Brandon Hall Group podcast
Mahesh Kumar joins David Wentworth to unpack seven recurring HCM mistakes — and what HR teams should do instead.
Episode takeaways
Mahesh Kumar and David Wentworth explore seven persistent human capital management mistakes — and the practical operating changes HR teams can make to avoid them.
If the foundation is wrong, everything you build on it is going to be wrong.
— Mahesh Kumar
Founder & Managing Director, TraineryHCM
When role definitions go stale, hiring, pay ranges, skills, performance expectations and development decisions all start from the wrong foundation.
Keep job descriptions current, skills-based and connected to job architecture and real work.
A once-a-year review documents the past, but it does not create the ongoing conversations, coaching and course correction employees need.
Move to continuous check-ins, clear goals, timely feedback and documented coaching throughout the year.
Point solutions become “best of chaos” when employee context, workflows and ownership stay fragmented across the HR technology stack.
Connect the systems you already use so data, workflows and decisions share a consistent employee context.
Employees in different roles and career stages need relevant development — not the same catalog, assignment or learning path.
Align learning to role, skills, goals and existing proficiency while removing irrelevant or redundant content.
Talent decisions become harder to defend when leaders rely on intuition without performance, skills, readiness and workforce evidence.
Use workforce intelligence to combine relevant evidence and make more informed, explainable people decisions.
High performance in one role does not automatically translate to people-management readiness or leadership capability.
Assess readiness, build leadership capability and use succession pipelines before moving strong individual contributors into management.
Metrics matter, but rewarding outcomes without examining how those outcomes were achieved can reinforce behaviors that damage culture and long-term performance.
Recognize both outcomes and the behaviors behind them, using richer feedback to make performance expectations explicit.
Listen to the full episode
Hear the full Excellence at Work conversation with Mahesh Kumar and David Wentworth.
Speakers
A practical discussion grounded in HR technology, talent and workforce decisions.
Mahesh brings 15–20 years of HR technology and process consulting experience to the discussion, connecting recurring HCM problems to their downstream effects.
David hosts the Excellence at Work episode and challenges each mistake with the practical realities HR and learning teams face inside organizations.
Full transcript
Transcript provided for accessibility and reference. The original episode is published by Brandon Hall Group.
Original podcast: Brandon Hall Group — Excellence at Work →Welcome to the Excellence at Work podcast where we explore the strategies and best practices that drive business success. I'm Rachel Cook, COO of Brandon Hall Group and the host of our podcast along with members of our executive team. In each episode, we'll dive into the latest trends, insights, and real-world examples from some of the most exciting leaders from organizations worldwide. Be part of our journey and learn from the best as we discuss innovative approaches and cutting-edge technologies for talent management, learning and development, leadership, diversity and inclusion, and more.
Thanks for joining us today on this episode of Brandon Hall Group's Excellence at Work podcast. I'm your host, David Wentworth. I'm the managing director for learning and talent here at Brandon Hall Group, and I am joined by Mahesh Kumar, who is the founder and managing director for TraineryHCM. Hello, Mahesh.
Well, good afternoon, David. Thank you for this invite. I look forward to this exciting podcast.
Yeah, we're really happy to have you back. I know we've talked before about other things. I think we're going to put a little bit of a twist on things today. You know, we here at Brandon Hall Group, we spend a lot of time talking about excellence and great examples of how companies are doing such amazing things with talent, whether it's through our awards or papers or webinars. We really like to highlight those success stories.
But I think just as important is to acknowledge some of talent's greatest misses. Companies have to be able to recognize the mistakes that they're making and maybe some of the traps they've fallen into if they ever want to become one of those companies that are showing shining examples of doing things really well.
So in talking to Mahesh, I thought this was a great opportunity because he's got all these years of experience talking to companies, working with companies, and has kind of curated a list of some of the biggest and most common mistakes that he's seen over the years. So I think it's great that you're here to do this. It's important work, and I think we should just go through these one by one. Maybe we can understand what the mistakes are, why they persist, and maybe how to break free from them.
