The analogy of the slow-boiled frog is the one that comes to mind. Businesses have always paid top salaries and always reaped only 40% of the potential (according to Gallup and many others). It’s expected. Why leap out of the pan when it’s always been like this and always will?
If you bought a car that only worked 40% of the time, you’d create, wouldn’t you? Or if only 40% of the restaurants you went into and paid for a meal actually bothered to serve you any food, you’d change your eating habits, am I right?
So why is it that time after time, organizations hire extremely talented, highly skilled staff only to watch while those same people – who only want to make a difference and give all they’ve got – slowly suffocate once they’re in their new team?
It’s because we don’t expect any better.
Well let’s wake up and kick some buckets. Make a noise. Take to the streets and demand some action. Aux barricades!
It’s simply not acceptable – and not necessary – to accept the status quo. Almost everyone on this planet wants to contribute all they can. True laziness is rare. But businesses won’t let them, they’d rather make excuses for their employees’ poor performance. The technology’s no good. The processes are broken. The bonus scheme is wrong.
No, it’s none of those. People are under-performing in every enterprise in the world and it’s because management doesn’t know how to build teams that work.
Teams that work are teams where everyone is doing work that suits their natural ability and where everyone can read each other’s natural ability as easily as a menu. Teams that work are abuzz with energy and innovation. Work quality is as high as the morale. Everyone wants to join these teams, they have no problem recruiting.
In 50 years’ time it will be a criminal offence to hire someone without understanding their natural ability and placing them in a team where that ability can be utilised. It will be seen as a crime, a contravention of their human rights. 2018-style office environments will be likened to concentration camps, wilfully forcing people to do work that aligns only with their skills not their natural ability. They’ll say we lived in a barbarian age.
For now, there is no reason to fear a human rights law suit for hiring someone and ignoring their natural ability. But hiring good people and allowing them to contribute less than 40% of their potential runs contrary to everything CEOs say they value. It’s a crime against professional management.
It’s time to get outraged.
To get started with teams that work, take a team of fingers to the right and press one of them on Contact Us.
