Designed for Life

There exists a virtual law of human welfare and wealth creation:

Nothing of ultimate competitive advantage can be accomplished in any job, in any function, at any level, except through employees who are both gifted in performing the tasks involved and highly motivated to achieve the desired results.

Can there be any question that effective management is such productive use of employee strengths? The real issue is how do we make sure that our employees are well matched with their work. The secret to achieving good job match and employee satisfaction and their fruits of greater competitive advantage, higher levels of productivity, profitability, and cutting-edge exploitation of emerging technology is contained in how employers understand the nature of their employees.

There are essentially two ways to define the nature of your employees, each leading to radically different results! One road, and it is the one most traveled, is to position employees in a 'becoming culture'. In that scenario, management and the managers see the employees as a work-in-progress on the road to becoming whatever they need them to become. This understanding of the nature of human beings has a formidable precedent in how we are raised in our families and taught in our schools.

THE BECOMING CULTURE

Families play a key part by encouraging their youngsters to become whatever the parents value, be it grades or leadership, sports or work habits; appearance or relationships; fitting in or being unique; the emphasis being one or another form of 'getting ahead'. Much of this lqbbying is attempted in the context of the educational experience where the faculty seeks to help the youngster become a good speller, writer, reader, historian, scientist, ad- infinitum. Without regard to what, how and why the student is motivated to learn, teacher after teacher seeks to enable the student to become whatever the course and standards require. For twelve to sixteen years this scenario continues,with the focus primarily and constantly on 'becoming'.

Counseling is often utilized, not to better understand the student, but more to diagnose perceived' shortcomings' in navigating the 'becoming' process. Education is seen by all its participants as a process of transforming students into 'educated people' who possess the knowledge, attitude and abilities favored and deemed critical by those in authority.

Whether students are so endowed as to prosper a lot, a little, or hardly at all by means of their formal education, they nevertheless do not learn who they are, what their purpose is, what they have to give an employer, and what they want out of their career. In that state of mind and limited selfknowledge, they enter the world of work. .. confused, uncertain, but hopeful.

Upon entering the world of work, students trust that someone knows better than they and will make good use of them. However, employers are only interested in getting the work done, regardless of how the individual employees are put together. So, to close the gap between employee capability and work requirements, employers universally embrace the ubiquitous but baseless doctrine that, regardless of their unique make-up, employees can be trained, developed, motivated, changed, incentivized, rewarded - all to become what the employer needs them to become. It is a popular but mythical approach.

For example, when companies seek to hire employees, they gather information on what knowledge, skills and abilities the candidates appear to possess based on their education, experience and what reference checks reveal. They may use interviews and tests of some sort, especially to detect flaws or weaknesses in the personality of the candidates. No attempt is made to assemble all the fragments of data into a whole functioning person. Nothing is gathered, at least ordinarily, about what motivates the person. It would be accurate, I believe, to say that the candidate (and the information about him or her) is seen by the employer as what it has to work with to be fashioned, hopefully, into a top performing employee.

Another manifestation of the becoming culture regularly recurring in the work lives of many, or likely most employees is called Performance Appraisal. Here, supervisors evaluate the performance of subordinates. Almost as irresistible as speeding up when you're running downhill, is the emphasis on improving voids or weaknesses which emerge from the appraisal, so the employee can 'become' more complete or well-rounded, or better able to tackle a greater variety of future assignments.

A third expression of the 'becoming culture' is found in the epidemic number of behavioral change programs attempted in the last decades. Here, employers sought to realign and reshape employees so they would 'become' people with new values, new ways of thinking, and new abilities which conformed with new organizational objectives and strategies.

During the same time period, popular methods of assessing employees, like assessment centers, 3600, and formal psychological testing, moved to serve a development strategy: Again, the intention was to surface qualities needing attention, which then were used as the basis for the employee 'becoming' what was missing or inadequate.

In a related development, large company after large company came up with lists of core competencies deemed critical to becoming an effective executive. These core competencies became a template placed over hipotentials to see what was missing, which then became future 'becoming' goals.

Other common manifestations of the 'becoming culture' are training programs, where employees are trained to 'become' astute planners, risky decision-makers, leaders, negotiators, goal setters --- or trained to assimilate success principles --- all done without any reference to or concern about the current make-up of the employee or his/her ability to profit from the training. Similar, but more elaborate expressions of the 'becoming culture' are found in so-called executive development programs. Here an attempt is made to provide assignments that have been missing or experienced as difficult for the candidate in the past.

Management makes critical decisions about hiring, promoting and transferring people on the basis of past behavior without understanding why they were so good at their current job. The resulting decisions are effectively a crap shoot. At least 50% of the time, people are promoted into key positions who are not good at, or motivated --- to make risky decisions; or to set new and different goals; or to monitor activities which impact on bottom-line issues.

Brilliant articulate, analytical, relational influencers who can't abide the idea of confronting others, are put in command positions. Outstanding, knowledgeable specialists in areas critical to organizational success, who have built a reputation based on lengthy investigations and insightful recommendations, are promoted to operating jobs requiring quick, decisive response to a wide variety of unfamiliar issues and limited facts. Developers promoted to managing positions so they can maintain what they have developed. Scores of people hired or promoted into functions for which they have no heart. Supervisors, effective when they can personally monitor and interact with subordinates engaged in a familiar activity, promoted to manage multi-projects, multi-specialties, muItifunctions, or multi-plants. Outstanding salesmen, scientists, engineers, accountants, buyers, promoted because they were so good at what they did --- and frequently promoted to a managing job which they and their management ultimately and deeply regretted.

The Becoming Culture is alive and well in spite of the fact that there is no reason, no evidence, no research to believe people can be changed at the level of spots and stripes. Its so easy to make believe that people will do and become what we want, just like when we were children. But its not true. In other words it's a lie and a lie that destroys people.

DO PEOPLE BECOME SOMEBODY OR ARE THEY ALREADY SOMEBODY?