Misfits and Managers

Source: Exec Digital Canada

Date :16/06/2008 02:21:32

Managing talent is often seen as a problem, but the solution may be to let the talent do the managing

Written by John O’Hanlon

If you treat them as different, there will be challenges to managing, getting the best out of, and incorporating within existing organizational structures those gifted people whose skills are vital but for one reason or another won’t fit in. When it comes to what is called talent management, or the delicate dance around people with big egos, undeniable ability and probably major faults, that is the way most businesses have thought for generations.

This mindset comes from the notion that an organization has an identity, a structure, a culture, that has built up over decades, even generations. From the CIA to Ford Motor Company to Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (“We don’t gotta sit here and listen to this. You CERTAINLY don’t pal, ‘cause the good news is - you’re fired!”) and Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, employees have always been expected to shape up or ship out.

Which is why it is taking so long to make room for the disruptive notion that people are the organization, make the organization, and should be allowed to change the organization. It’s called the bottom-up approach to business and some claim it is the only model that will enable society to innovate at the speed necessary for its survival.

The marriage contract

Let’s look at the recruitment process. What does getting a job mean to the newly-qualified? Advertisement; job description; person profile; applicant; interview; assessment; offer; acceptance; compensation; line manager. After that, attendance; behavior; dress code; holidays; targets; feedback. Most of this stuff is just window dressing. It is possible to go through the whole process without asking the really important question.

Guy Kawasaki likens the job contract to a marriage contract: don’t get into it unless you are right for each other, he says, but that doesn’t mean either has to be perfect. There are two theories in hiring people, he says; either pick the candidate who lacks major weaknesses even though he doesn’t have major strengths, or the one who has major strengths even though he has major weaknesses. “The second line of reasoning is the way to go. A team of people with major and diverse strengths is what your organization needs in the early days when headcount is low. High achievers tend to have major weaknesses. People without major weaknesses tend to be mediocre.”

The major weakness of high achievers is often ego, if that is indeed a weakness. It may be a strength in some ways but there’s no denying it can be a pain in the neck.

Lee Crawford, the founder and CEO of the internet gaming company Twofish is a bit of a maverick himself. Before starting his present company he was Director of Engineering at Yahoo!, overseeing development efforts across all of the Yahoo! Games properties. He joined Yahoo! through the acquisition of Stadeon, a mobile multiplayer technology company he co-founded in 2001. “I sold my company to Yahoo! because I saw I could have a platform and the resources to do something with an order of magnitude much larger than I could command at Stadeon,” he says, “But I couldn’t stay there because of the political in-fighting that was going on.”

Yahoo! made the mistake of trying to engineer the outcomes of its activities to suit a plan, rather than make the most of the opportunities in front of it. It wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last company to do that, and it was perhaps this thinking that lost it the opportunity of a mature partnership with Microsoft and at the same time cost it a lot of good people. Google on the other hand, he says, demonstrates a caring and sensitive approach its staff, famously gives them a lot of perks as well as the opportunity to pursue their own research in company time and to get their ideas listened to.

Command and control

There are a lot of command and control companies still out there, a hangover from the old industrial manufacturing model, says Crawford: “But it doesn’t cost you a lot to look at the changes in a person’s life and respond to them as a friend and employer should. Modern industries are driven by exceptional people, and exceptional people tend to be idiosyncratic.”

Silicon Valley has been forced to come to terms with the challenge of talent because, as Crawford puts it, “It is the only place where you can be a rock star in the back office.” It’s not money that motivates these people, he says, because if that were so they would have gone into financial services. “They require high levels of stimulation in what they do, and high levels of recognition. In the world of technology, the team is more important than the manager, and that’s hard for traditional managers to understand sometimes.” They don’t teach that on most MBA courses either, he might have added.

But he’s wrong about one thing. Rock stars are present in the back offices of many companies, some of them quite traditional. Innovation is the lifeblood of engineering companies for example, but until fairly recently innovation was not the first thin on the design department’s ‘to do’ list. Jim Griffith, the Timken Company’s first CEO from outside the family in its 100 year history, told me how the firm recognized the danger that teams happening on really radical new technologies outside of the development plan would leave, develop them independently, then sell them on the open market. What is sometimes called intrapreneurship had to be developed, either by giving the guys a sabbatical and funding to pursue their hunch or by helping them set up a spinoff company, retaining the company’s interest through a substantial shareholding.

Business unusual

Frankly, bottom-up thinking is a revolution that starts with education. Benchmarking won’t be most effectively done within the United States (not even Silicon Valley) or anywhere in the developed world, because we have been doing things the same way for too long. For a really radical model, it may be necessary to turn to an economy that is growing at an annual rate of nine percent and proposes to grow its higher education sector from 300 institutions to 1,500 in the next five years. That economy is India, where, as in the USA, there is a shortage of A-players. They can’t afford the procedures of the (British) Indian Civil Service and to their credit, they have no intention of doing so.

A little way back I quoted from Guy Kawasaki’s last book and I’ll end with a thought from his next. “Are mavericks born or made?” he asks. “It’s probably a little bit nature, a little bit nurture.

“What red-blooded working person wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and says, I think I’ll stand for business as usual today?”

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