HRHeadStart #87: Team-based Performance Management; AI's Effect on Skills Distribution

The Talent Agenda

According to this HBR article from over 20 years ago, “teamwork” was a core value for about 40% of the Fortune 100 companies back then. I feel certain that the number has only gone up considering that a lot of work today is team-based. But just the act of defining core values is an utterly insufficient condition for success. We also need a clear blueprint of how core values like teamwork will be embedded in management processes and behaviours.

We also know from research that how a team works is more important than who works on the team. The team purpose, work structure, ways of working and inter-personal relationships all have a bigger impact on team effectiveness than the smarts of individuals on the team. However, most performance management approaches are still overindexed on individual performance. Check out this article to learn more about how to make team-based performance management a reality and bring this much talked about core value to life.

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Working Better

A large part of schooling and work focuses on improving skills. The variance in skill proficiency can be quite large in humans. New evidence is suggesting that AI elevates the skills of the lowest performers across a wide range of fields to, or even far above, what was previously average performance.

“…this works even for the highly trained knowledge workers at Boston Consulting Group. Across a set of 18 tasks designed to test a range of business skills - from analysis to idea generation to persuasion - consultants who had previously tested in the lower half of the group increased the quality of their outputs by 43% with AI help while the top half only gained 17%. Where previously the gap between the average performances of top and bottom performers was 22%, it shrunk to a mere 4% once the consultants used GPT-4.”

Learn more if AI is a Leveler, King Maker, or Escalator?

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Tiny Thought

"Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is." ~ Ernest Hemingway