Sure, yes, let's go for it.
All right, awesome. So starting off at the top—and we see this a lot in a lot of different areas—we look at things like job descriptions. I know this is a real challenge now as companies become very focused on skills and capabilities and what does that translate into what jobs look like. But one of the things holding them back is they tend to treat those job descriptions like a historical document. You put the effort in, you create it, and then no one ever looks at it again. What's been your experience with that?
Yeah, I'm glad we are talking about job description as the first mistake. The job description is the most important component of hiring a person into the organization. I come from two different perspectives: one is we have done consulting projects for the last 15–20 years, and one of the common problems we have seen with our clients has been the job description. Many times it is stale. And the common thread, as you said David, is employees always say, "No, the job description is an old one. What I do now is different from what is in the job description."
The problem is it causes a lot of downstream damage as time goes on. Nobody ever can trace back to what is the source of this problem, because you start off with the job description to hire somebody into the organization. You set the performance standard, you set the pay range, and training, and everything to do with the job description. But the job has evolved over a period of time, and the job description doesn't keep pace with it just because it's very difficult for any organization to do it. And that is why job descriptions always lag behind what the job is.
So if the foundation is wrong, everything you build on it is going to be wrong. So that is one of the problems that's been a common thread that we have seen. If you take skills as another bucket or component into it, that gets even more critical. The job description must be current. Historically, the facts are that it's not current, and organizations are struggling to manage that function. With AI tools, regulatory shifts, and all that, it's even more important today than ever before.
So this is a very important function, but it's not given enough credit. Managers also find it difficult to keep track of this. Training people on competencies, building their career plan, building the career path—all depends on where you start. And where you start is different from where the employees are, and there is no matching.
Let me give you a simple number that I got from SHRM a couple of months back: only 42% of HR leaders say the job description accurately reflects the role requirement. That's a very alarming number if you think about it. People are saying that more than 50% of the employees in their organization have job functions or what they do today that's very different from what that job description says. So it costs a lot of money to hire the wrong person, too. But it's an evergreen problem—it's always been there with HR organizations.
Yeah. Well, especially when companies start to think about skills and capabilities and rethinking that, and how do we build the right skills and not necessarily do it by jobs. The first step they take is they look at job descriptions and use that to inform their skills and capabilities, right? And so if that stuff's out of date or wrong or off on the wrong target, it just is all built on that.
Exactly, exactly. And they don't start with a good architecture. It's not a glamorous topic, right? Job descriptions have no glamour in it. It is a boring function, and you combine that with the job architecture, it's not glamorous at all, but it is the foundation. So that's a very important topic; it's been an ongoing problem in the HR space for quite some time now.
Yeah. I think we have to get much more dynamic and fluid with the job descriptions, like we are with the skills and capabilities matrices that companies are working through.
One of the things you brought up in that response is you talked about setting those performance standards. I think that's another area that companies just—it's like quicksand. They're just locked into this performance management mindset of it's the annual performance review. I can't believe it's 2026 and we're still talking about this. I mean, for as long as I can remember as an analyst in this space, we've been talking about moving away from that and trying to get more strategic. But that still is sort of the most common denominator in the performance world, right? Is the annual performance review, is that correct?
Yes, yes, that's correct. I think generally what we are doing is we are confusing a document with the discipline. The annual review is a documentation event. It captures what happened in the prior year. And performance management is something completely different: it's an ongoing conversation, coaching, correcting people's issues, or whatever the case may be. If it happens every week or every month, or you go to a Starbucks for a coffee discussion—if that happens, that's very different from having it as an annual performance review.
What's happening is we are taking that annual event into play and we are forgetting the fact that the performance could have been tracked much earlier; a much better job could have been done. And that is one of the reasons why the annual performance review is not the way to go forward in today's world, especially with things that are changing so dramatically. The annual performance review is just one milestone for your annual compensation review and all that, but that is not the case.
