3

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The HC BRidge Framework

Pivot-Points in Impact, Effectiveness, and Efficiency

Which talent pools at a Disney theme park make the biggest difference to strategic success? Would it be the characters (such as Mickey Mouse), the ride designers, the cast members on the street, the executive leadership team, or a host of other roles that Disney employees play every day? As we saw in chapter 2, the answer may well depend on a clear distinction between what’s important versus what is pivotal. It requires thinking about strategy at a much deeper level than simply asking, “Which talent pools help make Disney theme parks ‘The Happiest Place on Earth’?” Clearly, everyone tries to contribute to that. When we ask questions like this in any organization, the answers vary widely and the reasons for the answers vary even more! Becoming clearer and more consistent about the answers is vital to strategic success.

Chapter 2 showed how a decision science produces that clarity using a framework that describes the logical connections between decisions about a vital resource and how they affect strategic success. The other elements of the decision science (mind-set, systems, and optimization) rely on the logic of the decision framework. This chapter describes the decision framework that underpins talentship. It articulates the logical connections between decisions about talent and strategic success and organizes them so they can be applied consistently across different strategic and business situations. We will introduce the decision framework using the relatively simple example of talent in a theme park and use the decision framework as the guiding logic for much of the rest of the book. In later chapters we will apply the framework to other, more complex, situations, such as the global strategic dilemmas facing Boeing and Airbus.

Impact, Effectiveness, and Efficiency Applied to Talent

We built the talent decision framework earlier on the three anchor points of impact, effectiveness, and efficiency. We call these “anchor points” because they are like the supports for a suspension bridge. Chapter 2 showed that these three ideas are also part of decision sciences in other professions. Figure 3-1 reviews how they apply to talent and organization decisions.

Efficiency captures how investments affect programs and practices. Effectiveness captures how programs and practices affect talent and organization pools. Impact captures how talent and organization pools affect sustainable strategic success. All the anchor points are necessary and work together, and they must all be considered when making talent and organization decisions. Yet, as useful as these anchor points are, we can go deeper to describe a set of logical linking elements that show the details of how each anchor point works. To continue the bridge metaphor, think of the linking elements as the spanning connectors on a suspension bridge between the anchor points.

Figure 3-2 takes this next step. It provides the specific linking elements within each of the three anchor points. As we mentioned earlier, we call this the “HC BRidge framework,” and we will describe it in detail in this chapter.

FIGURE 3-1

Applying anchor points to talent and organizational decisions

FIGURE 3-2

HC BRidge framework: Seven key questions

Figure 3-2 depicts the decision framework by translating each of the linking elements into questions. Consider how well the leaders in your organization can answer these questions. As we’ll see later, when organizations properly use these questions, they reveal new insights about how to compete for and with talent and about the role and structure of strategic HR management

We will illustrate the HC BRidge framework using the example of a Disney theme park that began this chapter. This example is familiar and straightforward enough to make a good teaching tool. Yet we shall see that even in this relatively uncomplicated and familiar context, the HC BRidge framework reveals insights about talent decisions that defy conventional wisdom and uncovers opportunities for significant and unique competitive advantage. The decision framework in any decision science must provide a tangible approach to defining how the resource can best be aligned to achieve strategy execution. As we will show, when it comes to talent and organization resources, alignment requires understanding where differences in the quality or quantity of talent and organization have the greatest strategic effect, execution requires knowing what decisions are most pivotal to enhancing those vital talent and organization elements, and agility requires having a consistent logic that spans many situations and identifies where change must occur.

Impact Pivot-Points: Where Talent and Organization Most Affect Sustainable Strategic Success

Impact identifies the relationship between improvements in organization and talent performance, and sustainable strategic success. The pivot-point is where differences in performance most affect success. Figure 3-2 shows that this requires digging deeply into organization- or unit-level strategies to unearth specific details about where and how the organization plans to compete and about the supporting elements that will be most vital to achieving that competitive position. These insights identify the areas of organization and talent that make the biggest difference in the strategy’s success.

Recall the chapter opening about the Disney theme park. Suppose we ask the question the usual way: “What is the important talent for theme park success?” What would you say? We find there is always a variety of answers, and they always include the characters. Indeed, characters and the talented people inside the Mickey Mouse costumes are very important. A decision science, however, focuses on pivot-points. Consider what happens when we frame the question differently, in terms of impact: “Where would an improvement in the quality of talent and organization make the biggest difference in our strategic success?” Answering that question requires looking further to find the strategy pivot-points that illuminate the talent and organization pivot-points. Figure 3-2 shows that this requires defining strategic success and what most affects it.

Sustainable Strategic Success

The first linking element, sustainable strategic success, asks, “How do we intend to compete and defend our position?” Although this always seems to be a straightforward question, chapter 4 will show that there is usually great value in making it much more specific. This linking element probes deeply into organizational strategies to define the specific competitive or strategic context, the organization’s intended position within that context, key competitive differentiators and where the organization will be positioned on them, how it will grow, and how it will be unique and defensible enough to sustain that position.

