This article is a taste of what to expect in the book Talent Intelligence: Use Business and People Data to Drive Organizational Performance that you can order here
The broadly accepted definition of marginal gains is: “The theory that small yet significant improvements can lead to monumental results”. It is the performance equivalent of compound interest. Small continuous improvements over time will be force multipliers to be greater than any one change may have achieved.
Two notable proponents of marginal gains were Clive Woodward and Dave Brailsford.
Woodward took the helm of English rugby in 1997 as England’s first full time coach. Although new to the role Woodward had both a successful rugby and business career. He was both an England and British & Irish Lions Rugby player, a successful coach for Henley, London Irish, Bath and the England U21 team as well as running a successful IT leasing and finance company. For context, rugby had at this point only officially been a professional sport for 2 years when in 1995 the International Rugby Board announced that the sport was now professional and all laws against paying players for playing were dropped.
Woodward took to the role with gusto introducing a raft of team rules and expectations to better equip the team for this cultural change and professional approach. There was an appropriate dress code, language had to be kept clean in public areas, mobile phones only allowed in players bedrooms, all players had to be ready for pre-arranged meetings 10 minutes early, Omitted players must congratulate their rivals, no talking to the press or writing books, England players are never off duty it is a 365 day a year role, and then arguably the most important two in my opinion, players must be present, don’t just turn up, have a contribution and finally have fun, work must be enjoyable. Beyond this cultural change Woodward took to looking at every aspect of the England team and their set up looking for 'Critical Non-Essentials' where there were opportunities to make a 1% improvement. Woodward came up with the theory that wearing baggy shirts makes players easier to tackle. And the team's kit suppliers Nike have responded by producing a skin-tight kit which is also designed to stay light by retaining less sweat. They also took to changing their kit at half-time to concentrate minds for the second half on a fresh start. Woodward has employed visual awareness coach Sherylle Calder to enable players to improve their peripheral vision to enable his brand of heads up rugby. It was a period of evolution not revolution, it was not about a radical overhall but rather a series of continual and all-encompassing changes that cumulatively produce a significant delta of change. All these changes led to a “golden era” of England rugby culminating in Woodward and the team winning the 2003 Rugby World Cup.
As Woodward put it:
“Winning the Rugby world cup was not about doing one thing 100% better, but about doing 100 things 1% better”. Sir Clive Woodward
Dave Brailsford was hired by British Cycling in 2003 as a Performance Director to look to turnaround and transform their widely ill performing cycling organisation who had won just a single gold medal since the 1908 Olympics and had never in it’s 110year history won a Tour de France. It is fair to say things were not doing well. Over the next five years Brailsford took apart every element of the British Cycling setup to look at any area that could be improved, if only marginally. From their bike design, their clothing, right through to their muscle massage gels, the beds riders were sleeping on to maximise rest and recovery… the list goes on. This holistic approach meant that in just 5years he could transform the teams’ approach and the team dominated the road and track cycling events at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, winning 8 gold medals, 57% of all the gold medals available. Then once again four years later the team continued this new-found level of performance raising the bar by not only setting nine Olympic records and seven world records at the London Olympics but also seeing Bradley Wiggins becoming the first British cyclist to win the Tour de France in its history.
In both these cases the true power of the marginal gains could only be realised by a culture of improvement and innovation. Everyone is looking for ways to improve, whether individually or as a group, they are not restricting their thinking or field of view.
So what? Why am I talking about Marginal Gains and how does it relate to Talent Intelligence?
When I talk to a lot of people either looking to build a Talent Intelligence capability or looking to pivot their sourcing intelligence to be used in a more strategic manner it can feel overwhelming for them. Moving from being a Talent Intelligence Provider delivering objective intelligence usually across Talent Acquisitions recruiting needs to being a Talent Intelligence Trusted Advisor providing value-added services and proactive strategic advice to the business well beyond the effective and efficient execution of the business strategy can feel like such an overhaul and a revolution that it is simply not achievable. To this I say use the power of marginal gains.
Look at your service offering, your technical skill set, your customer base, the maturity of your output, the scalability of the function from a systems, processes and tooling perspective, the consulting skill sets, your workload demand signal and workload capacity planning etc and look at each and every discrete unit and think “How can this be improved if only by 1%?”. When you complete a piece of work take the time to sit back and reflect on the project. What went well? What could’ve gone better? What can you improve the next time you do a piece of work like this? It could be:
- something as simple as tying in with your internal HR analytics team earlier to get attrition data so the overall project length is less.
- looking to tie in with real estate to get aligned cost per square foot of office space in a location to ensure you have a consistent message.
- that you need to spend longer on intake to further flesh out the business problem to ensure you are addressing the root cause of a problem rather than the symptom.
- although everything landed well the customer felt a little in the wilderness during the process so next time you could have more formal check in meetings mid project.
- tying in with recruiters on the ground for a location study to ensure you have a voice of the market as well as the more macro data.
- that you want to build out a dashboard for the customer to be able to use on an ongoing basis rather than just a one-off report.
- trying to articulate the potential measurable impact before you take on the project rather than after the project is completed.
If you are starting from scratch with no formal Talent Intelligence capability it could equally be:
- Trying to better articulate the candidate funnel and conversion metrics to paint a better picture of the search
- Tying in anecdotal information from candidates and the market
- Presenting relevant competitor or market intelligence (M&A activity, Layoffs, hiring surges etc)
- Pulling together a whitepaper not because you’ve been asked to but to challenge your leaders’ ways of working (think topics such as diversity, working from home / remote, cost of living crisis etc)
The list is seemingly endless…. and that is the point.
There are so many facets that make up a high performing Talent Intelligence offering that the possibility to improve is never ending. Creating a culture of improvement and not being afraid to be self critical is absolutely vital. Even if you are a team of one. Take the time to break down the process into its constituent parts and think about what are the areas to try to improve if even marginally. Think about where you want to go, what do you want to achieve and work backwards to see the dozens of smaller improvements you need to make to get you there. Do not be so focussed on the end goal that it feels overwhelming and you miss the small actions you can take each and every day in order to get you there.