The third, and most devastating, flaw in the system is its assumption that varied experiences make the employee more attractive. This assumption focuses the employee on hunting for marketable skills and experiences. With these skills and experiences proudly displayed on his résumé, the employee then meekly waits — or aggressively lobbies — to be chosen for the next rung. In this scenario the employee is the supplicant. The manager is the gatekeeper, pushing back the hordes and selecting the attractive ones — the ones with the most skills and the best experiences — for advancement. Great managers know that this whole scenario is awry. In their view the hunt for marketable skills and experiences should not be the force driving the employee’s career. They envision a different driving force. They have a new career in mind.
One Rung Doesn’t Necessarily Lead to Another
“Why do we keep promoting people to their level of incompetence?”
Why do we continue to assume that a person’s success on one rung will have any relevance to his or her likelihood to succeed on the rung above? More than likely we have been confused about what is trainable and what is not. We have made no distinction among skills, knowledge, and talents, and this clumsy language has made it easier for us to say, “If John has shown himself to be a good salesperson, then I am sure we can just train him to be a good manager.” Or, “Since Jan has proven herself a solid manager, I am confident that we can teach her the strategic thinking and the vision needed to be a great leader.”
As we noted earlier, we now know that excellence in every role requires distinct talents, and that these talents, unlike skills and knowledge, are extraordinarily difficult to train. Armed with this knowledge, we can dismantle some long-standing career paths. We know that the talents needed to sell and the talents needed to manage, while not mutually exclusive, are different — if you excel at one, it does not tell us very much about whether you will excel at the other. We can say the same about the talents needed to manage, as compared to the talents needed to lead. In fact, we can say the same about all roles — even roles that, at first glance, seem to be very similar.
Consider, for example, the conventional information technology career path. If you work in information technology, you will tend to begin your career as a computer programmer — writing code — and then progress to a systems analyst role — designing integrated systems. Programmer to systems analyst: these are the first two rungs on the conventional IT career path. And given their superficial similarity, this would seem to be a sensible way to structure things.
In fact, these two roles are quite different. Great programmers possess a thinking talent called problem solving. The best programmers want to be given all of the pieces to the puzzle. Once they are armed with all the pieces, their particular talent is the ability to rearrange the pieces so that they all fit together perfectly. In their personal life this talent often draws them toward crossword puzzles or brainteasers, like the ones in chapter 3. In their professional life this talent enables them to write thousands of lines of computer code and arrange them in the most effective and efficient order.
While this talent is nice for a systems analyst to possess, it is not particularly relevant to success on the job. By contrast, their most important thinking talent is called formulation. They revel in situations where they are faced with incomplete data. Lacking some of the most important facts, they can then do what they love: play out alternative scenarios, hypothesize, test out their theories. On the job this talent enables them to construct highly intricate systems and then test these systems for bugs. If one system has a glitch, they then play out different scenarios, narrowing the range of possible solutions until they have identified exactly what needs to be changed and where and why.
The talents of problem solving and formulation are not mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible for an employee to possess both. But if you are blessed with problem solving, it does not necessarily mean that you are similarly blessed with formulation. To promote programmers to systems analysts simply because the conventional career path dictates that you should is to take a blind roll of the dice. You are just as likely to wind up with a team of misfits as you are a team of talented systems analysts.
Before you promote someone, look closely at the talents needed to excel in the role — the striving, thinking, and relating talents necessary for success. After scrutinizing the person and the role, you may still choose promotion. And since each person is highly complex, you may still end up promoting your employee into a position where he struggles — no manager finds the perfect fit every time. But at least you will have taken the time to weigh the fit between the demands of the role and the talent of the person.
If Marc’s managers had bothered to think this through, perhaps they would have seen the poor fit between the Washington job, which required a reporter who loved to spice things up, and Marc, whose dominant talent was an ability to calm things down.
Create Heroes in Every Role
“How to solve the shortage of respect.”
Even if you thoughtfully examine the match between the employee and the role, you’ve still got a problem. No matter what conclusion you come to, the employee will invariably want to move up. The employee will want to be promoted. Every signal sent by the company tells him that higher is better. A larger salary, a more impressive title, more generous stock options, a roomier office with a couch and a coffee table, all this and more awaits the lucky employee on the next rung on the ladder. No wonder he wants to move up.
These blazing neon lights are a damaging distraction. They not only tempt employees to jump from excellence on one rung to mediocrity on another, they also create a bottleneck — legions of employees all trying to scramble onto increasingly fewer rungs. Conflict and disappointment are inevitable. There has to be a way to redirect employees’ driving ambition and to channel it more productively.
There is. Create heroes in every role. Make every role, performed at excellence, a respected profession. Many employees will still choose to climb the conventional ladder, and for those with the talent to manage others or to lead, this will be the right choice. However, guided by meaty incentives, many other employees will decide to redirect their energies toward growth within their current role. Great managers envision a company where there are multiple routes toward respect and prestige, a company where the best secretaries carry a vice president title, where the best housekeepers earn twice as much as their supervisors, and where anyone performing at excellence is recognized publicly.
If this sounds fanciful, here are a few techniques that great managers are already using to build such a company.