We say “sustainable strategic success” rather than “competitive advantage” because the principles in this book apply not only to profit-making organizations competing in traditional financial markets but also to mission-driven organizations such as the U.S. Navy, Asian Development Bank, and the United Nations. These principles apply when the objective is to enhance traditional and competitive strategy outcomes and when the objective is sustainability, often referred to as the “triple bottom line.”¹

The Walt Disney Company is a diversified entertainment company with activities as diverse as television, ESPN Zone arcades, retail stores, movies, television, and theme parks.² Let’s focus on an example from one of the most well-known Disney attractions: Disneyland. What might sustainable strategic success look like for Disneyland? While Disneyland has many competitors, let’s compare it to just one: Cedar Point, in Sandusky, Ohio. The Web sites for Disneyland and Cedar Point are instructive. Disneyland’s visual imagery shows well-known places, such as Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, often with famous characters in the foreground.³ Cedar Point shows towering steel and wooden roller coasters.⁴ Disneyland’s motto is “The Happiest Place on Earth,” and Cedar Point’s is “The Roller Coaster Capital of the World” (or one might say, “The Most Thrilling Place on Earth”). Disneyland emphasizes family fun while Cedar Point emphasizes thrills. Disneyland’s Web site provides information on Mickey Mouse, and Cedar Point’s Web site provides blogs where patrons can describe their thrilling ride experiences and hold discussions regarding the technical aspects of the rides.

Table 3-1 compares Disneyland and Cedar Point on a common set of differentiators that illuminate the unique competitive position each organization desires and how to make that position valuable and difficult to duplicate. No strategic intent is inherently wrong or right. For example, sports cars are supposed to be noisier than family cars. Creating the right kind of noise in the engine might be the key to strategic success for a sports car while making the car cab quieter is the key for the family car.

TABLE 3-1

Strategic positioning of Disneyland vs. Cedar Point

	Disneyland	Cedar Point
Key differentiator	Disney characters	Roller coasters
Value proposition	“The Happiest Place on Earth”	“The roller coaster capital of the world”
Brand essence	Fantasy	Thrills
Interesting Web site feature	0% Disney vacation financing option	Blog/discussion page for roller coaster enthusiasts
Discount for seniors	None	75%
Source: Disney Online, http://www.disneyland.disney.go.com; Cedar Point Amusement Park, http://www.cedarpoint.com.

Even in an example as focused as theme parks, we can see there is great richness in the respective strategies. Later chapters will show there is even greater richness in strategies that span multiple products or sectors. Disney’s theme park strategic intent is to delight guests with uniquely and surprisingly happy experiences. How does a park do it? This takes us to the next linking element in figure 3-2.

Resources and Processes

The next element of the HC BRidge framework—resources and processes—describes what an organization must create to achieve and defend the strategic position or its mission. Figure 3-2 mentions two important categories. The first is “resources” that must be obtained, deployed, exploited, and protected. For theme parks, resources would include brands, real estate, and relationships with key regulators or local authorities. We’ll cover that element in later chapters with other examples.

The second is “processes,” which are the transformations that the organization must accomplish to create its unique value. We’ll focus on the process of hosting guests in a theme park. This process involves transporting them to the park, orienting them within the park, providing services and experiences while they are on the park grounds, assuring their safety and comfort, and transporting them from the park. The transformation is to make guests happier, more delighted, eager to return and make future purchases of Disney products and services, and so pleased that they will tell stories to their friends and family, creating new Disney guests.

The next challenge in impact analysis is to find the pivot-point in the process where improvement would make the biggest difference to Disney’s strategic objective of delighting customers. One way to find the pivot-points in processes is to look for constraints. These are like bottlenecks in a pipeline: if you relieve a constraint, the entire process works better. For a Disney theme park, a key constraint is the number of minutes a guest spends in the park. Disney must maximize the number of “delightful” minutes. Disneyland has eighty-five acres of public areas, many different “lands,” and hundreds of small and large attractions. Helping guests navigate, even delighting them as they navigate, defines how Disney deals with this constraint. Notice how this takes the customer delight strategy and makes it much more specific by identifying a pivotal process that supports it.

Organization and Talent

The linking element of organization and talent focuses on what work must be accomplished and how it should be organized. Here we look for talent and organization areas where alignment and performance improvements would make big differences in the strategic pivot-points of processes and resources. Identifying pivotal resources and processes now allows us to see the talent question more clearly. Instead of asking “What talent is important?” the impact question becomes “Where would improvements in talent make the biggest difference in the number of delightful minutes for guests?” Is the answer still “Mickey Mouse and other characters”? Perhaps not, as we shall see.

Figure 3-3 takes the performance yield curve concept and applies it to two talent pools in the Disney theme park: Mickey Mouse and the park sweeper.

Mickey Mouse Is Important but Not Necessarily Pivotal. The top line represents the performance of the talent in the Mickey Mouse role. The curve is very high in the diagram because performance by Mickey Mouse is very valuable. However, the variation in value between the best-performing Mickey Mouse and the worst-performing Mickey Mouse is not that large. In the extreme, if the person in the Mickey Mouse costume engaged in harmful customer interactions, the consequences would be strategically devastating. That is shown by the very steep downward slope at the left. That’s why the Mickey Mouse role has been engineered to make such errors virtually impossible. The person in the Mickey Mouse costume is never seen, never talks, and is always accompanied by a supervisor who manages the guest encounters and ensures that Mickey doesn’t fall down, get lost, or take an unauthorized break.

