Hacking HR to Build an Adaptability Advantage

Handing out Promotions

By Mukesh Gupta on June 24, 2022

Every organization talks about team work and how important team work is to continue to win in the competitive markets but when it comes to walk the talk most of these organizations fail. 

My vision is to create an organziation where you reward a team for their performance rather than having to use the bell curve to rate every member of the team in a certain range, with some coming on top and some at the bottom. 

So, what does that mean is the following: 

  1. Set goals for the team as a whole 
  2. Appraise the team as a whole against their goals
  3. Compare the performances of different teams and rate their performances in comparision with other teams. 
  4. The rewards are that the better performing teams get the most challenging and important projects/goals 
  5. Instead of considering individuals as the most basic unit of the organization, you start considering the teams as the most basic units. 
  6. The teams can decide on how they distribute the financial contributions from the organization (salary, bonus, share allocation, etc). 
  7. The team selects who they want to be a part of their team. 
  8. The team decides which role will be played by whom. 
  9. The performance information of all the teams are openly shared with others. 

The idea behind this hack is the following: 

  1. The sum of the parts can always be more than them individually. 
  2. It is very difficult to form a good coherent working team. No point in breaking the team voluntarily as much as possible. 

Some challenges that might need addressing due to this approach could be: 

  • If you have the same people working together, you dont get diverse opinions and chances are that you could miss out on innovation, creativity and hinder the organization in the long run. 
  • Its easier to manage the individuals than managing teams as there is not much common ground to measure one team with another if they are working in different functions. 

In my opinion, both of these challenges could be addressed if we think through the challenges ( for example, if the teams bring in external consultants to help them in their work and creating opportunities for teams to jam together to solve specific challenges) 

HR process being hacked:Performance Management

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michele-zanini_4's picture

Hi Mukesh, thanks for sharing this hack--it's really great. When I read it I was reminded of Whole Foods Market (a health-oriented supermarket chain the US) and its reliance on self-directed teams. It might be a good real-world example from which to build a full hack... Here's an article that describes their model: http://www.fastcompany.com/26671/whole-foods-all-teams

Best,

Michele

This is very interesting. Thanks for sharing the information about Whole Foods Market.