There's an interesting research that actually you folks have come up with. I found in one of the researches, it said 8% of companies say that performance management drives high value—the annual performance management. So it means that it is more of a ritual that many people don't want to go through, but they have to go through because it's important.
Yeah, it's been locked into so many other things, right? It's been tied to, like you mentioned, the raise. It's almost become a whole performative ritual, like you say. In order to justify a raise or not, we have to have this performance event, and the real value isn't even there anymore. It's just a thing to justify whether or not there's some sort of compensation increase.
Yes. The way we see it is, the discussion between a manager and an employee—if there is any surprise to either party, then that performance management process is not exactly where it should be. The employee should be fully aware even before they go into this annual ritual, because they have had multiple conversations. They know where they are, what they must be working on, and so there must be enough communication between manager and employee.
The annual performance documentation is to get through the annual process for your other pieces, but it must be a continuous process. It's also very difficult to manage for an organization. So the challenge is between: "Okay, I need to do something," so they come up with annual. But the way in which things have changed and the expectations of employees have changed, the process is kind of broken.
And it is clear. I've noticed it in my own life, and it's very much a ritual process. Gallup once said only 14% of employees actually agree with their performance review documentation. It just kind of is a stunning number to say employees don't believe what they read at the end of the year—it is very different from what they thought. And that means that 86% of the employees do not agree that the year-end documentation correctly reflects their performance that year. So that's a stunning number.
That's a big problem, and we do it as an annual review because it is a lot of effort for organizational culture to change to make it continuous performance management. So it's a big deal.
Yeah, change is where the effort is. I mean, once you get out of that annual ritual and it becomes more continuous, it actually becomes easier because there isn't as much time invested; it's ongoing, and there isn't so much weight added to this time period. So it actually is—it's the cultural change, though. Like I said, there's so many things built around this traditional process.
Yes, yes. And there's a cultural change, and then there's a technology solution that is also required. Let's say you are in Starbucks, and a manager and the employee are reviewing performance: how can that conversation be documented and be part of the review process? It doesn't have to be sitting in a conference room and doing it; it's more of an in-between coffee break. If these things can be done in a more informal-plus-formal way, and have a culture of continuous feedback, that will achieve a lot of the ideal goals that every organization might have. They can do it; it's just that culturally it's very difficult for many organizations to change. That's the problem.
All right, so that's number two. Moving into the third, which—obviously these are going to all be somewhat interrelated, right? You talk about the performance management process and what gets rewarded and why. What's interesting is we've identified mistake number three being: rewarding results while ignoring behaviors.
It's interesting because the first half of that, rewarding results, of course—that's what this is all about, right? We're all about outcomes, we're all about rewarding results. So when we say doing that while ignoring behaviors is a mistake, what do you mean by that?
So this is where organizations end up with a culture problem, and they have no idea they built it themselves. Compensation is the most honest signal a company can send to the employee at the end of the year or whatever the frequency is. What happens is the reward structure is sometimes not connected to the employee's behavior. If you reward results without regard for how people achieve them, you are basically rewarding the behavior that will eventually break your organization.
How are you rewarding your employees? If you have your sales rep or someone who is violating some of the norms that are part of the organization or the right thing to do, but they're still making the number—because they are making the number, if you are rewarding them and you forget the fact that there are certain attributes that must be part of the process, then you are building a reward structure where you are ignoring how they got the number, but you're just rewarding them just because they got the number.
Coming from Wall Street, anecdotally I can say that that was the culture in the Street. If you make your number, you get it. And how you make the number is not something that is questioned until it becomes an issue. Until then, there's never a question. That had created this whole culture in the Street. Things have improved now a bit, but still, if you're going to reward just because somebody hits the number or does something that you want, then you have not realized: they got there, but how did they get there?