FIGURE 3-3

Applying yield curves to talent: Disneyland’s Mickey Mouse vs. the sweeper

Because the position is so well engineered, there is also little payoff to investing in improving the performance of Mickey Mouse. There is great value in investments that ensure Mickey Mouse performance is up to the very high necessary standard, but beyond that standard, differences in talent pool performance are not as crucial. The role of Mickey Mouse is so important that it can’t be left to improvising by cast members. If you watch carefully, Mickey Mouse manages to interact with a lot of guests per hour. Each one gets great attention, but the interaction with Mickey doesn’t last long. This allows more customers to see Mickey within a short time span, maximizing the number of delighted guests per minute. The Mickey Mouse role is aligned to the process constraint (number of minutes in the theme park) that is pivotal for the unique strategic position (The Happiest Place on Earth).

Finally, Disney characters are known and expected to be excellent, so park guests may be less likely to be delightfully surprised by characters who are friendly, attentive, and so forth. Disney executives report that when guests write letters to share their enjoyable experiences at Disney parks, they often begin with descriptions of unexpected encounters with cast members other than characters. For example, Eyes and Ears (the internal publication for cast members at Walt Disney World) publishes “Fan Mail,” a column containing letters from guests. One guest wrote about how impressed he was with a hearing-impaired housekeeping cast member who “clearly communicated with our family and was terrific with the kids.”⁵ That’s not to say that guests don’t write about the characters, but characters may not be the vital pivot-point for surprise and delight.

Sweepers Are Pivotal Talent at Disneyland. If the talent pivot-point for the guest experience process isn’t characters, what is it? When a guest has a problem, folks like park sweepers and store clerks are most likely to be nearby in accessible roles, so guests approach them. People seldom ask Cinderella where to buy a disposable camera, but hundreds a day will ask the street sweeper!

The lower curve in figure 3-3 represents sweepers. The sweeper curve has a much steeper slope than Mickey Mouse because variation in sweeper performance creates a greater change in value. Disney sweepers have the opportunity to make adjustments to the customer service process on the fly, reacting to variations in customer demands, unforeseen circumstances, and changes in the customer experience. These are things that make pivotal differences in the “Happiest Place on Earth” differentiators. To be sure, these pivot-points are embedded in architecture, creative settings, and the brand of Disney magic. Alignment is key. In fact, it is precisely because of this holistic alignment that interacting with guests in the park is a pivotal role, and the sweeper plays a big part in that role. At Disney sweepers are actually frontline customer representatives with brooms in their hands.

Interestingly, interacting with guests encompasses other jobs as well. Store clerks, for example, have similar opportunities to assist guests in surprisingly delightful ways. We hear stories about harried guests who grab several bottles of water from a bin, pay for them, and take them back to their table, only to realize that in their haste they purchased only three bottles of water for their four children. The store clerk comes over to say, “Here’s a fourth bottle of water, no charge.” When store clerks and sweepers cooperate, the possibilities for delighting customers increase exponentially. For decades at Disney, store clerks have been carefully cast for precisely these moments. Recently, retailers in other industries instituted similar roles by putting greeters at the front of a store or restaurant.

Pivotal and Important Are Different. Again, it’s not that Mickey Mouse isn’t important: the yield-curve diagram in figure 3-3 shows the Mickey Mouse line is higher than the sweeper line at all points. Even the best sweeper probably creates less value than the lowest-performing Mickey Mouse. In any well-run organization, everyone contributes to the mission in different ways. The key is to understand those differences systematically. The question that reveals these differences is often “What’s most pivotal where improving talent and organization matter most?”

Once we understand the talent and organization pivot-points, we are much closer to targeting our talent investments to make a significant strategic difference. We still need to go one level deeper, however, to uncover the specific talent and organization elements and the programs and practices that will optimally affect them. That’s the next anchor point in the HC BRidge framework: effectiveness.

Effectiveness Pivot-Points: Where Policies and Practices Most Affect Organization and Talent Performance

Effectiveness defines the relationship between talent and organization performance and the portfolio of policies and practices. How do HR programs and processes affect the capacity and actions of individuals and groups? As figure 3-2 shows, effectiveness is independent of impact because how practices improve performance is independent of the strategic effects of that improved performance. Powerful insights occur when effectiveness and impact are considered together.

Most HR organizations are more adept at effectiveness than impact. HR professional associations affiliate with HR practice areas, such as the American Society for Training & Development or the Employee Benefit Research Institute. The effects of HR practices are the prominent question in research on staffing, compensation, development, performance management, and other HR fields. Most HR textbooks are organized around HR activities (though with increasing attention to how programs integrate with strategy).

Effectiveness is important, but it is often challenging to see how the effects of programs (such as staffing, training, and rewards) on actions and interactions (such as performance ratings, competencies, teamwork, and retention) really affect the business or competitive position. Organizations that ignore impact in favor of effectiveness often produce well-meaning HR programs with great effectiveness on low-impact talent pools. Ignoring effectiveness in favor of impact is equally dangerous, producing situations where opportunities to improve talent could significantly affect sustainable strategic success but with little idea about how to create the capacity to execute on them. Returning to the Disney example, effectiveness identifies the pivotal programs and policies that will most improve the performance of the pivotal talent pool: sweepers. Figure 3-2 shows that this requires asking deeper questions about precisely how the talent pools create their strategic impact through interactions and actions. Let’s see how this would work at Disney.

