How rapidly are skills changing within your company (as a whole or in parts of the business)?
Are you experiencing a greater need for cross-boundary collaboration to solve business problems? How easily are you able to form cross-disciplinary teams?
PART TWO
The Core Principles
The man who grasps the principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
—Harrington Emerson
CHAPTER 3
Principle No. 1: You Get What You Give
I have learned that the best way to lift one’s self up is to help someone else.
—Booker T. Washington
IMAGINE A CUSTOMER SERVICE team meeting. You’ve convened to solve a problem that has a direct bearing on the customer experience. It’s not that you haven’t tried before, but the fixes haven’t been working and customer complaints have not decreased. You are happy to see Lucinda enter the room and be warmly greeted by the team. Lucinda is from HR and has worked tirelessly on the employee experience. You ask a team member to outline the problem and the fixes you’ve tried to date. Can Lucinda shed any light on the challenge? She asks for 24 hours and to reconvene the team the next day.
At the next meeting, Lucinda offers some suggestions based on her work. Her perspective points to a communication issue that can be addressed by having a five-minute team huddle at the beginning and end of each work day to address issues that are affecting customers. You call Lucinda’s manager to thank her for Lucinda’s time.
The first Inside Gig principle, “You get what you give,” addresses the importance of creating a give-and-get model around talent, specifically how sharing talent across departments or functions optimizes organizational resources. This principle suggests that a manager should give employees time to participate in projects outside their teams, either to use skills they have but aren’t utilizing in their day-to-day roles or to learn new skills. Thus, managers give away some of their employee resources. What do they get in return? They are able to leverage talent from elsewhere in the organization to contribute to pressing business challenges they are facing.
This talent could perform roughly the same work employees lent elsewhere would do, or it might be to provide skills the manager needs but doesn’t have in the current team. So talent from elsewhere in the company (supply) is acquired in exchange for employees lent elsewhere to learn and apply all of their skills. An employee might have a critical skill set not available from the current team members, a gap that the company would otherwise hire for. By leveraging talent from elsewhere in the organization, the firm saves money; it doesn’t have to bring in a contractor, freelancer or consultant to assist on the project or spend resources onboarding someone new. Managers and team members, when working on a new team, enjoy the benefit of using their skills in a new context, learning from others and gaining new skills and perspectives.
In our work with progressive organizations, we have discovered that managers will share talent whether or not incentives are in place to do so. Creative problem-solving results from sharing talent, and lessons learned will continue to have long-term benefit. One company in particular reported significant savings and more customer goodwill, in addition to a marked increase in employee engagement.
THE PRINCIPLE IN ACTION
Let’s take a peek at how “You get what you give” works in practice. Juan is a manager of a team of five engineers. His boss has asked him to develop a solution to a vexing problem for one of the company’s customers. Juan’s team already has a heavy workload trying to innovate one of the firm’s current products. The timelines are tight for the special project, and Juan isn’t sure his team has the capabilities to succeed. And as is typical, Juan has no budget to bring on a new team member or contractor to help on this—or any—project.
During this high-pressure time, one team member, Kris, asks for permission to participate in a project with another team in a different department where she can learn a new skill related to technology the company is implementing. Juan understands that this initiative is important to her and to the company, so they discuss how work can be shifted to allow Kris one day per week, or a few hours per day, to contribute to the other project. In effect, Juan is “giving his talent away.” He does this despite his team’s ongoing work assignments and the special project they are in the midst of.
In order to solve the problem his boss has assigned him, Juan realizes he needs to get someone with marketing expertise to help his team better understand the problem that the customer has articulated. He approaches Delana, the marketing manager, to explain the problem, and he asks to borrow talent to work on a solution. Delana says she understands the importance of the project and can see how her team member will gain important insights by working with an engineering team for a brief period. So while Juan has given talent away to another team, he gets talent in return. Thus, he has the right set of skills to solve the problem at hand and provides Kris with an opportunity to learn and grow in an area of rising importance to the company. Furthermore, one of the marketing team members gains perspective from the engineering team that will help her become more successful in the future—a win for everyone.
THE TALENT SCARCITY MINDSET
While “You get what you give” is nice in principle, it is the most challenging shift in prevalent attitudes to overcome when implementing the Inside Gig. This is because most managers operate from a mindset of talent scarcity, a mental model that suggests “These are my employees.” In other words, “Hands off. Don’t touch!”
This may not be a fair portrait of your management style, but companies do ask a great deal of managers. They’re given ambitious goals, tight time frames and even tighter budgets. No wonder they aren’t willing to part with “their” talent. In fact, they would often be happy to have the talent of other managers as well. The pressure that managers face to achieve their goals despite limited resources creates a mindset of talent scarcity. Budget cuts only exacerbate this tendency. Managers have an ongoing fear that if an employee is lost to a resignation, internal transfer or promotion, there is a significant likelihood the lost position will go unfilled or be eliminated permanently, leaving them to accomplish the same objectives with even fewer people.
The scarcity mindset induces managers to hoard talent. Once they find good employees, they don’t want to let them go. Sometimes managers make great hires with particularly valuable skills and don’t want to lose them because they have a disproportionate impact on the ability of their teams to meet their goals. In other cases, managers have invested in mentoring, coaching or training employees until their performance is key to team success. Either way, managers value those employees and don’t want to see them go elsewhere. While managers may rarely admit to hoarding talent, their actions often speak louder than their words.
Talent hoarders take various actions. They might hold employees down by giving them lower performance ratings than they deserve so that other managers aren’t tempted to poach them. More commonly, when employees ask about promotional opportunities, some managers are quick to say, “I think you’re doing a great job in your current role, but you aren’t quite ready yet for a promotion.” Or if the company has a talent review process in which it discusses potential candidates for special developmental opportunities or promotion, talent hoarders become very quiet about their hidden gems. If managers from other departments inquire about having certain
