"Your job is meant to support your life. Issue #04 | June 2026 |
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This Month's Hook The Goonies Had No Business Finding That Treasure
© Warner Bros. / Amblin Entertainment. Used for editorial and educational purposes. Run Mikey's crew through a standard talent review and you don't get a treasure hunt. You get a PIP. A kid with an inhaler leading the mission. One who can't stop eating. One whose gadgets fail more often than they work. One who won't stop talking. By every conventional talent metric, this crew doesn't make the shortlist. They also find One-Eyed Willy's ship, save their homes, and deliver the single most satisfying ending in 1985 cinema. Here's what the talent review missed: Mikey didn't build a team of A-players. He built a team of complementary players. A decoder. A negotiator. A logistics brain. Someone who can read a room and make people laugh when everything is falling apart. A leader who holds the vision when every rational person would have turned back. Hire five versions of the same A-player and you get one kind of sharp blade for a five-tool problem. The Goonies would have died in the fireplace room. The diversity of capability, not the concentration of credential, is the variable that determines whether a team can navigate complexity. That was true in 1985. It's still true in your next talent calibration. "Most leadership books would have told Mikey to build a team of A-players. Mikey built a team of complementary players. One of those decisions finds the treasure. The other builds another committee that dies in the conference room." The Case File What JP Morgan Found When They Stopped Screening People OutWhat happens when you remove the filter? JP Morgan Chase decided to find out. They redesigned their hiring process for certain technical roles to include candidates their standard screening had been quietly rejecting, people who didn't fit the expected profile but had the capability. What the org chart predicted and what actually happened were two very different things. Teams with neurodiverse participants were 48% faster and 92% more productive than teams without. Not marginally better, nearly twice as productive. By people who had been screened out as "difficult to manage" or "not fitting the profile." JP Morgan is not alone. SAP's Autism at Work program spans 17 countries and reports a 90% retention rate for neurodiverse employees, far above industry averages. Microsoft's neurodiversity hiring program records 30%+ productivity gains and 90%+ retention. Goldman Sachs launched a neurodiversity internship where their first cohort had a 100% offer and acceptance rate. These were not charity programs. These were organizations that looked at the people their standard process had been rejecting and asked a different question: what if the filter is wrong, not the candidate? MFIHR Insight The question this raises isn't whether your organization should launch a neurodiversity program. The question is: what is your current screening process filtering out that it isn't supposed to? Every hiring funnel was designed by someone with a picture in mind of what a "good candidate" looks like. The people who don't fit that picture aren't necessarily less capable. They're just less expected. And in most talent reviews, unexpected is treated the same as unqualified. The Hot Take Your Organization Has a Sloth.The Goonies had a character named Sloth. His own family locked him in the basement and called him a liability. Not on the org chart. Not in the succession plan. The Fratellis didn't see capability when they looked at him, they saw a problem to manage around. Chunk didn't see it that way. He sat with him. Shared a Rocky Road. Treated him like a person instead of a liability. And the man who everyone had written off showed up at the exact moment the mission was at stake and delivered the one thing nobody else could. No credential. No succession plan entry. One moment. One irreplaceable contribution. "HEY YOU GUYYYYYS." Your organization has a Sloth. Probably more than one. Not someone who's slow, someone who's been quietly written off. Left off the high-potential list. Given the label "not ready" by a manager who never actually designed work that fit their shape. The talent isn't missing. The conditions for it to show up are. "'This person isn't performing' and 'this person hasn't been given the problem that fits their shape' are not the same diagnosis. Treating them the same way is how organizations keep passing on their best future contributors." Straight-Talk Insight Three Questions Before Your Next Talent Review.Before you move someone's dot on the nine-box, before you cut someone from the high-potential list, before you decide who's "not ready," ask these three honestly: 1. Are you diagnosing performance, or diagnosing fit? Has this person actually been given work that matches their capability, or have they been doing a job that was never designed for their skill set? Those are different problems with different solutions. One is a performance conversation. The other is a job design conversation. Know which one you're actually having. 2. Who in this room is playing the Fratellis? Who has decided, officially or by omission, that someone isn't worth the investment? Labels become self-fulfilling fast. The person gets fewer stretch assignments, less visibility, fewer key conversations, and eventually confirms the conclusion that was really the cause. Challenge the label before you ratify it. 3. What would Chunk do? Before the next review cycle, have a real conversation. Not a structured check-in, an actual human question about what kind of work energizes them, what they're proud of, what they feel they haven't had a chance to show yet. The answer is almost always more interesting than their last performance score suggests. And it costs exactly one Rocky Road. Featured Read The Manager-Employee Gap: Why Leaders Stopped Eating LastI had a goal to be published by SHRM. This month, it happened. The piece is built around Simon Sinek's Leaders Eat Last, a framework I've been living with for years, and a story I couldn't shake: a senior leader who opened an all-hands meeting talking about four people who had left the company more than a year earlier. Nobody corrected him. That moment is the clearest picture I know of the quiet distance that has been widening between managers and the people they're supposed to protect. The article lays out four moves for senior HR leaders who want to close that gap. If you manage people, or the people who manage people, this one is worth your time. Read the Full Article on SHRM → |
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MY FRIEND IN HR "Your job is meant to support your life. Your life isn't meant to support your job." |