Interactions and Actions

Interactions and actions describe how individuals’ behavior and cooperation affects the pivotal roles. What key constituents will be encountered? What will be the key role challenges and aligned responses? What will distinguish effective from ineffective behavior?

Interestingly, in Disney theme parks, the pivotal actions and interactions are probably not improving performance on sweeping! This seems incongruous at first because theme park cleanliness is clearly a fundamental Disney differentiator. No one would deny that park cleanliness is important, but is it pivotal? Disney sweepers and other jobs in the talent pool that interact with customers are pivotal because they affect the constraint of the number of delightful minutes in the park. Our favorite illustration comes from an executive in one of our classes who recalled the time his hot, cranky, and sunburned child was sitting on the sunny curb waiting to watch the parade. A sweeper happened by, noticed the sunburned child, and stopped sweeping. He told the family that there was a shady spot up the hill where they could watch the parade, and he accompanied the family to that spot.

Pivotalness Reveals Distinctions Within Roles. Although a clean park is incredibly important to Disney, the sweeping part of the sweepers’ job has a flat slope for maximizing the number of delightful minutes for guests. Meeting the standard of cleanliness is essential for sweepers, but improving cleanliness beyond that standard doesn’t surprise or delight guests. For example, there are no radioactive materials or hazardous waste at Disney. So, while a clean park is very important, the level of custodial performance is not as high as might be required by facilities such as operating rooms or nuclear facilities. Creative cleaning is less likely to delight guests than creative customer interaction.

Like the performance of Mickey Mouse, cleanliness is expected by guests, so it may be harder to surprise guests with cleanliness beyond the standard. Like Mickey Mouse, Disney has engineered away most of the variation in the quality of sweeping, through clever park design and even culture (if a sweeper fails to clean something, another Disney cast member will probably catch it before it affects a guest). Sweepers need to meet a very high standard of sweeping, but once they meet that standard, doing more may make only small differences in guest surprise and delight.

Role Challenges and Moments of Truth Reveal Pivotal Actions and Interactions. Pivotal actions and interactions are often revealed through vital role challenges or moments of truth, where interactions and actions make the biggest difference. The pivotal role challenge for Disney sweepers is when a guest needs help or information, and the pivotal aligned action is providing it in a pleasantly surprising, accurate, and appropriate way. Notice that it’s not enough to say that sweepers should create delightful guest experiences. The aligned action for sweepers isn’t to be entertaining (singing and juggling), even though that would also fit the general description of “delighting guests.” Disney has lots of other roles to keep guests entertained, so sweepers can’t make as much of a difference there.

More important, sweepers who are busy singing and juggling wouldn’t be approached by guests with questions about ride locations, which lines are shortest, and so on. Park guests won’t approach Mickey Mouse or Cinderella with those questions either (no one asks Cinderella where to purchase a souvenir). Guests feel more comfortable asking their mundane but very important questions of those in what Disney calls “accessible” roles, and they take advice from such roles more readily. So the people in the sweeper role make the pivotal difference through the quality of guest assistance they offer, and they need to be in the sweeper role to be most effective.

The interactions element of the HC BRidge framework focuses on how individuals cooperate. Interactions can be the formal information sharing or profit and cost allocations between business units, or they can be more subtle, in the form of informal networks, communication patterns, and mutual trust and respect. For example, a pivotal interaction at Disney is the inclusion of sweeper supervisors in planning meetings with park designers. Sweepers are constantly learning things like where the park needs more shady spots to watch the parade, information that is vital to park design. Disney defines the aligned actions of sweeper supervisors to include observing and listening to sweepers talk about their experiences with guests. Sweeper supervisors need to get that information, and designers need to listen to sweeper supervisors. This is cooperation at its most pivotal level. The interactions element of the HC BRidge framework identifies the structures and formal and informal relationships that make those interactions happen. Interactions also reach outside organizational boundaries, as when sweepers interact with guests.

Figure 3-4 shows how the concept of yield applies to the actions of sweeping versus helping guests. The same logic that helped us see more clearly where pivot-points existed in the strategy and what talent pools were pivotal now applies here, revealing pivot-points within the role. This deep application of similar logic at several different levels is a hallmark of a mature decision science.

FIGURE 3-4

Yield curves and aligned actions: Sweeping vs. guest relations

Quality Pivotalness Versus Quantity Pivotalness. What about labor shortages and turnover? Does HC BRidge apply when the significant strategic issue is having or getting enough talent? So far, we have focused on pivotalness of differences in the performance of sweepers or Mickey Mouse. We refer to this as “quality pivotalness.” A different kind of pivotalness focuses on not quality but quantity. “Quantity pivotalness” has a steeply sloped yield curve on the quantity of talent. Quantity-pivotal roles exist where strategic value pivots on finding enough talent, finding it quicker, or reducing turnover.

