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.