These two processes have to go together, but many times it doesn't, especially in an environment where you want to hit the numbers. That creates a big problem culturally, and that really comes back and hurts the company badly. We have so many anecdotal evidences of companies paying the price for employees not going through the right behavior, and that is a big, big problem for organizations, especially if you don't have the right culture.
Right. I mean, I can give an example of what this would look like. Granted, this is almost a comical answer, very black and white: think about a call center, and you're training your call center. If the outcome is, "Well, we know what makes customers happy is if they have shorter call times, right? We want that because then the call center can take more calls." So shorter call times is a metric that many, many call centers use. Now, I can have the shortest call times in the whole company by picking up the phone and hanging it up.
Hang it up, mhm.
Pick it up, hang up, or say, "Nope." And all of a sudden, my call time metric is through the roof! But how am I getting there? What's happening because of it? It's really important.
And then you mentioned, too, I think this is applicable very much in a sales environment. If a company has decided, "Look, we need to shift fundamentally how we look at sales—the approach our salespeople are taking, the strategies they use." That's a difficult ask sometimes. You can put people through the training, but at the end of the day, they're interested in getting their numbers, and salespeople will often fall back to what's familiar. They'll do it the way they've been doing it because they know they have some level of success.
So are they actually exhibiting the behaviors that you want? Very often it goes beyond just their numbers. If the behavior is supposed to be changing so that you create happier customers—it isn't just closing the customer, but they're happier, they're more long-term, they're more apt to buy more in the future because of the behavior—and if all we're focused on is the outcome, you can short-circuit the system very quickly.
Yes, yes. David, you raised some of the points: they are not measured. The retention of the client, longevity of your client, and all that—they're not able to measure. They measure only one attribute, and that is one of the reasons why they measure the wrong attribute. Not necessarily wrong, but like the call center example: "Okay, how many calls you took" is an example of a metric that's going to come back and haunt you, because that call center guy can have excellent performance from that metric's standpoint at the cost of everything else.
So that's why it's a challenge that organizations have to come back and say: what is the metric they want to use? Not necessarily just one; there could be more than one. And also, what kind of behavior are they rewarding? That's a very important component here.
Absolutely. When we were talking about performance management, you brought up the technology aspect of it. This is a huge challenge for a lot of companies, beyond just performance management, obviously—much broader in the whole HCM spectrum. Companies easily fall into this trap, and it's a trap that just keeps getting deeper the more you stay there. It's the idea of buying just more software instead of really being able to leverage what you have, or seeing how you can leverage what you have and then connecting your various tools. What have you seen over the years? Of course, being a software provider, if they're going to buy your software, you're probably happy they buy more, but ultimately, more software is not always the answer.
Yes, I'm glad we are talking about this. In fact, I've read your research—your Brandon Hall research that says 22% of organizations actually have technology that they think is integrated. That says a lot, right? It's a massive 78% that don't have anything that's integrated. There is another research by Gartner that comes up with a similar number, saying between 70% and 80% of organizations think that their HR is not integrated at all.
So you are buying more HR software instead of connecting it. This is an evolution of things that has happened over time. What happens is you start off with "best-of-breed," and assuming it's best-of-breed, it turns into kind of a "best of chaos." That's what has happened in HR technology over the last 15 years, and most organizations are living with the consequences of the decisions they have made. Now that they are deep into that architecture and that process, and they haven't integrated, it is a problem.
It's not just an HR problem, to be fair; buying an isolated best-of-breed and not integrating is in many aspects of corporate America, but HR is one of the things that is also not connected. I read somewhere that there are some 11 HR technology solutions generally that organizations have. Every single one of them was purchased to solve a real problem, there's no question about it. They really bought it because they want to solve the problem, and I also take it for granted that it does solve that problem.
Whether it solves the problem organizationally together, that is not the case. What's happening is it is individually solving that problem; it is not connecting the connective tissue that is part of the HR architecture. Because technology was bought over time, and each one did something better than something else, and they had a homegrown system they wanted to replace, there are lots of issues every organization has. They want to solve that problem right then and there. They do not have the funding or the process in place to really integrate their technology. That actually leads to each of those HR technologies standing alone and not talking to each other. So yeah, it's a big problem.