For Cedar Point, one can imagine that the job of sweeper is mostly quantity pivotal because it primarily reflects the role of sweeping, which is flat sloped. Yet, if Cedar Point runs short on sweepers, its strategy suffers. The Cedar Point Web site aggressively encourages kids to apply for summer jobs, many of which are probably quantity pivotal.⁶ Disney also needs enough sweepers, but as we have seen, the job at Disney has a significant role in guest relations. So sweepers are more quality pivotal at Disney than at Cedar Point. At Disney the job of sweeper is both quantity and quality pivotal. Talent can be purely quality pivotal (there’s plenty available, but differences in quality matter a lot) or purely quantity pivotal (having more available matters a lot, but differences in quality don’t have a large impact), although typically talent is a combination of both quantity and quality pivotalness.

Culture and Capacity

Culture and capacity describes the collective and individual characteristics that employees must have to execute the vital actions and interactions. This element translates the actions and interactions into things like skills, knowledge, engagement, and opportunities. In actual organizations insights about culture and capacity often emerge from questions like “What shared values, beliefs, and norms will support or inhibit execution?” and “How will success depend on individual capability, opportunity, and/or motivation?”

Organizational leaders often jump too quickly to one particular solution. Some may like capability (“can employees do it?”) and will suggest, “Increase knowledge by giving sweepers ten hours of training on park information.” Some may focus on opportunity (“do employees get the chance?”), suggesting, “Let’s put sweepers near the ride lines, where all the guests are.” Still others may emphasize motivation (“do employees want to do it?”), suggesting, “Let’s give a bonus for the number of times sweepers help a guest.” These ideas may all be good ones, but a decision science demands a logical way to evaluate and assess them. Careful consideration of which element—capability, opportunity, or motivation—is most pivotal is one way to do that.

Disney provides a good example of a culture that treats all customers as guests and all employees as cast members. Everyone from sweepers to executives goes through an eight-hour training and orientation program called Traditions. Every month Eyes and Ears reports on unique examples of guest service, and Disney leaders are often in the park watching for such examples so that they can reward employees. Every Disney cast member knows the four core pillars of the Disney experience: show, safety, courtesy, and efficiency. Disney cast members carry a small card entitled “7 Guest Service Guidelines” (illustrated with pictures of the Seven Dwarfs from Snow White):

Be Happy … make eye contact and smile!

Be like Sneezy … greet and welcome each guest. Spread the spirit of Hospitality … It’s contagious!

Don’t be Bashful … seek out Guest contact!

Be like Doc … provide immediate Service recovery!

Don’t be Grumpy … always display appropriate body language at all times!

Be like Sleepy … create DREAMS and preserve the “MAGICAL” Guest experience!

Don’t be Dopey … thank each and every Guest!

This makes culture directly relevant to the most pivotal actions and interactions. Often the pivotal moments when individual employee judgment will make big differences occur when no one is there to supervise or direct the employee, and culture helps ensure that the person will make good choices. Disney also provides innovative opportunities for sweepers by designing its park trash collection so that sweepers don’t have to walk a long way to discard trash. Even the most capable and motivated sweeper can’t do much if he or she spends days walking between the park and the trash receptacles. The key is to balance capability, opportunity, and motivation within a collective culture.

This approach to capacity and culture suggests a different approach to employee engagement. Every Disney employee understands the mission to create “The Happiest Place on Earth” by delighting guests. Virtually any employee action that improves the guest experience might be seen as aligned with this goal. Thousands of times a day, Disney sweepers have to decide whether to sweep or help guests. Truly aligned execution occurs when the sweepers make those decisions correctly. Talentship suggests that engagement should focus on questions like:

• Do sweepers understand the relative pivotalness of sweeping versus helping guests?

• Do sweepers say that they have the capability, opportunity, or motivation to actually stop sweeping and talk to guests?

• Does the culture of customer service enable them to take the initiative to provide the specific service that makes the pivotal difference?

Disneyland accomplishes the daunting task of creating a precisely engineered guest experience largely built on the work of teenagers in their first jobs. To succeed, culture and capacity must seamlessly support the right actions and interactions. Strategy execution also requires decisions about how to make the aligned actions and interactions happen. Next, we will show how to identify the pivot-points where supporting policies and practices must work together to do this.

Policies and Practices

If sweepers are pivotal at Disney for their customer interactions, then should we enhance those actions by rewarding sweepers, by investing more in their training, or both? Figure 3-2 shows that the policies and practices linking element of the HC BRidge decision framework describes the programs and activities that will create the pivotal capacity and culture. Such practices need to work individually, but it’s more important that they work as a portfolio. Insights into policies and practices are often revealed by questions such as: How will our practices distinguish us in the talent market? How will our practices work together? What are the conditions for success?

In Florida Disney’s sweepers are unionized, which limits Disney’s ability to differentiate pay based on individual performance ratings. That doesn’t stop Disney from creating a portfolio of programs and practices that enhance sweeper capacity and culture. Performance policies include asking guests to rate or describe something that a sweeper did that delighted them. Disney provides Great Service Fanatic cards for guests to write down the name of a cast member and what that person did that was so special. Great Service Fanatics are eligible for special drawings for prizes; plus they receive a special notation on their employment record.

