In his almost always brilliant blog, Seth Godin explains this principle using "Staples" as an example. Godin begins:
"The people who started Staples didn't do it...
because they love office supplies.
They did it because they love organizing and running profitable retail businesses. They love hiring and leasing and telling a story that converts prospects into customers. Postits are sort of irrelevant.
You shouldn't become a middle school math teacher because you love math. You should do it because you love teaching.
I hope Staples has a senior buyer who actually does love office supplies. I hope that textbooks get written by people who love, really love, the topic they're writing about. It's easy, though, to fool ourselves into believing that going up the ladder means we get to do more of the thing we started out doing.
It's often the case that the people we surround ourselves with (and the tasks we do) have far more to do with job satisfaction and performance than the subject of our work."
Don't run to fast by that second to last line... "It's easy, though, to fool ourselves into believing that going up the ladder means we get to do more of the thing we started out doing." This is a strengths based explanation of the Peter Principle which simply put says, "People get promoted until they reach a position of incompetence.".
Just because you were great at your last job doesn't mean you will be even average at the one you get promoted into. Consider the world of professional sports. It is extremely rare for a world class athlete to go and become a world class coach in the sport they excelled at. In fact, name almost any world class coach and I will show you a fairly average performer. In many cases, a weak performer.
This is played out everyday in business when the great sales person gets promoted into management only to fall flat on his or her face. And the reverse is true. An average sales performer slips into a management role and ends up finding his or her area of excellence.
In his book, "Inside Apple", Adam Lashinsky explains how founder Steve Jobs recognized and applied this insight.
"From the moment Jobs returned, corporate culture changed. Employees would focus on whatever it was they did best and nothing else. Under Steve Jobs only one executive owned a P&L, and that was the chief financial officer. By creating a system where by only a financial executive would mind the budget, Jobs forced functional executives to focus on their strengths. Steve let people’s talent define their jobs, not jobs define their talent.”
Lashinsky quotes Jonathan Ive who is the now famous Apple Design Team Leader,
“I was terrible at running a design business, and I really wanted to just focus on the craft of design. I worked out what I was good at and what I was bad at. It became pretty clear what I wanted to do. I was really only interested in design. I was neither interested, or good at building a business.” Lashinsky continues, “Apples approach to career development is yet another way it ruins contrary to the norms at other other companies. The prevalent attitude for workers in the corporate world is to consider their growth trajectory - what’s the path up? Companies spend an inordinate amount of time growing their people for new responsibilities... But what if it turns out that all that thinking is wrong? What if companies encouraged employees to be satisfied where they are because they’re good at what they did? Instead of employees fretting because they were stuck in terminal jobs, what if they were excited in having found their perfect job? There are many professionals that find it liberating to work at what they are good at, receive competitive killer compensation, and not have to worry about supervising others or jockeying for higher rungs on the org chart.”
No comments:
Post a Comment