I was with a group of Talent & OD professionals from the City of London, talking about the perils of the ‘9-box matrix’ and other common management practices. They nodded enthusiastically: “We agree – it is complete nonsense”.

Then I asked: How many of your organisations have these practices? To my astonishment all nodded again: “We do”.

So there’s the problem. Somehow we have a situation where the experts employed to help us get the best from people are designing and deploying bureaucratic processes they don’t actually believe in. Some kind of groupthink has taken over, with organisations blindly copying each others’ practices.

In a recent article, David Clutterbuck calls this ‘HR Bling’ – rolling out the HR equivalent of fake Rolex watches. He explains:

“The nine-box grid, promoted heavily by the leadership pipeline movement, claims to be an accurate way of assessing talent and identifying high-potential employees. Nice idea, if managers could assess performance and potential (the two axes of the grid) with any significant degree of accuracy or without bias. But the weight of evidence suggests they can’t, and that putting people into boxes does more harm than good – not least because it creates self-fulfilling prophecies that reinforce the illusion that good choices were made.”

If we start to look at real evidence, how many other people-management processes are called into question? It could be a long list:

Performance management – in the form of an annual 1-1 review – is widely hated by managers and employees. Many would agree that it fails to achieve most of the things it is designed to achieve, and could usefully be replaced by a more regular series of conversations.

360 degree feedback is recommended by experts to be used for development purposes alone, and can be very powerful. Yet many organisations use it as a means of formal assessment, with the result that people are routinely over-rated and even do ‘deals’ with colleagues to rate each other highly.

Leadership competencies are identified, codified, and and used to identify ‘HiPos’ (high potentials) who have the highest ratings across the range. Yet evidence shows that most successful leaders don’t fit the profile – they have one or two towering strengths and some severe weaknesses. (Alternatives including focusing less on traits and more on personal impact, through conversations, by identifying ‘conversation gaps’).

Pay & Reward systems have been establishing ever-more complex ways to link pay to performance, despite a wealth of evidence that it simply doesn’t work for all but the most mechanistic jobs. Do we understand people’s individual motivations and career needs? Or simply assume that money will buy love?

Succession plans are filled with names, but how many of them would actually accept the job if offered? Have they been asked? Often not. David Clutterbuck adds: “According to research, women outscore men on nine out of ten leadership traits. Yet men are twice as likely to be promoted at any point in their career than women.”

Unfortunately, the list doesn’t stop there. These things don’t just need a tweak – they need an overhaul.

So the question is: How can we equip HR and Talent professionals with the confidence, evidence and expertise to build tomorrow’s companies based on approaches that work, not just bureaucracy they don’t even believe in?

In my view, the answer does not lie in inventing better processes or trying to measure and evaluate what we do (although both those things would help). The answer lies in looking deeper at the industrial-age Western beliefs and assumptions that are still driving the way we manage people and build organisations.

Only then can we start building a new generation of agile, inspiring organisations and grow leaders who can create value through people.

Which HR practices do you think we need to call into question? And what false beliefs or assumptions are driving them?