Sweepers at Disney know that their career path can lead to positions where they will be working with park designers or Imagineers (the engineers and architects that design the rides), a developmental reward that other theme parks may not be able to offer. One Disney executive pointed out that sweepers often want to spend some time in the stores or working with merchandise. Disney can offer them a vast array of experience with merchandise ranging from dolls to CDs to games. Not only is this a reward for the cast member; it builds their product knowledge, which makes them better in their role as a customer ambassador when they return to the sweeper role!

In employee development sweepers receive different training in customer interaction than Mickey Mouse. Sweepers get opportunities to learn from experience that will increase their familiarity with the park and those areas of the park that are most asked about by guests. In fact, while all Disney cast members go through the famous Traditions orientation and training program, there is also a formalized on-the-job training program for Disney sweepers. Trainers include former sweepers, who are selected for their ability to train and their job knowledge and experience. A detailed training outline goes well beyond the custodial basics and includes specific guest service elements. In staffing and sourcing, sweepers are selected not just for their experience or capability at cleaning but for their orientation and passion for providing one-on-one service and for their emotional and verbal capabilities.

Notice how the portfolio of practices is directly connected to the pivotal interactions and actions. Disney would not provide the same customer service training or incentives to everyone. Just as with well-executed marketing or financial decisions, Disney’s talent investments are targeted to where they will have the largest effect. Disney is competing with and for its sweeper talent in a way that is very different from competitors, who see the sweeper job solely in terms of sweeping the park or who provide the same kind of customer service training to everyone.

Disney will not only create more of the pivotal capacity and culture; it will also present a unique position in the talent market for the customer-oriented sweeper candidates. For those individuals who are motivated by the opportunity to provide great customer service, Disney becomes a uniquely appropriate place to work. Disney begins to attract the best of the candidate pool because it offers an integrated employment proposition that also exploits its unique business model.

How Alignment Changes the Competitive Game

For Disney’s competition, the game has changed. Disney will compete better with sweepers, recognizing that sweepers are customer ambassadors with brooms in their hands. Disney will also compete better for sweeper talent. It has changed the market for customer-oriented sweepers by identifying, attracting, rewarding, developing, and retaining precisely the kind of customer-focused sweeper it needs.

Before Disney changed the game, other theme parks might have attracted their share of customer-focused sweepers. Now, as applicants learn what Disney wants and that Disney can provide very distinct rewards and development, the company will attract more of the sweeper applicants that want the customer-ambassador role. Disney can further refine the supply by developing tests that reveal which candidates have a passion for customer service, helping it identify characteristics that others miss. When Disney provides training and incentives that further increase the quality of its sweepers as customer ambassadors, it increases the internal supply of such talent. This is how the talentship decision science enhances a widely touted but elusive goal: synergy in talent and organization investments. We will return to this theme later.

As figure 3-2 shows, once we understand precisely how talent pools create pivotal strategic impact, and what programs and practices best prepare them to do that, we turn our attention to investing resources to make those programs and practices happen.

Efficiency Pivot-Points: Where Investments Most Affect the Portfolio of Policies and Practices

Efficiency defines the relationship between the portfolio of policies and practices and the level of investments, identifying where specific resource investments most enhance the portfolio. Efficiency encourages questions such as “What unique resources does your strategy provide that you could leverage in talent management?” and “Where could investing more resources than the industry norm generate unique value in your portfolio of practices?” While every organization must determine a budget for its talent practices, efficiency in talentship focuses on a broader array of resources and on optimizing the investment against the pivot-points. While efficiency focuses on the relationship between investments and policies and practices, there are also specific questions about the investments themselves, including these: What resources will we consider (money, HR staff time, participant time, leadership time)? What will be the resource trade-offs? How much will we invest, and where will we invest it?

Typical efficiency measures in the Disney example might include the cost per hire for sweepers, the cost per training hour delivered to sweepers, the time to fill vacancies, or the average sweeper pay compared to sweepers in other theme parks. HR leaders often diligently benchmark such numbers, attempting to match or exceed the efficiency levels of their competitors. Lacking a framework that includes effectiveness and impact, organizations often maximize cost or time savings by making HR programs more efficient. When efficiency is the sole focus, it can motivate attempts to increase the yield of programs and processes per unit of resource expended. This can lead to trying to “shrink to success.”

Disney provides very detailed and intensive on-the-job training for new sweepers. The training lasts forty-six hours (in addition to the eight-hour Traditions program). While Disney doesn’t have statistics on the amount of on-the-job training offered by other theme parks, it seems likely that the company probably spends more time and money than competitors to attract, select, and train its sweepers. Disney looks inefficient on benchmarks such as cost per new hire. Of course, the investment is well worth it, as we have seen, because Disney makes the most of that investment.

In fact, when other theme parks focus exclusively on efficiency, it actually lowers Disney’s costs! Why? Because the other sweeper employers attract those who meet the minimal standards, who will sweep minimally well. This leaves a wide-open market for Disney to attract and retain sweepers that do great customer care. The sweepers who are less skilled at customer care and are willing to work with less on-the-job training in a job that is defined exclusively in terms of sweeping end up at other theme parks, while those with great customer care potential end up at Disney. Disney doesn’t have to get into a bidding war because others are too busy cutting costs to understand the value.

