12 minute read
Taking on Employee
Taking on Employee Disengagement by MANAGING CHANGE
BY WHITNEY JOHNSON
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The No. 1 problem facing organizations— and the leaders and managers within them—is the disengagement of their employees.
No. 1. It’s not your competitors or the economy or the political landscape; it’s not global uncertainty, the pace of change, and the constant pressure for innovation. Or rather, it’s not those things except that they become very dangerous to an organization with a disengaged workforce. Every potential problem looms large when you’re not equipped with highly engaged, creative, problem-solving and productive people. Unless your firm is one of the rare exceptions to whom the data does not apply, you are being dragged down by employee disengagement. Organizations are just a shell, a skeleton. They are fleshed out and made lively by the people—the talent—that work within. High-growth organizations need high-growth individuals; they are the lifeblood of progress. If you are not proactively managing your people for their growth and engagement, then your organization is not adequately armed for battle in a highly competitive world. Let’s examine the challenge of constant change to illustrate the point. Change is rolling over all of us, all the time, both personally and professionally. We don’t have to like it, though much of it we do. Regardless, we aren’t going to change change; it’s here to stay. The real question is whether we’re being submerged under the rolling wave front, or are harnessing its power and energy and riding the wave to get where we want to go. Are we managing change, or does it manage us? Are we leading change or merely being carried along in the current, soon to be left behind on the shore like so much sea wrack? How do we meet the modern challenge of constant change? How do we calibrate our organizations to benefit from change, to use its energy to propel us forward? The short and simple answer is, we calibrate our people to be change agents and to benefit from change themselves. Organizations only do what their people do.
FOLLOWING THE S CURVE The S curve was popularized by E.M. Rogers in the 1960s. He used it to model the diffusion of new technologies through the marketplace. We’ve adapted it to illustrate the unpredictable process of human growth as individuals surf their personal “S Curve of Learning.” It helps model how people grow and respond to change.
An S Curve of Learning has three primary phases: • There is a low end, or launch point, where a lot of learning needs to take place in a relatively short period of time, and it feels like progress is slow or limited. People may require extra support from others due to frustration and discouragement. • Then comes an ascent up the steep back of the curve. Growth and progress are rapid while learning continues after a basic competency has been achieved. This is a sweet spot of high engagement and greatest productivity. • Finally, growth and learning flatten out again as the potential of the learning curve is exhausted at its high end. Mastery has been achieved. Complacency, boredom, and stagnation—disengagement—are on the near horizon. Your organization is a collection of S Curves of Learning. Every job, every role is its own S curve. Every employee is working on a personal S curve. Once you know where individuals are on their curve, you understand what this means for their personal growth and their potential to be change agents within your organization. As we have analyzed and aggregated data from our S-Curve Locator (scurvelocator.com), a tool that identifies where individuals are on their current S curve, we are seeing a pattern among high-growth organizations: approximately 15% of employees are working at the launch point of their curve, approximately 70% are situated along the high-growth sweet spot, and the final 15% have mastered their role and are preparing to jump to a new learning curve. You want to maximize the growth opportunity along each curve, and when people are no longer growing—and therefore, no longer engaged—you facilitate their movement to a new curve.
GAINING MOMENTUM ON THE S CURVE Because high-growth organizations need high-growth individuals, here are suggestions for helping the people in your organization build momentum along their current S curve: Hire for high potential, rather than maximum proficiency. Many, even most, managers resist this idea as counterintuitive. But I can’t emphasize enough how important it is in combatting the persistently high levels of employee disengagement that are reported year after year. Reevaluate every position, every time it needs to be filled. The world has changed since the last time you hired; make sure you are revising your job descriptions. If you aren’t evolving
and adapting, but simply regurgitating what has been advertised before, you’re shortchanging the opportunity for positive change. The common practice of inflating the requirements for a position and then hiring the most qualified—read overqualified—candidate means we onboard a new worker who will soon be bored and dissatisfied with his or her work. This leads to both poor productivity and rapid turnover. How can we expect to be the beneficiaries of change when a significant percentage of our workforce, including recent hires, are more engaged seeking new employment elsewhere than they are in working for us? Overstating the requirements for a job may simplify the work of HR by limiting the number of applicants, but it wastes growth potential. As “How Degree Inflation Weakens the Economy,” a January 8, 2018 article in Forbes observes, it’s bad for organizations, workers, and the larger economy. Instead, hire someone who will be challenged by the role and growing from the outset of his or her tenure with your firm. Always consider internal movement of employees; potential is most readily evaluated as you observe people at work over the course of time. There is no method of screening outside applicants that will give you the same insight, so don’t succumb to the temptation to always look for someone new and shiny to hire externally. Keep talented employees for as long as possible by providing them with new learning curves in-house. They’ll keep growing and so will your organization. Understand where your employees are on their S Curve of Learning and manage appropriately. Here are some considerations for the three primary phases: Launch point. If you’ve hired for potential rather than proficiency, an employee at the launch point level of the S Curve of Learning should experience considerable challenge. I want to clarify that I am not talking about entrylevel positions only; I am talking about the launch point of all types of positions, whether a recent entrant into the workforce or a new C-suite executive. Periodically, everyone should be in this stage again for ongoing growth. High challenge—with the amount to be learned and the perception of slow growth that accompany it—means that employees in the entry-level phase in their curve may require extra support to help manage frustration and avoid excessive discouragement. Metrics should measure growth in the role, as opposed to objective overall