Employee Retention and The Power of ONE
Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users has a wonderful post on the importance of one maverick within a company.
Kathy contends, while CEO’s often provide lip-service to the need for folks to think outside the box, that during that previous economic downturn it was the so called mavericks and lone wolves that were let go. Kathy points out:
“…these were probably the folks the company most needed when it became painfully clear that business as usual was failing horribly.”
Kathy invokes Tom Peters when she states; “Team thinking leads to incremental improvements, and prevents revolutionary ideas.”
That tracks along with something I heard from Tom Peters when he spoke in Little Rock many years ago: “Incrementalism is death.” Tom was basically saying that improving something in increments is not the same as having a complete breakthrough. Incrementalism is the fabled death by a thousand cuts, as many of our public education systems are discovering.
By some coincidence, just minutes before reading Kathy’s meaty post on the importance of mavericks and how teams are created to support and encourage implementation of “purple cow” ideas, I was just reading the Feb 2 BusinessWeek Online career article, It’s Time to Plug Talent Leaks, on the recent explosion in employee turnover. Guess who’s leaving in droves? The maverick’s. The key intellectual lifeblood of the company.
I’m always amazed at how laissez faire most managers seem to be at losing their best talent. A local florist decided to “lay off” my wife during the summer, thinking that she would eagerly return in the fall, just in time for the five-month floral holiday season. The flower shop had recently hired two lower paid trainees, whom they kept on during the summer. The owner and the head designer were shocked when my wife rebuffed their offers of a position with a $.25 per hour raise. My wife has decided never to work with that flower shop again.
Fortunately, my own supervisors and chain of management “get it.” What keeps me going to work isn’t financial, it serendipity. I’m allowed, and even encouraged, to keep breeding “purple cows.” One of my latest is the addition of nearly two dozen new RSS feeds to the Arkansas SBDC website. I’m the only one who thinks they’re a great innovation. Well, me and 200 people who have subscribed in the past few weeks. I suspect the staff will convert when they see the bottom line results.
Bottom line: read these two very good articles. I would read Kathy’s first and then read the BusinessWeek Online article with Kathy’s thoughts fresh in your mind. Comments and opinions are always welcome.
