

In a former job I used to cover industrial and organizational psychology and management science research. So these are folks were doing research experiments and generating evidence. They were constantly super frustrated at the enormous gap between what HR folks actually do and what the evidence actually shows on good hiring/retention practices.

A couple of resources that may be helpful if you're interested in learning more about the evidence-based practices identified by the research community:

1) The Behavioral Insights Team in the UK did a report on evidence-based hiring in 2015. One of the takeaways that really stuck with me is basically you should hire people based on actual skills, not "branding" from their resumes. This means you are more likely to hire a good fit for a position if you remove university name (i.e., attending an Ivy League school is not necessarily a consistently good metric of job performance), name of places they have done internships (again, access to big name companies is often acquired through connections and not necessarily skills), and indicators about gender/race/ethnicity/etc (removing the candidate's name when reviewing resumes).

2) Avoid personality assessments or other pre-employment quizzes. Though they can be kinda fun, most of the personality assessments used in hiring are totally bogus. People selling these assessments make all kinds of claims but research pretty consistently finds that the tests are marketing drivel. If you are using a personality measure, try to do your research to make sure it is psychometrically validated and was developed using rigorous, peer-reviewed methodology.

3) The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology has tons of evidence-based resources on hiring and other topics.
posted by forkisbetter at 9:57 AM on May 4 [5 favorites]

What you try is hard. I just stumbled upon this article today:

Are recruiters better than a coin flip at judging resumes? Here's the data.

One thing I learned: Not getting hired says nothing about you. The person they hire says a lot about the company. I guess the same is true for promotions.
posted by maloqueiro at 1:09 PM on May 4 [2 favorites]

Related:

Super Chicken Model vs. Jack Welch "FIre the bottom 10%"
posted by maloqueiro at 1:27 PM on May 4

I wonder whether you might get some good recommendations either directly from Ask A Manager site owner Alison Green or in one of the weekend open threads.
posted by kristi at 3:29 PM on May 4 [2 favorites]

Before I retired last year (from the Banking Software arena) there was a "new guy" who impressed the heck out of me. He was like a ninja team member. If you asked him could such and such be included in the next release he would say there was already so much in that release it would probably be too risky to add more at the last minute. He would ask "could we have a .1 of the prior release?" If you asked him if a copy of the current release with its associated database could be created for debugging a serious reported problem, he would ask if it was more important than the .1 release you asked about.

I know the above sounds like making excuses. But I say it as more of a "5 Whys" exercise. He was willing to engage with anyone who needed his help as long as his manager knew about it and agreed. This guy is young, learned the ropes quickly, and is a natural team player. I'm not sure how reading a résumé would uncover that kind of think on your feet, try never to say "no", solutions based kind of thinking.

One insight I read recently in Ryan Holiday's "The Obstacle is the Way" emphasized the importance of perception rather than perspective. Anyone can see a problem, the best person knows what perspective to take on the problem which results in the most effective solutions or avoids ineffective or counter-productive reactions. Again, not sure how you check for that on a résumé. I suspect that the face to face (or remote) interview would be more telling. FWIW.
posted by forthright at 5:05 PM on May 4

I wonder if it would be helpful to research companies who have done this well. One that comes to mind is Starbucks - my understanding is that they have an excellent pipeline for corporate roles. Perhaps there's documentation, formal and/or informal, about how they build and promote that practice.
posted by girlstyle at 7:58 PM on May 4

I found the book "The Leadership Pipeline" by Charan et. al. to be a really good read in this space - it covers the individual employee journey through different key career milestones (contributor, leader, leader-of-leaders, functional leader, etc), as well as the patterns / antipatterns that will present themselves at each major transition, as well as what it means to support this organisationally.

Noting that as per the title, it's very much focussed on the Leadership / Management pipeline, not individual contribution or technical paths.
posted by muppetkarma at 8:21 PM on May 4

Stanford researcher: This Warren Buffett story reveals the No. 1 trait hiring managers need to look for (CNBC, April 27, 2021 article.) The trait is "trustworthiness." Buffett's also interested in intelligence and energy.

(skycrashesdown, consider how you and those former tellers came up from the branch; your success stories could point the company toward similarly-solid candidates now.)
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:28 AM on May 5