It's always blown me away. You talk about the number of HCM technologies in a company. Having spent my career in learning and development, you sometimes talk to companies that have two, three, four, five LMSs alone in-house from acquisitions, mergers, what have you.
I think in today's current environment—let's be honest about it—there's a lot of turnover in the HCM world amongst companies. But a lot of times, the aftermath of the turnover that people don't look at is the technology that was put in place by people that are no longer there. I don't mean that the technology shouldn't be there anymore; it's just that there's no more ownership. There's no more accountability for it. No one actually can understand: "Well, I don't remember why we had this and what was going on," because the people who were responsible in that chain maybe aren't there.
So it's really important to take an inventory: what do I have, first of all? And how much of it, when you talk about these homegrown solutions—we see this all the time: "Oh, we've got this and this and this, we can tape them together and make this other thing." This leads to problems down the road as more workarounds get built on top of more workarounds, and then the person that created the workaround isn't there anymore.
This idea that it's almost self-fulfilling: as complicated as this technology environment gets, it's so complicated that when a new challenge arises, companies feel like it's just easier to find yet another piece of technology to try to solve it.
Exactly, yeah. Band-aid after band-aid after band-aid, rather than to break it open. It's also because there is no funding. Many times what happens is there's not enough funding for them to look at it architecturally, see what is the right thing to do, and how do we go about doing it. Sometimes that costs as much as the software itself. So they don't have enough budget, and they squeeze something. They want to solve today's problem with something that might be the latest in the toolkit, so they just buy that, not realizing that they have added complexity.
Every integration is a failure point. Anytime there is an integration between two applications, it's a failure possibility, maintenance cost, and all that. It never gets into the thought process at the beginning when they buy. Now they bought it, they want to use it because they bought it, and now you have an environment where that software has its own life without people fully understanding why they bought it or whether there's an ROI for them in this process. So that is a big problem.
Yeah. Ultimately, more technology is not always the answer. I say this all the time: if you're having any kind of challenges—if you've got data problems, process problems—technology won't fix those. It'll just make those things happen at a larger scale and faster, right? So whatever problems you're having, if you don't address the core issue, technology will not fix it for you. It's important to really understand what technologies you have and why. You talk about funding and budgets—yeah, that's a big challenge. But if you start to realize, "Oh, I don't need these four things," suddenly you're starting to free up some of that to be able to apply it in the right way.
All right, let's move on to the next mistake. This is sort of a big-picture mistake. Again, here we are in 2026, and I'm amazed I'm about to say this, but one-size-fits-all training. We still do it. We still train everybody in the organization, delivering learning as if it's all one and the same.
Yes. As a software provider in training, we are aware of this. The reason for that is manifold. One is, if the organization says, "Okay, employee XYZ, you're going to get the 10 courses we bought in bulk, and that's what you're going to get." Everybody gets the same set of courses, not realizing the career expectations, their desire to go to a different job, or learn different skills are kind of lost in translation. All that they do is check the box: "Okay, we did the training."
This is a very common problem because organizations are finding it difficult to calibrate the requirements for training, put them in different buckets, and solve the problem in a way that—okay, the finance guy and the technology guy, or finance guy and HR guy, are not going to be in need of the same set of courses because their background is different and their career path is different.
Also, the second flavor is a first-year analyst or a first-year employee versus a guy who has been 15 years in the same company or at a higher level: they don't have the same skill set, and they don't need the same set of training. Organizations find it very difficult to think that way, and they are struggling to find the right content, the right toolkit, and the right solutions that they can build on so that everybody can have their own set of content.
They are trying to check the box, and for you to check the box, it's easy to assign the same set of courses for everyone. Operationally it becomes easier. But I do have the thought process that this is going to change in the future because now with AI, every individual has an opportunity—in good software—to have their personalized career planning and personalized learning plan. Once you have your personalized learning plan, you can say, "Okay, I'm here, I want to be here, and this is the timeline. Let me frame the courses I want to take that will take me from here to where I want to be."
