The talent your company needs
may already be on the payroll
In that classic of management science, the secret to finding a talented team of
people who have intellect, passion, and courage says: “if I ever go looking for
my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard.”
Unfortunately, many executives and HR professionals have spent the last few
decades solving the wrong problem. They are correctly convinced that growing
their business requires having more talent than their competitors. They are also
convinced that they must compete hard to win talent that might otherwise go to
their competitors. Instead they should be more fully utilizing the talent they
already have.
“Employee engagement” is a tired term in no small part because so many give it
lip service and so few succeed at doing it well. Though executives say that
their most important asset is their people, don’t tap into the knowledge that
their employees who do the work have about both the problems and the solutions
they face every day. In the early 20th century, an employee was simply a “cog in
a machine,” as portrayed by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Lights. But today, workers
are looking for more meaning in their jobs while at the same time, they’re less
engaged.
Gallup’s 2013 Survey found that 70% of the workforce is not engaged with a full,
20% actively disengaged (they are “more-or -less are out to damage their
company”). Yet, engagement is the pathway to providing that desired meaning.
Workers who are engaged feel that their job matters, that their opinion counts
and that they are valued by their managers for the work they do. So, companies
who learn how to engage earn higher levels of employee satisfaction, and a
reputation that attracts even more talent. Better still, when employees are
given the right environment where their talent can thrive, the financial results
are dramatic.
+For example, at a financial services company that employed 25,000 people, the
CEO put into place a process specifically designed to have the employees
generate smart ideas about their own work to make more money. In just 100 days,
these employees came up with 2,400 ideas that the CEO announced to Wall Street
were worth $400 million … and then subsequently reported each quarter that the
actual impact was larger and coming faster than promised. A similar process was
put in place at a consumer division of a food manufacturer that employed 7,000
people. In just 100 days the employees came up with 500 ideas worth $40 million.
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So did thousands of employees suddenly become more talented—smarter, more
energetic, better collaborators, stronger project managers? No, obviously not.
What changed was that management made the goal of solving problems urgent so
that employees wanted to use their talent to help the company and felt valued
that their ideas mattered.
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There are three key elements to engaging employees and utilizing more of their
knowledge:
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1. The single most important element, without which the effort will never
succeed in a widespread way, is real commitment from management.
How the top of the house spends its time is worth far more in terms of creating
a corporate culture of engagement than any words in a mission statement. When it
is clear that big bosses are paying attention to what employees have to say
about things that are broken or even just less than perfect in the company, many
employees will take action.
2. The next necessary element is that finding and solving problems is mandatory.
We said that when bosses pay attention, many employees will take action. The way
to get nearly all employees to take action is to make it mandatory by using a
process that requires managers to present their ideas to solve problems to the
top of the house. It is the rare manager who will show up empty-handed to a
regularly scheduled, “bring us your ideas meeting”.
3. The third key element is to make the most talented employees visible to the
executive team.
Those employees can then get deserved recognition for adding millions to the
bottom line. This visibility goes hand in hand with making problem finding and
problem solving mandatory. When you tell people they must find and fix problems,
you must then give them an executive audience. Here we circle back to our first
element, executive time. In very short spurts of time, teams from each area of
the company can present their solutions to win approval for any needed
implementation resources. It is hard to think of a more productive way to use
executive time.