Over time, a percentage of the "people decisions" we'll make will be wrong; we simply can't know in advance which ones. The hidden secret of leadership efficiency connects directly to the rise and fall of our staff skill development. The only certainty lies in knowing no one stays the same.
 
Earlier in this decade it became all the rage for companies to use a "rank & yank" system for determining where to place their emphasis. From Ford Motors and Microsoft to Sun Microsystems, June was nail-biting time as managers assembled to evaluate and rank employees as if they were show dogs, prepping for Westminster. Over the course of several days there was much wrangling behind closed doors where bosses compared and contrasted people's performance over the trailing twelve months, rating them on a five point scale.
 
Nobody wants to rank in the bottom category in any organization. Consider Sun Microsystems' 43,000 employees ranked in three groups: 20% graded superior, 70% "sun-standard," and 10% viewed as under-performing. To their credit, unlike other companies' rating model, Sun alerted its weak links to their ratings then commenced one-on-one coaching to bring them forward. They saw dramatic positive improvement.
 
The idea of assessing employees is hardly new, having been used by companies of all shapes and sizes. We've cautioned that if carelessly administered, it's the middle tier potentially most demoralized by this process. Conversely, it's here where, regardless of your company's size and scope, you can steadily lift group performance. Unlike other companies using the old-school "bell curve" overview, if you say, "Well, since there will always be a middle tier, if we commit to loving them to death and cultivating their potential, we'll be way ahead of the guys who take the easy way out and write them off as "under-achievers" since once ranked as mid-pack, people fall away and you'll seldom find a hidden winner.
 
You may be thinking, "Radio clusters and their companies are too small to mess with a system for assessment; leave that to IBM or Dow Chemical." I fervently hope you'll take a second look. You need not have a complicated or cumbersome internal ranking system to establish a culture of validation and development. Instead of empirical spread sheets or voluminous narrative, commit to an annual format requiring your management team to consider their departments through the other end of the telescope with questions like, "If you could be on a desert island with any of your staff members, which would that be?" Or, "Enduring great competitive duress under the fog of battle, which person would you most want in your command post?" With this approach to assessment you may begin to see patterns within your team which in turn leads to personal growth steered by the very department heads making those assessments. Be aware the process is as beneficial to the assessor as the assessed.
 
Caution: if poorly executed the process could lead to weaknesses such as a decline in teamwork or strained relationships among staffers. That said, if the vision of upgrading your human capital is to matter and take root, every employee from the clerical staff and the morning team to the executive suite must be perceived as valuable and deemed worth assessing to keep pace with the unrelenting one-way flow of time, competition, and the pressures of modern leadership.