Now the toolkits have gotten better, and with the induction of AI, it can pull many things in, and we can give you a more comprehensive set of stuff that you can take. So things, I hope, in the next 3 to 5 years will get much better than where they have been.
The other piece is big corporations—what they have done is, "Okay, I buy X number of courses, in the thousands or hundreds. I don't know what you want; you pick whatever you want." There is no guidance to employees. Either they have everybody take the same, or they let the employee choose. Employees now struggle to figure out what it is that they should take, or how they should frame their career plan, and what courses they should take to get to the next level.
So once again, coming back, I think AI is going to help us in this space. Of all the things, I think this is one of the promising ones where there can be a solution. At this point, the solution is not there. I have seen many, many clients selecting the same set of content across the board. We are shocked as to why they do it, but they do it all the time.
You know, it's funny—we've been talking about the personalization of learning for a long time. That was the conversation long before AI actually entered the conversation, although AI is going to be a big driver of that. But one of the things that I thought when the AI conversation began—I know there are all these super pie-in-the-sky things that we want to do with AI, but early on I thought, here's something tangible that would be great.
The idea of personalizing learning can be a daunting concept to go that far. But all we really need to start with, if you're going to start this journey, is leveraging tools now with AI to eliminate irrelevant and redundant content first. By doing that, you've already personalized the learning and made it relevant. It isn't so much, "Oh, I have to figure out exactly what this person wants and needs." If you first eliminate what they don't need, learning just becomes and feels more relevant and contextual, because I'm not seeing this material that I already know, that I'm already certified in; I'm not seeing the stuff that has nothing to do with my role, my job, or my goals. Just the absence of that has already elevated the learning experience to feeling more relevant and personalized.
Yes, yes. That is true.
And then you can go from there. Then you can start to add in the tailormade career path and all the things you need to get there.
Even from a place of compliance—I was just talking to folks about compliance training, and it feels like something people don't ever want to touch: "We can't mess with compliance training, it has to be this way, it has to fit these things." But the reality is companies are seeing huge success by saying, "If you just answer these questions, then you don't need this training." We know that you have that competency, you have that skill, without just saying, "Oh, it's compliance, you have to take it." People get way more engaged, they're quicker to pick up on things that are more strategic, it makes their overall experience that much better, and it's so much easier on the learning team. It seems like it would be easier just to dump everything on everyone, but ultimately it makes your job easier if you've got the tools to allow you to give people what they need and want.
Yes, and what you said about compliance training is so true. People are afraid of touching it, so they say, "Okay, this is what you've got to take," not realizing whether it's relevant or not. They're afraid of touching it, especially with compliance.
All right. Moving on to number six in our Hall of Shame here: this is going to circle back a little bit into the performance area and how we recognize performance. This is an old issue that is almost now a punchline to a joke: the idea of how do we recognize really great performers, as far as promotion goes? The old story is: you're the greatest software developer we have in this company, and you've maxed out at your compensation level, so we're going to make you a manager—someone who's never managed people before, and now doesn't get to do the job that they're really, really good at all that much anymore. It seems super counterintuitive, but we do it all the time.
Yes, yes. And I think progressive companies, especially in the Valley, have created some level of solution to this problem. But the mistake that organizations make all the time is not a question of promoting the high performers; the mistake is promoting them without preparing them for fundamentally a different job.
It's a different job. Being excellent in the role that you are in doesn't mean you will achieve the same level of success in the next role that you are going to have. You might be a great sales guy and doing very well, and if you become a sales manager, you may not be the right candidate to be a sales manager because the skill set needed is going to be different. Neither the candidate nor the organization realizes that it requires a different skill set from what that person had before, and if they are not prepared for that, that's going to be a big problem.
