It’s not who you are, but who you could be

Maybe past performance isn’t the best predictor of future success.

At IBM, when performance review time rolls around, employees get judged not only on their past accomplishments (and failures) but also on how they might perform in the future. How can IBM predict the future? In a word: Watson.

Using artificial intelligence, Watson Analytics looks at an employee’s experiences and projects to deduce the potential skills and qualities each person might have to serve IBM in the future. Watson also scours IBM’s internal training system to see if an employee has gained new skills. Managers then take Watson’s assessment rating into account as they make bonus, pay and promotion decisions.

“Traditional models said if you were a strong performer in your current job that was the singular way that you got a promotion,” says Nickle LaMoreaux, vice president for compensation and benefits at IBM. “Well, we certainly still care about performance.” But that now includes hypothetical future performance, too. Historically, employers used past accomplishments to make pay decisions. That worked when job tasks stayed relatively static over time, but “the half-life of skills is getting shorter and shorter,” says LaMoreaux. What employees could do yesterday matters less than what they can potentially do tomorrow.

And IBM is not alone. A survey of more than 2000 organisations, by the consulting firm Willis Towers Watson, found that more than 40 per cent of respondents are planning on or considering changing the focus of their performance management systems to include future potential and the possession of skills.

Not all companies use analytics to predict their employees’ futures, as IBM does. The Intern Group, an internship matching organisation with 80 employees, ranks workers on what it believes are the 15 skills — such as flexibility and communication — needed to succeed in the next 100 years.

The company has used the rating system to identify what chief executive David Lloyd calls its top 10 per cent of future talent, a group of people the company will do “whatever it takes” to keep, Lloyd says.