Marcus Buckingham asks a key question about managing talent: “What would happen if men and women spent more than 75 per cent of each day on the job using their strongest skills and engaged on their favourite tasks, basically doing exactly what they wanted to do?”
They’d produce great results, in all likelihood.
To harness that productivity for the organisation, people should be given jobs that suit both their abilities (current performance) and their capabilities (potential performance). They should also understand the actions and behaviours they need to use to perform the job well.
This is not what normally happens. We often promote people out of a job they are good at — and in a way that makes it clear that cannot say no.
To top it all, they receive no hints about how to approach their new job — what specific actions they need to demonstrate to perform well. You’re just supposed to know.
It’s a common mistake to move your best sales person to sales manager, the best engineer to manager, a strong functional specialist to general management. Not to say that excellent sales people cannot become excellent sales managers. Of course they can. But do they want to?
Some people are at their best right where they are, and moving them or promoting them in order to reward their excellent performance is a formula for failure.
Couldn’t managers ask people what they feel their skills are and what they think they could do to add the most value to the organisation — and then try to give them these jobs?
Is it that we think people are intrinsically lazy and will only want to do as little as possible? Or that there are jobs no-one would ever elect to do? What might seem interminably boring to you may be very interesting to me.
One chief executive I worked with recognised the two-sided nature of talent — ability and capability. He laid out this challenge to his top 300 or so managers around the world: “Rather than have us tell you what and where your job should be, would you please tell us where you think you would add most value to the company. List the three jobs you think you would be best at and we will do our best to put you in one of them.”
It resulted in some dramatic shifts. One senior line manager who had been in charge of a large business unit in Africa elected to move to a public affairs role in Brussels. The net result was that people came close to Buckingham’s 75 per cent goal. Revenue and profitability soared and the company’s value tripled.
Managers need to trust people to choose their role. They also need to understand that not everyone wants a job change or career progression. Where they are is just right.
