HR Pioneers: Interview with Ashley Goodall from Cisco.

Ashley Goodall is the SVP of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco Systems, Inc – and if those credentials weren’t good enough, he previously worked at Deloitte, where he was responsible for all their leadership development and performance management redesign efforts.

Oh, and he’s also British.

So what is on Ashley’s mind right now? Well, if you watched our last blog post, you should already know the answer: Teams.

Like everyone in the Talent leadership space, Ashley has read article after article about how companies have thrown out performance ratings systems, and how throwing out these faulty systems altogether doesn’t improve performance.  Yet these articles offer no solutions, besides one brief mention: work is all about teams.

First of all, as Ashley knows, it’s not about getting rid of performance data – it’s about finding a way to measure it so that the numbers we get actually mean something. Bad data is useless, and good, reliable data is necessary.

So why aren’t we figuring out how to incorporate the way people work in the real world – on dynamic teams – into our performance ratings systems?

Being on a team is the most important thing we do at work. We instinctively look for opportunities to collaborate with people. Our best and our worst work experiences are on teams. My team is the sun, the moon, and the stars of my experience at work. - @LittlePlatoons Share on X

Yet when we look at what organizations do to make team performance better – there’s nothing there.

If you want to get something done, you have to do it with other people. But in HR, we only talk to individuals about individuals. How does that make sense?

We need to integrate what people want as individuals with what they want to share as a group. If you ignore either side of the coin, you won’t be able to measure, accelerate, or activate your Talent. #HR needs to integrate what people want as individuals with what they want to share as a group. Share on X

Our businesses need fantastic teams, and they need HR to help build them. Thanks, Ashley. Brilliant Brit insight.