Every function has a similar situation: a person who is going to be promoted, if he's blindly promoted without giving the proper toolkit or getting him trained and all that, it's going to be a problem. And that happens all the time.
There are solutions happening. I have seen in the Valley and in many places where they create multiple tracks. If you are in a track where you are performing well and you want to be in the same track, they are creating that career opportunity for a person in that track to progress so that he feels he's being promoted, but at the same time he's doing the role that he was doing before, but more at a senior level. That gives him the confidence to exceed and do very well, and that also creates longevity for the employee to be in the organization.
Now, if you promote the wrong person and they become a poor manager, then you are in deep trouble. That happens because of the way the organization runs the promotion process. It happens in all verticals, all areas, just because companies are not able to think through. That also means the candidate or employee is not investing enough time in designing their career path: "Okay, I want to be a manager, I need to build my career towards it, learning towards it." It comes back to career pathing; it comes back to your customized, personalized learning.
If none of these things happen, then just because you want to be promoted, you go into a job that you are not interested in or you are not suitable for. Then your old job has already been given to someone else, and now you are in a job that you are not capable of doing. We have seen people leaving the firm because they are not in the right spot.
Yeah, and that's somebody that could have been super valuable in the right position.
One way that companies are alleviating this issue somewhat that I've seen over the years is this more democratized approach to leadership development. The critical skills that we focus so much on for leaders and executives, companies are realizing: "Oh, those might be helpful all across the organization, regardless of level or role." So they're starting to promote more leadership development programs—things that develop skills like managing people, difficult conversations, emotional intelligence, critical thinking—for any employee that shows interest.
What that does is, early on, it highlights people who have those capabilities or an affinity for them. They start to show that affinity through the learning and development work they're doing. Now, long before you decide, "Okay, this person needs to be a manager because we don't know what else to do with them," you have a history of whether or not that's a good move and whether that person is prepared for that.
All along the way, you've helped the organization, because those skills are important for everyone to have everywhere. Instead of waiting until someone's at that level of, "Well, we made you manager, so now here's all the leadership development training, all this stuff you've never thought about before"—it's a little late in the game to try to make somebody a great leader at that stage.
Yep, yeah, that is true.
So let's wrap it up with the big one, the final mistake. This is one that at first blush, people might say doesn't sound like a mistake: managing by gut feel instead of using proper workforce intelligence. What do you see with this?
Yes. One of the problems that we have is when you make your decisions based on your gut feel. Going back to the prior mistake we talked about: you have a gut feel that this person can be a good sales manager, without any analysis of whether the person is going to be capable of doing it. Then you are not having any analytical framework for you to do it.
There are lots of toolkits and lots of ways you can prepare your own organization and the candidate: assessment tools that can assess whether that particular person can be a right fit for that role; a succession planning process that will help the organization; career pathing and career planning by employees and the organization to say, "Okay, it's going to take X number of months or years for you to get there, and this is the path."
What happens most of the time is a shotgun approach where they just make a decision because this person did this in that function, so we will have this person do this new role. It doesn't necessarily work that way. Even now, many times decisions are made on gut feel or the manager's subjective decision-making rather than workforce intelligence.
By workforce intelligence, I mean a combination of analytical data, succession planning data, assessment of the employee, their performance on attributes, and the training towards those attributes they are aiming for. None of them by itself is going to solve it, but collectively, that gives a framework for the organization to say, "Based on all the information we have right now, what is the best way for us to approach this?" This gives some level of quantifiable data to help in decision-making. Is it easy to do? The answer is no. And so we still are living in a world where a lot of gut-based decision-making is going on right now. It is very difficult to solve because it takes a lot of effort.
Yeah. Like I was saying at the top of this one, I think a lot of leaders might take pride in the fact that they lead with their gut feeling. Maybe they're right more often than they're wrong. But at the end of the day, you have to take stock of yourself as an HR leader. If you're going with your gut, what informs that? Something has informed your gut feeling over the course of your life, and do you have all the information that's available?
