Talent Density

You can't manage what you don't measure. Now, of course, that's a cliché. But it's a cliché for a reason. It's because it's true. And the most important thing as a leader for you to manage, and therefore, measure is the talent within your organization.

So let's talk a little bit about how you measure talent, something that goes beyond making sure you're having annual or semi-annual performance planning discussions, you're scoring people on a scale of one to five and pissing them off when you tell them they're four, and they think they should be a five.

There's got to be some better way to do that. And the better way I want to talk to you about is something called Talent Density.

It's one measure that tells you how talented your organization is, tells you whether you're improving your talent, or you're decreasing in your talent. And it's a very simple measure, it's a measure of the percent of A-players within your organization, minus the percent of C-players in your organization.

Now, let's talk about who those folks are.

A-players are those folks that are living your core values every single day, they are models of fit within your culture. They're also those folks that are highly productive. They're not just meeting their goals, but they're exceeding their productivity goals. So what's the percent of A-player's within your organization?

Now let's talk about C-players.

I know I'm skipping over the B-players.

But let's talk about C-players, C-players, I've put in two categories, you've got C-players who are C-players, because their productivity is significantly lower than expectations, so low that they're actually holding the organization back. Those are C-players. Then you've got your toxic C-players, toxic C-players could be highly productive, or unproductive from a goal standpoint. But what makes them toxic is their lack of fit within your culture. The fact that they are not living your core values every day, core values are non-negotiable. So if you've got folks not living your core values, they're toxic to your organization.

So what's your percent of A-player's minus the combination of C and toxic C-players, and that gives you a number.

And if you're assessing as I always recommend your team and who are the A, B, C, toxic C-players every quarter, every quarter, you'll have a talent density score.

Now, when you look at that calculation, that talent density could be anywhere from a positive 100%. Everyone in your organization is an A-player to a negative 100%. Everyone in your organization is a C-player. So it's negative 100 to positive 100. Anywhere in between.

This is not a number that you should benchmark against other organizations.

Because the way you define an A-player or a C-player may be very different than other organizations.

It's a number you need to benchmark against yourself.

If you have a talent density right now of 20%. You may set a goal of next quarter being at 30%, quarter after that being at 45%.

What are you doing to measure the talent in your organization?
What's your talent density today?
What's your goal 90 days from now?