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The Danger of Over-Valuing Smart, Talented People
July 03, 2009
An excerpt from "OOPS! 13 Management Practices that Waste Time and Money (and What to Do Instead)"
By Aubrey C. Daniels
After the Enron disaster you would think anyone who understood what happened there would realize an organization's success is not assured by having smart and talented employees.
Jeffrey Skilling, CEO of Enron, demonstrated that smart people can learn bad behavior quickly. What Enron did, and others still do, was waste a lot of time and money trying to find, hire, and retain smart, talented people. When Enron hired these outstanding people, they treated them special by routinely exempting them from following certain job requirements, policies, and procedures. Because they were labeled "smart," they got by with rude, insensitive behavior towards other employees, and in some cases, customers. Because of their behavior, bosses constantly spent time cleaning up the messes their special hires created with peers, subordinates, and other managers. Smart, talented people follow the same laws of behavior everyone else does, so you do not need to (and shouldn't) treat them more special than you treat other employees.
Why do we keep looking for smart people? Apparently, the thinking is smart, talented people are in short supply. The Web offers eight million ways to find advice about hiring and retaining talented employees. Without a doubt, every company should hire the best people available, and I favor any means that promotes this. However, smart, talented people are not in short supply; they are all around us.
Under-valuing employee potential
The common problem, contrary to popular opinion, is you don't buy people's brains; you buy their behavior. If one person's brain helps him or her do something another can't, that something should make the person more valuable, rather than their measured IQ. More importantly, employee value lies in how their intelligence is used to advance the mission and vision of the organization.
You can't tell if someone is smart by looking at a sheet of paper. Résumés can't tell you how well a person works with others, or even how the person performed in the jobs listed. Are the accomplishments listed on the candidate's resume created by the applicant, or accomplished in spite of him or her? In addition, being smart doesn't mean you have practical sense. We've all known people with high IQs who don't have enough sense to come in out of the rain.
What to do instead
1. Be aggressive in training and promoting people. A young aircraft engineer approached me after my speech, and wanted to give me an example of how his company didn't understand positive reinforcement. He said there was a job he wanted to learn because he thought it would help him in the future, so he approached his manager about it. The manager said he needed him where he was, and gave the young engineer a raise to show how valuable he was. The mistake his boss made, he felt, was he wanted the experience of the other activity, and was already happy with the money he was making. Shortly after this incident, a competitor offered him a job that allowed the opportunities he requested from his present employer. He said, "My former boss did me a favor because my new employer is going to match my current salary, and I now have the opportunity to learn the new skills I wanted."
As a manager, it is your job to retain and develop people. Employee retention is not a human resources responsibility. A part of any reward system for managers and supervisors should be the number of employees they keep and promote within the organization. One of the most innovative programs of this nature occurred at Kodak years ago. When black-and-white photographic paper manufacturing was considered dying by many new hires, it became increasingly difficult to recruit them to this part of the business. Joe Stoudenmeyer, the department manager, turned that situation around in a year by rewarding supervisors and managers for promoting their best people out of the department.
Managers would sell other departments on their employees because the managers were rewarded for getting their best employees better and higher paying jobs. If a job didn't exist in the company, managers would explore possibilities outside the company. That didn't occur frequently, but it was an option. Joe thought it was important for the company to ensure its employees knew department management had their best interests at heart. Of course, many didn't want to leave because Paper Sensitizing became a positive, reinforcing place to work.
2. Spend the time and money to train people to fluency. Whether it is in sales or operations, one of the most costly mistakes companies make is putting people in jobs before they are fluent in critical aspects of those jobs. The place this is most obvious to consumers is in what Clark Howard, a popular consumer advocate, calls "customer no-service." People dealing with the customer should be the most knowledgeable about products and services, and know it so well they can respond to customer problems correctly and without hesitation. Getting people to this point requires training beyond passing a quiz or demonstrating knowledge only one time. The amount of repetition required for fluency is far more than the average trainer understands, but the extra time pays off in happier customers and more confident and competent employees.
3. Have a way of positively reinforcing and rewarding employees who put in extra time and effort. This requires observing behavior to make sure those people who put in extra effort are not overlooked or ignored. The benefit of getting managers to observe performers pays huge dividends in discretionary effort. In 1992, Robert Eisenberger demonstrated in his research that people who are rewarded for extra effort not only work harder on assigned tasks but also work harder on other tasks. In addition, they tend to be more honest and exert a higher degree of self-control.
The knowledge and technology exists today to create a high performing workplace with the people you have now. Money and time are better spent on growing smart, talented people rather than trying to entice and buy them.
For Daniels' analysis and commentary on workplace management news and trends, visit his blog.
Dr. Aubrey C. Daniels works with organizations to apply the science of human behavior in the workplace. Daniels is the author of four best-selling books: "Bringing out the Best in People," "Performance Management," "Other People's Habits," "and Measure of a Leader" (with James E. Daniels).
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