No, I’m not sharing the answer yet.

BUT!  Mike and I were so pleased by the responses, we’re going to deliver the answer in a podcast, coming out in the next week or two.  And, we’re going to go over all the blog comments, and address the points everyone has made.

We’re shooting it tonight, so if you have comments you want addressed, now’s the time.  We’ll do our best to include the late ones.

[This post does not endorse nor suggest the continuation of on-the-fly, spur-of-the-moment casts.  There’s still plenty of work to be done that can’t be shoehorned into a busy schedule.  Thanks - H]

Mark recently blogged with our first ever management koan, “What Would An Effective Manager Do?” It was clearly a big hit - we got 45 responses within 2-3 days. Clearly, many of you wanted to know what the answer is, and that’s great - the burning desire to get better is at the heart of all good managers. Maybe we should say “many of US” wanted to know, since even Mike posted a comment wondering about the answer! (Mark thinks that was just him being nice to everyone, putting everyone out of the misery of waiting.)

So, this is a first for us, a show driven completely by a blog post and its response. In fact, we had to juggle a lot to slide it into the lineup, and it’s certainly unusual for us to record a show and put it right up on the site.

And what’s the show about? Well, don’t you want to know what an effective manager would do? We’re going to learn the right way of thinking on this issue, and then we’re going to review every unique blog comment and provide insight as to what works and what doesn’t.

This cast describes a technique for measuring your team and/or organization’s ability to recognize talent.

Many managers mistakenly fail to connect the process of hiring with the later successes and failures of the organization. When someone doesn’t work out, particularly if it’s 3-5 years after they were hired, very few managers think that the problem started when they were being interviewed. But the fact is, just like our elected leaders in a democracy, we get the people we deserve. If we hired them, we MUST have wanted them? Right?

Somehow, though, this kind of analysis is never done. While it’s probably not terribly helpful for those who leave the company after 20 years, there ought to be a way to evaluate managers’ abilities to find and hire good, talented people (”talent”) for the company.

And now there is: The Manager Tools Talent Scouting Average.