Make employees pass the test
With some low-hanging fruit already on the table, ZS still needed to do a better job of ensuring that people were taking advantage of new systems meant to spark collaboration and accountability. In order to do that, you need to figure out who is excelling at those elements and who needs more work. Bajaj again started with senior leaders, as they all do peer 360 reviews.
“That peer input is part of calibrating me as a partner, part of keeping my culture consistent with the rest of the firm,” he says.
You can do that calibration by having senior leaders outside of a project review how it went. For example, when Bajaj does one for another partner, he reviews the work done on a project and then speaks with people on that team about the role the partner played, listening for overall trends, not one bad review.
“So if I’m doing a 360 on a different partner, I will interview the managers who used to work for that partner to try to make sure that what they have [to say] is being listened to,” he says.
And you can do that with more than just partners. After a project closes, everyone on the team is asked to review people below and above them — managers, for example, grade associates and partners.
Again, no one negative review costs anyone a job.
“Let’s say I’m an associate,” Bajaj says. “I get reviewed on every project by whoever the project manager was and so I may get reviewed by 10 different managers in the company for 10 different assignments over a six-month period and it’s the integration of those 10 that creates my annual review. That’s given to me by my manager, who summarizes it and says, ‘Here’s how people are talking about you. There’s this element called collaboration, and you’ve scored below average, and here’s the things people have pointed out.’”
People are also asked to write their own review and describe what collaborations they’ve done that have benefited themselves and others in the firm to drive home its importance.
“The things we value, we make sure they are reinforced in multiple systems,” Bajaj says.
In all, teamwork is one of about eight dimensions in what ZS calls its competency model. The model is an overall test, without which you cannot get promoted to the next level.
“So these dimensions are tracked over your career — same dimension but different measures of success and degrees of success are required as you progress up,” Bajaj says. “We prefer people to have every dimension, but very occasionally, we will compensate and say they were so much of an outlier on all these dimensions and this one they are pretty close, but if you fail completely on a dimension, you are unlikely to progress to future levels.”
And when people can’t improve, Bajaj says you can’t have any reservations about telling them to move on — even to the point of helping them find work.
“We’ll, of course, try to improve them,” he says. “And if they can’t improve, we’ll be open as to how their career will flourish better elsewhere. Because it’s not just about us being selfish and saying you don’t fit with us and you should leave. If their career isn’t progressing with us, it’s not good for them either.”
