CONCLUSION
GETTING STARTED
It makes no sense to have your best, brightest, and most-experienced employees leave to pursue opportunities elsewhere because they are bored. Yet too many companies make exactly this mistake.
Boris Groysberg, a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, has administered a “Building a Great Company” survey to small- and medium-sized companies around the globe for the past decade, asking questions about topics ranging from strategy to culture. He asks executives to rate “How effective is your company” on thirty-seven HR practices, from recruitment to engagement. For the 450 companies surveyed in 2017, “job rotations” had the lowest rating, with “high-potential program” coming in at third lowest. “This was not unusual,” Groysberg notes. “These practices have long been at the bottom of the list.” Clearly many companies struggle to provide employees at the top of their learning curve with new assignments and opportunities internally.
The ability for managers to support their employees through a series of learning curves requires a willingness to stretch beyond the parameters of everyday thinking. It also requires that managers have the support of upper management. But this requires change. And change, as we all know, can be tough for organizations to handle. We talk a good game, but the reality of our human condition is that few of us like “new” until it’s no longer new. We prefer the sure thing, the familiar status quo that has brought us to our present level of success. Stasis provides a semblance of certainty and safety. Except that really, safety and certainty are an illusion.
In risk-averse organizations, it may be hard to convince your superiors that it’s a good idea to move a star employee to a new role where their success is far from guaranteed. It may be difficult to make the case for hiring someone with more potential than experience. It may feel impossible to get buy-in for the idea that an employee who is underperforming in one role could be a standout in a different role.
If your company is the kind of organization that tends to point out what could go wrong, you will not convince anyone to change by arguing that managing employees in a new way will unlock innovation, feelings of achievement and satisfaction, and engagement. If your company has a glass-half-empty way of looking at things, then work with their risk-averse survival instinct rather than against it. Make it scarier not to try something new.
Lay out the risks of not encouraging people to disrupt themselves: what it could cost you, your boss, your team, and your company. Here are some points to bring up:
• You will lose your high potentials. You can’t continue to “like them right where they are,” because they won’t stay. If you don’t help broker in-house moves to keep them stretching, they’ll broker their own move to a new employer.
• Even if they do stay, if you don’t push people into challenging, constrained situations, they won’t be engaged.
• If they aren’t engaged, they won’t innovate. (They may not even really work.)
• If they don’t innovate, your company will become less competitive. You will be beaten by faster-adapting competitors because you won’t be prepared for the future. According to an in-depth study conducted by Accenture, high-performing companies (those that surpass their peers on financial metrics across business cycles and leadership eras) are those that develop capabilities before they need them. Average and low-performing companies don’t, which is why they can’t compete.1
Want to know if you’re about to be disrupted? Take the pulse of your workforce. Says writer Anne Lamott: “If we stay where we are, where we’re stuck, where we’re comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you’re dying.”2
That said, don’t argue that the learning-curve approach to management has no downsides—it’s just that the upsides far outweigh them. For instance, if you help talented employees jump to new roles, yes, your team may suffer in the short term. But in the long term, you will gain a reputation as a talent developer. Capable, ambitious, high-potential people will want to work for you.
If you hire someone who isn’t already an expert, you’ll also have lower productivity for a time. That person won’t be able to just plug right into the role. But they will be happy to have the job and be loyal to you, since you took a chance on them. They will be eager to work hard and prove themselves. Your entire team will benefit from this highly engaged employee. This approach entails some risk—but not as much risk as sticking with the status quo.
Remember that for yourself, too. Because the most frequent reservation people have about allowing their subordinates to disrupt themselves through successive learning curves is this: concern that their superiors won’t support this new paradigm, that they won’t reward and may even punish them for trying it.
But in my experience, the biggest obstacle to this management style is not the higher-ups. There’s always a higher-up, even when you are the CEO. It starts with the person reading or listening to this book. The single biggest impediment to innovation in your organization could be you.
Whether you oversee a team of ten or ten thousand, remember that you are positioned to help others. You can reward and promote them and aid their personal disruptions. I’m sure you want to do that, or you wouldn’t have bought this book—and made it this far. But helping others learn and grow is always the kind of thing that seems easier to do tomorrow. It’s easy to say, “Today I’m just too busy.” Or “This quarter is not the time to move my best employee to a new role.”
The best bosses don’t just build one A-team; they build vast networks of A-teams over the course of their careers. Generosity and assistance bring long-term rewards. As you facilitate and celebrate the success of others, it will burnish your reputation as a talent developer and a boss who people love to work for.
A manager, like a coach, must know that you don’t win unless your team does. As you aspire to be a boss who leads their team up the learning curve, be patient with yourself and with others. People often say to me, “Your ideas are terrific, but it all comes down to execution.” It does. But our fear of not executing brilliantly can leave us stranded at the starting line, unwilling to even try.
One of the great examples of being willing to start, make mistakes, and then patiently course-correct is Benjamin Franklin. He wanted to achieve moral perfection. He made a list of thirteen virtues. But he didn’t try to master them all at once. Instead he “executed” one at a time, beginning with temperance, because a cool head was foundational to the remaining twelve virtues, which also included industry, moderation, and humility. He wrestled with these goals throughout his life, giving focused practice to each of the thirteen for a week and then beginning the cycle anew. He said, “Having a garden to weed, [one] does not attempt to eradicate all the bad herbs at once, but works on the beds one at a time …” As you learn to disrupt yourself, and help others do the same, work on one bed at a time. On discouraging days, take heart from Franklin’s wisdom when he said, “A perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being envied or hated. A benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.”3
Throughout this book, I have extolled the value of constraints: in fostering creativity and in forcing action. As a manager of people, remember that of all the constraints we face, time is the most unyielding. Other resources may multiply, but time is always finite. Whether it’s our time in a job or our time on this planet, the amount of time we have left is always shrinking.
We are driven forward by our consciousness of limited time. It is a force more potent than the need to have a job or to earn a paycheck. People want to dream, and then they want to realize their dreams by learning new things, developing new competencies, and having an opportunity to make an imprint on the world. Managers can be makers, generating opportunities for their team members to create and recreate themselves through personal disruption.4 What a wonderful day’s work that would be.