Call off the Accountants

Abraham Maslow advised us that, “He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail.” That’s only part of the story.

It’s also true that if the only measurement system you use is economic, you tend to try to understand everything in economic terms. That may be fine if your goal is to determine the relative profitability of two product lines. It may not be a good choice for measuring the effectiveness of your talent development efforts.

In the 1970s “human resources accounting” was all the rage. Today, there are Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) systems that promise to improve your “performance management ROI.”

This all sounds very precise. It sounds like we know what we’re doing. I’m not sure that we do.

The best way to evaluate organizational talent development isn’t economic at all. It’s the succession plan. If we’ve got qualified people to fill all our vacancies, we’re doing a good job. That’s a collection of judgments, not measurements.

Talent development is a long term proposition. It isn’t accurately described by measures that count up the number of training hours or take the pulse of employee engagement at a single point in time.

And there is a personal dimension to talent management. People develop knowledge and abilities in ways that aren’t measurable in any conventional sense of the word.

Attempting to apply conventional accounting measures to talent development presents two dangers. There is the danger of false concreteness where we imagine that an arbitrary numeric measurement is more accurate than the same judgment expressed in words.

And there is the danger of simply paying attention to the wrong things. The late Russell Ackoff warned us about this when he said, “Managers who can’t measure what they want, frequently settle for wanting what they can measure.”

Wally Bock

Wally Bock is a coach, a writer and President of Three Star Leadership.