We talk about AI in this same conversation, and one of the challenges AI has faced is it's only as smart as all the stuff that it's looked at that's previously happened. If you feed it a bunch of biased or incorrect information, well then that's what you're going to get. So if over the years your gut has been informed by the way things had been done or the way that the company believed it should be done, that's what your gut's going to tell you, and that may not be enough.
Now, if you inform your gut feeling with data, with analytics, with the right tools, then that just makes your gut feeling that much more reliable. Then it'll prove you right more often down the road, and people will take you even more seriously.
And coming back to the AI thing: it's so important that you have faith and confidence in your gut feelings, because AI at this stage anyway requires a lot of gut checks. Like, "This is what AI has come up with; this is what it says. I need someone to look at this and say yes or no, this is reality, this is what we should do." If you're doing that without all of the information that you could possibly have, then you're doing yourself a disservice.
Yes. The last piece in that is when you start having only gut-based decision-making, then you are disenfranchising many employees in the process. They don't know why you made what you made as a decision and what was the rationale, and so employees don't get what they thought they would get. If there are five candidates who could have been promoted and you promoted somebody with your gut feel, then the remaining four are going to be disappointed because there is no rational explanation that you can give as to why you made that decision. That creates a whole loop of problems, people leaving, and all that stuff.
Yeah. So, that was seven things on our Hall of Shame list. That's not to say that this list could not be longer—I'm sure anybody listening is probably like, "Oh, what about this? What about that?" If you ever want to reach out to either Mahesh or myself and add to this list, we'd love to hear it because we know that they're out there.
Again, this isn't supposed to be a doom-and-gloom look at things. As we went through these, I'm sure a lot of folks have recognized themselves or their organization in a lot of these. There's a reason why they made this list: because they persist. But it's just up to us to really look at these things head-on, be honest about them, and start to try to move away and do things differently. Even though it's called the Hall of Shame, we're not trying to shame anybody.
Yeah, we know that it's just we need to help ourselves.
Mahesh, I really appreciate you walking through these with us. I mean, I don't want to say that it was enjoyable to cultivate this list because it's a little heartbreaking sometimes, but it's the reality. We know that everyone has good intentions, and it's just really trying to break some of the old habits that are entrenched in HCM.
Yes.
So thanks for sharing your insights today and thanks for walking through this list with me. We hope to connect with everybody on another podcast soon. So thanks!
Thank you.
Research references mentioned in the conversation. The speakers reference Brandon Hall Group research on HR technology integration and Gartner research on integration challenges. These figures are presented here as speaker-attributed statements from the episode transcript; review the original research for methodology and the latest figures. View the original Brandon Hall Group episode →
Related TraineryHCM resources
Frequently asked questions
Concise answers to the core human capital management questions raised in the episode.
The seven mistakes are outdated job descriptions, treating annual reviews as performance management, rewarding results while ignoring behavior, buying more HR software instead of connecting it, one-size-fits-all training, promoting top performers without management readiness, and managing by gut feel instead of workforce intelligence.
Job descriptions influence hiring, role expectations, skills, performance criteria, development and compensation. When the role definition is stale, downstream HCM decisions can begin with inaccurate context.
An annual review is a periodic evaluation event. Performance management is an ongoing process of goals, check-ins, coaching, feedback, evidence and course correction throughout the year.
Disconnected tools can fragment employee data, create duplicate work and make it harder to connect performance, learning, succession, compensation and workforce reporting. More software does not solve a process or data problem unless the underlying operating model is clear.
Employees have different roles, existing skills, goals and development needs. Removing irrelevant or redundant content and aligning learning with role and skill context makes development more relevant and actionable.
Workforce intelligence combines evidence such as performance, skills, assessments, succession readiness, learning and employee context to inform decisions. It should support — not replace — human judgment by giving HR leaders a more complete basis for talent decisions.
Connected HCM
See how TraineryHCM connects performance, talent, learning, compensation and core HR into one connected platform.
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