Challenge is keeping your good performers

Challenge is keeping your good performers

Challenge is keeping your good performers

Good performers are addicted to good work

Good work is like LSD to good performers

Creating this LSD every day is important

Being able to contribute, having authority to make decisions, opportunity to learn awesome new things, experimenting, taking risks, dealing with complexity, handling changes, fitting exceptions with rules, facing challenges and achieving things with limited resources by working with constraints is very addictive to young minds.

I have repeatedly seen people choose challenging work over pay benefits

People stay back with organization longer for interesting work

Moment the joy in the work is gone, LSD has exhausted, people leave

Money no doubt has magnetic power, but it depends.

It is easy to lose good performers if there is nothing interesting left in their plate

People do choose significantly higher pay but inside they still keep hunger for good work

Also people have moved away from good pay if there is not so good work when money is not that important then

Once you get better pay benefits, it is difficult to come back for lesser

“Difficult” has its limitations.

Great companies focus on “guaranteed performance”.

Some great companies recruit overly capable person than challenge he has to deal, for a safety

They will put layers of guards through heavy process and audits.

This reduces risk, and generates predictable, measurable, controllable… performance

Heavy process is defense against error and human factor

This is good design for repeatable performance of same or similar things

But the heavy system does not goes well with youth who is inspired to achieve

Things are simple, why make so cumbersome with process and system.

Working on one of its kind of achievements of the time is different story.

It is not a repeatable thing yet.

Some great companies have managed to setup correct work culture where challenges drive people. Google, LinkedIN, Facebook… I believe these are the companies have drastically different work ecosystem than traditional.

How do people achieve things as being just humans is more important.

It is important than spending on a heavy defense budget for trying to make things independent of human factor.

I prefer to choose people. Depends on what kind of problem to solve. Sometimes other.

Still in both cases good people are needed. Framework to support people is needed in both. Investing in people works better.

It is difficult to keeping good performers once LSD is gone

Keeping good performers requires solving this interesting problem called “making things interesting”. And this is LSD.