performance. Managers should be monitoring to determine if the employee is on the wrong curve. If the employee is not able to bring his or her strengths to work, then tweaking or outright change may be required. Though progress may be slow, it should be taking place. One of the best ways to show support at the launch point is to value inexperience. At the entry level of an S curve, employees aren’t blinded by the familiar and therefore are capable of asking questions like “Why do you do it like this?” Such questions lead to innovation and should be encouraged, which is why your team needs 15% of its people on the launch point of the curve. Sweet spot. After six months or so, depending on the complexity of a role, an employee should have developed a basic level of competence and be poised for an explosion of growth. Both individual workers and their teams/ organizations reap great benefits in this phase. It is a time of rapid learning, creativity, innovation, high engagement, and productivity. Work is fun and rewarding. Key to managing employees in the sweet spot is to extend the length of time they spend here. Thoughtfully provide stretch assignments to stimulate additional learning. Shake
up and refresh the work environment by changing team configurations and offering new training opportunities and interesting projects and problems to work on. Incentivize the achievement of milestones and reward employees for their performance. Because they know enough but not too much, they are now capable of both asking and answering the questions that are the raw materials of innovation—hence the need for 70% of your people to be in the sweet spot. Make sure employees know they are valued, and proactively have frequent discussions about their next step in the organization. Understand their ambitions for themselves and what they hope to achieve. According to Gallup research released in March 2019, more than 50% of employees who leave their organization report that conversations about their job satisfaction and future opportunities have been absent. High end. Though it may seem that your most valuable employees are those at the high end of the curve, alas, this is not necessarily the case. It’s hard to argue with the importance of those who have mastered their role. But this is a precarious position—the plateau can quickly become a precipice. Monitor enthusiasm levels as this phase approaches. Does the employee feel there is more to learn in the role, or is their perception and yours that they are exhausting their potential? Ideally, the manager will know what the employee hopes to do next, and the employee will know what the organization has to offer him or her. I reiterate: Have these conversations before performance begins to slide. Neither a good employee nor the team is advantaged if plans are not made before that. Because they are in a position to answer questions and act as a stabilizer for the team, you want 15% of your people at the top of the S curve. Use your high enders to provide training and mentoring to employees on the launch point. Being a mentor is a learning curve of its own and can help extend the lifespan of an employee in the current role until a jump to a new curve can be made. If there is nowhere for a talented employee to move in-house, it may be time to help broker an advantageous move for the individual to another employer. But be unconventional in your thinking. Remember, you want employees to jump to new curves where they will have a lot to learn. If you want to manage your people along the S curve, to plot where people are on the S curve, and then optimize those curves, go to scurvelocator.com to get started. Recognize that you can’t do the same thing and get different results. This old cliché has never been more applicable to how we manage than it is today. A changing business environment and world mean we must evolve our management techniques as well. It can’t be business as usual if we want to be prepared and competitive in the face of change, much less if we want to lead change. Don’t hire the same old way, don’t expect people to want to stay unless you help them stay, and don’t have a “we like you right where you are” attitude toward the organic, growing, learning machines that work for you. Develop your team leaders and managers to be talent spotters, watching for potential and imagining possibilities. Facilitate disruptive employees who are proactive about their own career development and personal growth and nudge talented workers who may be a little more hesitant about embracing change to do so. Green-light new ideas and innovation as much as possible, and beware the naysayers who would thwart change. Adopt the mindset of a cycling team, where everyone helps the fittest riders move into the lead.
In my experience, most organizations are not doing what they should to reward talent-developers. Who in your organization is willing to encourage the people who could replace them? Who promotes a lot of subordinates from their department and is willing to broker moves for new learning? These types of managers add value to the organization by promoting individual growth, and they build morale and momentum by helping valuable employees disrupt themselves internally, rather than losing them to competitors.
Think long term. I estimate the average shelf life of an employee on an S Curve of Learning to be three to four years. Then change is needed to stimulate additional growth. An organization full of stagnant employees will also be stagnant. We can’t afford not to change.
It’s a challenge to accept this fact and act accordingly. There are impacts to near-term productivity that occur when we move highly competent employees to new roles where they are not nearly as adept. Very early in my career, I worked for a public library in a modestly sized but rapidly growing community. Library use was skyrocketing, creating demand for more funding, more materials, more programs, more employees, and so on. The pace of change and growth were a problem—what the library director called “a classy problem.” It’s the kind of problem we want to have in our organizations. Moving employees to new S Curves of Learning precipitates short-term growing pains, but they are nothing to compare with the pain of ossification and degeneration we will experience if we don’t keep our people growing.
The only question is whether your valuable employees will change for you or away from you. Whether they will learn for you or elsewhere. Innovate internally or externally. You can harness the power of human learning and growth to propel your organization into the future. High-growth organizations need high-growth individuals. Organizations that want to grow make people growth their top priority. AQ
Whitney Johnson is the CEO of WLJ Advisors and one of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50. She is an expert on helping high-growth organizations develop high-growth individuals. An innovation and disruption theorist, she is the author of the bestselling Build an “A” Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve (Harvard Business Review, 2018), and Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work (Bibliomotion, 2015).
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