Current Trends in Talent Solutions.

HR = Higher Revenues - In the latest FSB magazine, a Cornell University study determined what we all seem to know - that micromanaging will do more than annoy employees; it will slow your growth. The study, which surveyed 323 businesses, reported that superior HR and management decisions could mean the difference between an explosive business and a sluggish one. Here are some of the key areas they looked at:

Culture Fit - the importance of finding the right person for the right job in the right company really played out. Businesses that hired employees who meshed well with their organizations performed better than those that hired to fit specific jobs.

Autonomy - How you develop your leaders continues to show it's relevance and importance. The study clearly showed that companies with controlling bosses underperformed those that allowed workers more autonomy. The more autonomous companies grew at more than four times the rate of those that relied on tight top-down controls.

Work Environment - High salaries may get employees in the door, but providing a supportive, family-like work environment makes for a more productive company.

Current Trends in Organizational Performance

Why Dream Teams Fail - Organizations are constantly trying to find the answer to what will propel them to the next level of performance. Often, the focus is on bringing in the best talent. However, as illustrated in a recent Fortune article, dream teams often become nightmares of dysfunction. To see why dream teams so often disappoint, let's consider some of the most common paths to failure. Here's the link to the article.

Signing Too Many All-Stars - Chemistry and culture are the key ingredients in creating a high performing team. Focusing on people who are dedicated to making the team work, as opposed to a bunch of talented people with big egos, gives you a great chance of winning every time. Basketball's Detroit Pistons and football's New England Patriots have won with few stars while other teams - Washington Redskins, have bought star after star - and floundered. How could a Fortune 500 company run by a brilliant former McKinsey consultant, paying fat salaries to graduates of America 's elite business schools, dissolve into fraud and bankruptcy? It happened at Enron.

Failing to Build a Culture of Trust - Trust is the most fundamental element of a winning team. If people think their teammates are lying, withholding information, plotting to knife them, or just incompetent, nothing valuable will get done. A major problem is that people are transient and teams continually get broken up as players move from company to company. Instability is a big stumbling block to the development of trust, which is very fragile and laboriously created. Trust takes time and time is something very difficult to find these days.

Tolerating Competing Agendas - Part of a leader's job is to keep the inevitable personal agendas from becoming destructive to the organization. Many leaders have failed - see the Rigas' at Adelphia and the competing agendas of Eisner and Ovitz at Disney. But during the 90's at Ameritech, CEO Bill Weiss had a very blunt rule regarding competing agendas. He told his top team that if he caught anybody trying to undermine the others, the guilty party would be fired. It worked.

Letting Conflicts Fester - Bringing tensions out into the open and then resolving them is one of a team leader's most important jobs. The more creative a leader can be the more likely that conflict can be discussed and resolved. See the Fortune article for an interesting solution developed by the coach of the Army crew at West Point a few years ago.

Hiding From the Real Issues - Many organizations suffer from a culture of polite restraint. People don't express their honest feelings about the most important issues. There's a veneer of politeness or unspoken reciprocity - not raising differences in front of the boss. There are countless examples of companies under-performing because their culture keeps them from dealing with real issues. What are you doing at your organization to create an environment that allows the tough issues to be discussed?

In the end, there's probably no better place to look than the 1980 US hockey team that beat the Soviets at the Lake Placid Olympics. This was a team built explicitly on anti-dream-team principles. Coach Herb Brooks, who died in 2003, based his picks on personal chemistry. In the story's movie version, Miracle on Ice, Brooks' assistant looks at the roster and objects that many of the country's greatest college players were left out. To which Brooks responds with this essential anti-dream-team philosophy: "I'm not lookin' for the best players, Craig. I'm looking for the right players."