The HC BRidge Framework Applied from the Bottom Up

Look back at figure 3-2. We have described the Disney example working from the top down, but consider the power of this perspective working from the bottom up. A number of business leaders we’ve worked with have pointed out that the conversation about talent often begins with a question like “Why do we spend so much more than our competitors to train our people?” Too often, this is taken as a signal to cut training costs! The better approach is to work bottom-up to trace the effects of the investments through the framework to strategic success. By reframing the question this way, the conversation becomes more logical and strategic. Sometimes the answer is indeed to cut or redirect resources being spent on existing programs and practices. Sometimes the answer is to retain the expenditure because it is adding significant value. Regardless of the answer, the quality of the debate is raised.

A fundamental concept of talentship is focusing on talent and organization decisions that most affect sustainable strategic success. As the Disney example illustrated, making talent and organization investments that affect a cascade of pivot-points is the key to attaining the largest total impact. The principle of connected pivot-points is as fundamental to talentship as it is to other disciplines, like finance and marketing. At any stage of the sequence, if there is a non-pivotal connection, the effect of the investment goes to zero. The principle of connected pivot-points demonstrates the importance of looking beyond the particular program or process and beyond whether investments simply work. Many HR investments work in that they create a good effect (such as learning, motivation, or reduced vacancies) in one or more employee populations. The key question is whether the investment is the most pivotal way to create the effect and whether the effect on the talent and organization is pivotal to important organizational outcomes. Working bottom-up is often the best way to gain a new perspective, identifying HR investments that “work” in terms of effectiveness but may not be the most pivotal in terms of impact.

How HC BRidge Aligns All Organization and Talent

The Disney sweeper is a good example, but the HC BRidge framework is useful beyond customer-facing employees. Recall the competitive comparison between Disneyland and Cedar Point. Now consider the job of ride designers, a very different position from sweepers. Designers are highly technical professionals and rarely encounter a park guest. Both Disneyland and Cedar Point employ ride designers who, according to their job descriptions, do very similar things. In both parks they conceive and design rides for the park that are appropriate, safe, and enjoyable. Yet the differences are as strategically important as the similarities.

Ride designers at Disney are part of a team of engineers that are called Imagineers to convey their integral connection to storytelling. Disney needs its ride designers to excel in immersive storytelling, which translates the personalities of Disney characters and stories into rides that engage customers, ranging from very young children to grandparents. It’s a triumph that Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” ride leaves countless children, parents, and grandparents with the ride’s song playing in their heads all day!

An issue of Eyes and Ears describes how Disney’s “Legend of the Yeti” ride has all the elements of a great adventure story. It is set in a remote mountain village at the foot of the Himalayas, home of the legendary yeti: the Abominable Snowman. Key story elements include: “The fly-by-night tour operator, Himalayan Escapes; the aging 34-passenger industrial railway struggling to reach Mount Everest; cars packed with innocent explorers; a mangled train track that causes the railway to plummet backward; and of course an encounter with the raging yeti.”⁷

Yet the magazine also notes that Disney ride designers need to be skilled in technical aspects of the ride: “Creating the 199-foot-tall snowcapped mountain and runaway train adventure … required 5,000 tons of steel, 18.7 million pounds of concrete, and 2,000 gallons of stain and paint.” Disney ride designers draw on the engineering skills that all ride designers use, but at Disney the pivot-point is how they incorporate immersive storytelling.

In contrast, ride designers at Cedar Point need to be adept at exploring the safe limits of g-forces, the newest construction materials and techniques, and how to pack the greatest thrill into every second of a roller coaster. Disney ride designers seldom have to consider whether the “It’s a Small World” ride or the teacup ride generates excessive g-forces, but it was essential that the teacup ride designers understood that runaway teacups played a very significant role in the “Mad Tea Party” vignette of Disney’s 1951 animated classic Alice in Wonderland.

Eyes and Ears tells of the scouting trip that the creative executive, project coordinator, and architect working on “Legend of the Yeti” took to research the storyline.⁸ They traveled to the Himalayas, “learning about its culture, customs, architecture, and horticulture, and investigating the legend of the yeti. Other Imagineers followed later as part of a larger expedition, including scientists.” Disney ride designers get paid trips to the Himalayas to help them achieve immersive storytelling. It’s unlikely that other theme parks routinely send their ride designers to the Himalayas! It is a reward that only Disney can provide; so it not only reinforces immersive storytelling, but it also offers ride designers something unique to Disney.

Cedar Point would be foolish to send its ride designers to the Himalayas because such deep immersive storytelling is not its pivotal strategic advantage. On the other hand, Cedar Point might well send its ride designers on field trips to an automobile race, to investigate bullet trains, or to the launch of the space shuttle.

This all means that even in a job as technically sophisticated and well defined as “theme park ride engineer,” a logical decision science reveals many ways to compete for and with talent differently, depending on the strategy. Talentship applies to both Disneyland and Cedar Point, but the HC BRidge framework produces different conclusions for different talent and organization situations. Even within the same job of ride designers, the performance differences that matter at Disneyland and Cedar Point are marked. If Disneyland or Cedar Point chooses to compete with and for ride designer talent in the same way, the parks will each miss significant opportunities.

