Dan Bowling
Here is an excerpt from a thought-provoking article written by Dan Bowling for Talent Management magazine. To check out all the resources and sign up for a free subscription to the TM and/or Chief Learning Officer magazines published by MedfiaTec, please click here.
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At the risk of ending my career as a blogger for Talent Management magazine with my opening sentence, let me say it: talent can’t be managed. It can be analyzed, developed, recognized, rewarded and supported, but it can’t be managed. And this is something of a problem with much of modern human resources practice. There have been tremendous gains in the profession in my 30-year career, which included leading global human resources for Coca-Cola Enterprises, but at times in our headlong rush to develop the bona fides of the discipline with B-school processes and metrics, we have lost sight of the fact that talent is an entirely human phenomenon. Admittedly, a more scientific, data-driven approach to understanding workplace performance is to be desired, but I argue it shouldn’t come so much from the financial disciplines but from psychology and the social sciences, the goal of which is to study human behavior.
The good news is this is beginning to happen. Research into behavior, cognition, emotions and personality and their role in organizational performance is under way on a number of fronts.
And what are we finding? That optimism, resilience, positive emotions, social intelligence and character strengths are strong predictors of performance among individuals and groups — perhaps more so than skills and raw intelligence.
Who is doing this research? The list is long, but two of the epicenters are at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center and at the University of Michigan’s Ross Business School of Positive Organizational Scholarship. Other research is ongoing in universities, labs and organizations around the world.
Why has it taken so long to apply psychology to the workplace? We’ve known for millennia that the morale of an organization is critical to its success. Aristotle was the father of happiness studies (his word for happiness was Eudaimonia, or well-being), and his most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, was quite adept at leadership through positive motivation (he would reward his his troops with the plunder of a city after a successful campaign, an HR technique frowned upon in today’s corporate world). Despite this blessing, however, constructs such as positive emotion and workplace happiness were largely ignored by science during the 20th century. In corporations, they were considered nice but nonessential components of organizational health and consigned to low-level personnel staffers (time to plan the employee picnic, y’all). Since the turn of the 21st century, however, empirical research and scholarship on the issue of what makes life worth living have exploded, and a goodly portion of this research has been in the domain of work. It is also becoming mainstream. Tom Rath of Gallup (who has a degree in positive psychology from Penn, by the way) along with his Gallup research colleagues have highlighted in numerous best-sellers the importance of focusing on strengths — including psychological strengths — in the workplace.
McKinsey & Company routinely highlights findings in psychology and the social sciences in its white papers — as it did in its March quarterly journal showing how certain traits and cognitive styles impacted sales in a large retailer — and encourages employers to include scientific data regarding employee attributes as a core HR metric.
[During the remainder of the article, Bowling shares a substantial sample of the insights and recommendations provided thinkers and researchers from more than 40 countries with whom Bowling attended a conference. To read the complete article, please click here.]
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Dan Bowling, formerly the head of global human resources for Coca-Cola Enterprises where he was responsible for employee matters for 80,000 people worldwide, is a practicing attorney, senior lecturing professor at Duke University Law School, and a graduate level instructor in positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also been a partner in one of the largest labor and employment firms in the country. In addition to decades of experience working with C-level executives, he has published numerous works on employment issues in both popular and academic journals, and is a sought-after speaker for conferences and meetings.