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Opening Salvo
WTW asked 7,000 employees whether their manager helps develop their abilities, and the yes rate has slid from 84% to 78% over four years.
Six points sounds survivable until you put it beside the other number in the same report, which is that about 30% of the 500-plus employers surveyed have any process for identifying and tracking what skills their people have.
Development coaching won’t move that, and neither will a new competency model. Somebody has to define what capability the organization is building toward, and your managers will keep getting rated on it until you do.
Finally, a Monday that doesn’t feel like one.
Imagine a Saturday where you're not catching up on the CRM you didn't touch all week.
HubSpot's new self-updating CRM doesn't wait for you to log back in. Friday's calls are already logged. The deal that needs a nudge Monday morning is already flagged. The automation you set up once keeps running without you thinking about it. None of it needed you over the weekend.
Customers are already seeing it pay off: 45% more deals closed. Finally, you start Monday caught up, not behind.
The Fact Pattern
State of Product reveals what AI still hasn’t solved
80% of product professionals say AI helps them ship faster, but customers aren’t seeing value any sooner. Atlassian’s State of Product 2027 explores the gains AI is delivering and the challenges that remain, from decision-making that hasn’t kept pace to gut instinct overriding customer evidence.
Talent Management 101 (TM101)
The Measure Outlives Its Target
Measurement theory calls it criterion deficiency when a measure captures less than what it claims to. A development item asks whether a manager built capability. Answering that requires knowing which capability, and where an organization hasn’t specified one, respondents answer the question they can answer instead, which is whether their manager seemed invested in them.
The number that comes back is reliable. It’s stable across cycles and it correlates with things the business cares about, which is why it survives review. It still can’t say whether the capability the business needs in two years is any closer.
Why It Happens
A felt measure beats a defined one on every practical axis: It’s cheap, it runs annually, and employees answer it without training. Specifying capability takes agreement across functions and goes stale when the strategy moves.
Reliability reads as validity: A stable number looks like a working number, and nothing in the report distinguishes the two.
The deficiency has no owner: The survey team owns the instrument, the managers own the score, and the capability definition belongs to whoever sets strategy, who was never asked for it.
Specificity scores badly: Developing toward a named capability means declining most requests, and declining registers on the item as not developing people.
The Question Organizations Avoid
If you scored your development item against what your function will actually need next year, which of your highest scorers would still be high?
The Plug
This newsletter is brought to you by AstutEdge, a performance improvement consultancy. We help organizations close the gap between what leadership intends and what actually gets executed by fixing the misalignment in people, systems, and structure that stalls results.
We work through consulting engagements and coaching. If your organization is producing effort without outcomes, let's talk.
Visit astutedge.com or share this with a leader who feels the drag.