Today’s organizations have talent and organization decision frameworks that typically treat jobs as equivalents, which is reflected in their decisions about pay, sourcing, and skill requirements. Organizational leaders often strive to benchmark their talent programs and practices with data on the same jobs in similar organizations in the same industry. As we’ve seen, simply copying programs and practices will lead to wrong conclusions, even for the same job title in the same type of organization and industry.

Conclusion

Table 3-2 provides a detailed summary of the HC BRidge framework. It provides a brief definition and a description of the key concepts for analyzing each linking element. We said earlier that a hallmark of a successful decision science is that its principles become a natural part of the conversations of organizational leaders and decision makers. The last column of table 3-2 shows some of the typical conversation starters that organizations using talentship have used to guide their discussions.

The approach we suggest here is so different from the typical HR approach that organizations often wonder whether they can get there. The rest of this book will explain that, particularly chapter 10. We are hopeful because often without knowing it, many organizations approach one or two jobs or roles this way. The most typical are executives and salespeople. Investments in these jobs are often based on value, rather than solely on cost. Logical connections between performance differences and business outcomes are routinely considered. HR practices—such as staffing, training, and compensation—are often combined to synergistically enhance quality and performance.

In fact, these jobs are often seen as too important to leave to HR, so policies regarding selection, rewards, and development are assigned to decision makers outside the main HR function. We disagree with this kind of approach. Rather than treating pivotal roles as an exception to be managed outside of HR, this logical approach should be applied to most talent and organization decisions, and should be closely connected to the HR function. Executives and salespeople are treated the way they are in part due to decades of experience showing tangible pivotal effects of their quality and quantity. Another irony is that precisely because the talent pools of executives and salespeople have received so much attention, there is greater potential for distinctively competing for and with talent in areas that are less recognized. Executives and sales talent are often high impact but represent only a small subset of the talent where a systematic decision-based approach can contribute to strategic success.

TABLE 3-2

Detailed summary of the HC BRidge framework

HC BRidge linking element	Definition	Diagnostic questions
Sustainable strategic success	How we intend to compete and defend	What assumptions will be critical to our strategy?
		What unique competitive position do we want to achieve?
		What will make our advantages difficult to duplicate?
Resources and processes	What we must build, execute, and protect	What value chain must we create?
		What tangible and intangible assets will we require?
		Which process or resource constraints must be resolved?
Organization and talent	What roles and structures we must improve	Where would more and/or better people have the greatest effect?
		Where will we most need to make organization boundaries more effective?
		How will management systems need to align?
Interactions and actions	How individuals need to behave and cooperate	What key constituents will be encountered?
		What will be the key role challenges and aligned responses?
		What will distinguish effective from ineffective behavior?
Culture and capacity	What characteristics employees must have collectively and individually	What shared values, beliefs, and norms will support or inhibit execution?
		How will success depend on individual capability, opportunity, and/or motivation (COM)?
Policies and practices	What programs and activities we must implement	How will our practices distinguish us in the talent market?
		How will our practices work together?
		What are the conditions for success?
Investments	What resources we must acquire, and how we should allocate them	What resources will we consider (money, HR staff time, participant time, leadership time)?
		What will be the resource trade-offs?
		How much will we invest, and where will we invest it?

Imagine the competitive advantage if your organization consistently discovered your equivalent of sweepers before others and applied the same integrated and systematic effort to those talent and organization elements as you do your executives and salespeople. Organizations are undoubtedly missing strategic opportunities they could exploit by applying the same systematic and integrated approach to other less obvious, but equally pivotal, talent and organization areas.

A good example of the power of this fundamental paradigm shift is contained in the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis.⁹ That book chronicles the success of Billy Beane, who created a championship-level baseball team using a fraction of the pay and other resources of competitors. The key was to define a decision science of baseball that produced insights that no other teams had seen. For example, getting the baseball into the field of play was statistically more significant in scoring than hitting home runs. This redefined the logic of good hitting and thus the logic of selecting productive batters. The same kind of insights are available beyond baseball; however, they require a commitment to approaching talent and organization decisions with unrelenting logic.

This approach is new, so data is limited, but our experience suggests that there are talent alignment opportunities like this throughout organizations, not just where employees face customers. In retail organizations buyers often emerge as pivotal. In the U.S. military soldiers who can appropriately interact with local militias and populations are pivotal. In an air freight company the attorneys who negotiate exclusive rights to airport takeoff slots have emerged as pivotal. As we shall see, technical professionals who can facilitate global teams are pivotal. Like other decision sciences, the logic of the HC BRidge framework remains consistent but reveals different insights depending on the situation.

We invite leaders inside and outside the HR profession to make decisions about talent and organization resources with greater rigor and logic, using the talentship decision science and the HC BRidge decision framework. In the chapters that follow, you will have the opportunity to begin your journey to building and using that kind of logic in your organization. We will take each element of HC BRidge in turn, describing each anchor point in more detail, along with its implications. In chapters 4 and 5 we will describe impact, in chapters 6 and 7 we will focus on effectiveness, and in chapter 8 we will cover efficiency. In chapter 9 we will focus on talent and organization measurement, and we will conclude with chapter 10, offering lessons from our experience in making talentship work in actual organizations. Figure 3-5 provides the map to the book using the HC BRidge framework.

FIGURE 3-5

HC BRidge framework: Chapters