| January
/ February 2005
Productivity
vs. people –
HAVE
WE SQUEEZED OUT TALENT ALONG WITH COST?
A
“TRUE STORY” making the Internet rounds concerns
an offsite knowledge worker, earning in the high five figures,
who has outsourced his job to India for $12,500. The enterprising
employee spends an hour each morning sharpening the overnight
work product but otherwise has the day at leisure. So he has
decided to take a second job and outsource that as well.
And if
the story isn’t true, it deserves to be.
The world
has always secretly applauded the individual who has figured
out not only how to work the system but how to exploit it
as well. It’s the Army supply officer, portrayed in
such American classics as M*A*S*H and Catch 22, who can produce
a case of champagne or box of Cuban cigars in the middle of
a war zone. It’s Wally the engineer in the Dilbert comic
strip, who has replaced his quest for professional success
and the pleasures of the flesh with the higher goal of remaining
inconspicuous. It is CBS executive, author and Fortune columnist
Gil Schwartz, who pokes fun at corporate life under the pseudonym
Stanley Bing – even though his real name is widely known.
Talent
often runs amok when it is under-utilized, but today that
talent may be running right out the door. Many organizations,
in their relentless drive to wring every possible dollar of
cost from the bottom line, are squeezing out the energy, motivation
and innovation of their employees – who wonder how they
could outsource their jobs for fun and profit. Or perhaps
find new employment.
As Stephen
R. Covey says in his new book, The 8th Habit (of highly successful
people), “…most people are not thriving in the
organizations they work for. They are neither fulfilled nor
excited. They are frustrated.” Using data from a Harris
Interactive survey of 23,000 full-time employees, he compares
today’s workers to a soccer team where only four of
the 11 players on the field know which goal is theirs, only
two of the 11 care, and only two understand the position they
have been asked to play.
Most
organizations, Covey says, are in desperate need of talent.
Covey
calls for the courageous individual willing to “become
an island of excellence in a sea of mediocrity” –
and he’s right. If we don’t have talent, what
else is left?
In what
some European Union officials have termed “post-modern
society,” fewer and fewer people make things. In fact,
much production has shifted from the industrialized West to
China and various third-world nations. Management guru Tom
Peters cites the astonishing statistic that over 60,000 foreign-owned
factories have opened in China over the past 36 months –
a rate of one every 26 minutes round the clock. And there’s
a new R&D lab opening in China every 43 hours.
Because
we compete in a global economy, the push always will be to
drive labor costs down – and that path, at least for
a while, will lead to China. Even the Thai silk industry has
watched its neighbor to the north become the low-cost producer.
But, rather than outsource silk production to China, Thailand
has embarked on a strategy of becoming the fashion capital
of Asia – thus adding value to the higher cost of Thai
silk. That kind of innovative response could be adopted by
many industries in many nations.
In this
“post-modern” Age of Information, we speak of
knowledge workers – as distinct, one supposes, from
factory workers or sex workers. But is the emphasis on “knowledge”
or “worker”? The latter, as Covey indicates, encourages
managers to treat the new breed of employee pretty much as
they managed factory workers decades ago – which is
to say, as objects directed to perform specific tasks in specific
ways.
“What
happens,” he asks, “when you treat people like
things today? It insults and alienates them, depersonalizes
work, and creates low-trust, unionized, litigious cultures.”
The alternative
is to build a much more welcoming environment in which spontaneous,
continuous change and innovation can occur from the bottom
up – not from the top down. That, of course, may be
easier said than done if individual employees neither understand
nor care about their organization’s mission, much less
their role in it. Yet change is occurring far too fast not
to involve every employee, or to replace those who don’t
quite get the message. (Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch
tells the story of the division manager who was fired for
building market share while his competitors fled the dying
market.)
Talent
Acquisition
+ Talent Utilization
= Talent Retention
One change
that the 21st century has brought about is the increasing
recognition by senior managers and human resources professionals
that human capital management is not a series of unrelated
activities – with recruiting behind that door, personnel
development several doors down, and employee retention behind
another door way over there. Instead, there needs to be a
comprehensive plan that guides the acquisition, nurturing
and keeping of a bullet-proof workforce that is diverse in
thought as well as race and gender.
Back
when lifetime employment was regarded as an admirable goal,
beauty-care and household consumer products giant Procter
& Gamble used to tell impressionable young recruits, “You’ll
never want to leave P&G because you’ll never find
as smart a bunch of people anywhere.” Today, of course,
companies want the latitude of moving people out as well as
up, but wouldn’t any organization be proud to brag that
its people are the best and brightest to be found?
Exceptionally
talented people are located one at a time, carefully vetted
and sold on the promise of long-term opportunity that meets
a specific inner need (for challenge, responsibility, power,
etc.). However, the increasing commoditization of the workforce
and the trend in some larger corporations to outsource recruiting
to a third-party vendor works against the close collaboration
of search consultant and hiring manager to find the right
match. Indeed, Sanford Rose Associates’ Dimensional
Search® process requires such a collaboration to
create a multi-layered profile of the perfect fit. Time spent
up front means time saved later on.
Skilled
search consultants can produce candidates who walk on water,
but even the most nimble can sink like a rock if not given
the necessary tools and mentoring, if left unaware of how
their mission fits into the Big Picture and if not encouraged
to grow in skills and responsibility. Wise employers continually
test the limits of their high-potential workers in a variety
of “stretch” assignments.
Talent
– as anyone in the sports and entertainment industries
can testify – is vain, egotistical and often unpredictable
(no athletic team sets out to select bad players, nor does
any actor aspire to be a bore onstage). Employers sometimes
will guess wrong, and other times will end up with an embarrassment
of riches. (Only one of four top contenders for Jack Welch’s
job could be awarded the CEO position. The others accepted
top jobs elsewhere.)
As night
follows day, the more talent an organization acquires and
utilizes to its fullest extent, the more stimulating and attractive
the organization will become. Productivity too will rise –
not necessarily in terms of output per worker, but certainly
in terms of ideas and innovation.
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