Your promotion list is the productivity metric you forgot
Say you are already convinced. Revenue per employee, value added per head and margin per FTE count what a person produces during the period, and they ignore what was consumed to get it: health, relationships, learning that evaporated and knowledge nobody passed on. You nod. Then Monday arrives, and your dashboard still shows the same three columns.
This piece builds on an article I published on benjaminchaminade.com, the last of a ten-part series on what regenerative agriculture can teach management. I drafted it with AI assistance, and it reflects my own ideas and work. Here I want to deal with the question a convinced reader asks next: what do I change first, and where will it break?
Start with the people you promoted
My answer is deliberately unglamorous. Pull the list of everyone promoted in your organisation over the last three years. (Yes, the whole list. HR has it somewhere, probably in a file nobody has opened since the last review cycle.) Go through it name by name and ask one thing: is anyone on this list known for passing knowledge on or for rebuilding a team?
If the answer is nobody, you have found your bottleneck. Your indicators can wait, because your evaluation system is what blocks you. Promotions tell the truth about what an organisation values, far more faithfully than its KPIs and its speeches put together. They also shape who will run the place next. A promotion list that only rewards people who optimise the counters means the organisation is selecting exactly the behaviours that weaken it, and I consider that selection the real cost of raw productivity.
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Do a second check the same afternoon. Look at your annual objectives and ask whether they assume, without saying so, that people will work beyond a sustainable load. If hitting budget structurally requires an unbearable workload, no HR policy will make up for that contradiction.
Three moves for the coming quarter
- Add one question to every year-end review. Ask what is left in the organisation that this person put there. The question separates two profiles that output per head confuses. The first produces a lot and takes everything with them when they leave. The second produces slightly less and leaves behind skills, routines and relationships that others now carry.
- Rewrite the manager criteria. Keep operational results, and add how far team members actually developed, what was passed on, whether the team climate held and what the manager contributed to other teams. A manager judged only on raw team output has every reason to keep up permanent pressure, hoard the best people and refuse to lend anyone. People optimise whatever is measured, so a change in criteria changes behaviour.
- Use four questions in your next hiring round. What knowledge have you passed on in previous roles, which long professional relationships have you built, how do you judge a team’s fertility beyond its results, and what stays behind when you leave?
None of these requires a new software licence. They do require you to accept that the most productive person on your spreadsheet might have a negative net contribution, since a high performer who exhausts the team around them can cost the collective more than they bring.
Where it breaks
I would rather warn you now than let you find out halfway through.
The easiest path breaks first. Adding contribution indicators takes about a quarter, and it is also the easiest path to ignore. You end up with one more dashboard, tracked faithfully and connected to no decision. If promotion criteria stay untouched, nobody changes how they behave.
Rewriting evaluations breaks somewhere else. It takes one to two years, and it can trigger open conflict with managers who were promoted under the old rules. (They have a point, too: they played the game you designed.) Expect that conversation and prepare for it.
Then the executive committee will ask for a single score. Resist it. A single number would repeat the exact flaw you are trying to fix, because it would choose what it counts and make the rest disappear. A map across several dimensions forces people to discuss trade-offs instead of hiding them. Holding that map without collapsing it into one figure is a large part of the job for any HR director who wants this to stick.
The deepest break concerns strategy. Suppose your objectives can only be met by pushing people above the ceiling of the managerial doughnut, my adaptation of economist Kate Raworth’s doughnut, with a floor of needs the organisation guarantees and a ceiling of demands it must not exceed. In that case the strategy has to adjust, and the doughnut stays where it is. That path takes two to three years and needs the agreement of the CEO and the shareholders. You will not win it on Monday. You can start building the case on Monday, though, and the promotion list makes a good first exhibit.
Farmers went through a similar switch when Gabe Brown argued that a farm should be judged on profit per hectare rather than yield per hectare. The HR equivalent is to judge productivity by what remains after each person has passed through, instead of by what was extracted from them during the period. Monday’s version of that switch fits on one page: a list of names and an honest question.
Read the original article (in French): Contribution nette positive : du rendement par collaborateur à la fertilité collective https://benjaminchaminade.com/fertilite-collective/
I’m Benjamin Chaminade, a French-Australian speaker, consultant and entrepreneur in management, HR and innovation.