LEVELS OF ACHIEVEMENT
How long does it take to become excellent in a chosen field? In a study called the Development of Talent Project, Dr. Benjamin Bloom of Northwestern University scrutinized the careers of world-class sculptors, pianists, chess masters, tennis players, swimmers, mathematicians, and neurologists. He discovered that across these diverse professions, it takes between ten and eighteen years before world-class competency is reached. If you show some interest, he becomes even more specific. He will tell you, for example, that it takes 17.14 years from your first piano lessons to your victory at the Van Cliburn, Tchaikovsky, or Chopin piano competitions. While figures like this can feel a little too precise, Dr. Bloom’s general point is nevertheless well-taken: The exact length of time will vary by person and profession, but whether you are a teacher, a nurse, a salesperson, an engineer, a pilot, a waiter, or a neurosurgeon, it still takes years to become the world’s best. As Hippocrates, the philosopher and founder of modern medicine, observed: “Life is short. The art is long.”
If a company wants some employees in every role to approach world-class performance, it must find ways to encourage them to stay focused on developing their expertise. Defining graded levels of achievement, for every role, is an extremely effective way of doing just that.
Lawyers fi
gured this out a long time ago. The young lawyer, fresh out of law school, selects his field of expertise — corporate law, criminal law, tax law — is hired into that field by a law firm and joins as a junior associate. Over the next four or five years he will be promoted to associate and then to senior associate. As a senior associate he will still be practicing law in his chosen field. He will simply be more accomplished. Over the next five years he will, hopefully, be promoted to some kind of equity position within the firm, where he will start as a junior partner, move up to partner, and then be promoted to senior partner. As a senior partner in the firm he will garner a tremendous amount of respect and earn a very generous salary, yet he will still be practicing the same kind of law as he was back in his junior associate days. The work will be more complex, and he will have his pick of the most interesting and most lucrative work. The only difference is that, by now, he will be one of the world experts in his chosen field.
Law firms are rarely considered cutting-edge organizations, but with their use of graded levels of achievement, they are far ahead of most companies. Although all lawyers are free to choose more conventional career paths — moving into the management of other lawyers, perhaps, or becoming a legal generalist for a corporation — these levels of achievement provide lawyers with an alternative, but equally respected, path to growth. It is a path that offers them both the opportunity to become experts and a simple way to track their progress.
Lawyers aren’t the only ones to realize the power of these levels of achievement. In medicine the levels build from intern all the way to senior consultant over a period of, at minimum, fifteen years. In professional sports you can measure your expertise as you progress from rookie to second string to starter to all-star. In sales the entry grade might be the Million Dollar Roundtable, an important first step for the fledgling salesperson, but the pinnacle is the Presidents Club, where the criteria for membership are ten million dollars in sales and perfect client-service scores. And in music you track your progress not by whether you are promoted from the violin to the conductor, but rather by your journey from the most junior third-chair violinist to concertmaster or first-chair associate.
In fact, anywhere individual excellence is revered, you will find these graded levels of achievement. Conversely, if you cannot find them, it means that, either overtly or accidentally, the company does not value excellence in that role. And by this standard, companies don’t value excellence in most roles.
As we stated earlier, great managers rebel against this. They believe instead that every role performed at a level of excellence is valuable, that there is virtuosity in every role. So no matter how menial the role appears, they work hard to define meaningful criteria that can help a dedicated employee track his or her progress toward world-class performance.
AT&T provides help desk solutions to hundreds of companies. AT&T managers decided to organize each help desk according to the complexity of the client’s question. Level one deals with simple queries like “How can I turn on my computer?” Level two addresses slightly more difficult issues. Level three handles the panicked “What do I do? I think I’ve just crashed our entire intranet!” inquiries. These three distinct levels are not only the most efficient way to structure the operation — each level has a different pace, a different call volume, and so on — but they also provide a genuine career path for employees who want to grow into superior technicians rather than into supervisors.
At Phillips Petroleum, managers provide employees with a well-respected engineer career track. If the employee can show proficiency in the required procedures, then she can gradually progress through the different levels of this career path, all the way up to a director-level position, where she will be recognized as one of the most accomplished engineers in the firm.
In the mid-eighties Gallup worked with Allied Breweries to measure the performance of bartenders in pubs. One of the signs of greatness in bartending is an ability to remember not only the names of regulars, but also the drinks that go with them. We devised a program called the One Hundred Club. Any bartender who could prove that he knew one hundred names, and the drinks to match, would be awarded a button and a cash prize. The levels progressed up to the world-class Five Hundred Club, which brought better prizes and bigger bonuses.
When we started the One Hundred Club with Allied Breweries, few managers believed that any bartender would ever reach the Five Hundred Club level. But by 1990 Janice K., a bartender in a pub in the north of England, became the first member of the Three Thousand Club. She knew the names of three thousand regulars and their favorite beverage. From this angle Janice was the best bartender in the world.
It just goes to show: In most cases, no matter what it is, if you measure it and reward it, people will try to excel at it.
These are just a few examples of managers guiding employees with a series of levels that lead to world-class performance. Levels of achievement like these are invaluable for a manager. When confronted by that thorny question “Where do I go from here?” the manager is now able to offer a specific and respected alternative to the blind, breathless climb up.
BROADBANDING
These levels of achievement will certainly help redirect an employee’s focus toward becoming world-class. However, the manager’s efforts at career redirection will be forever hindered if all of the pay signals are telling the employee to look upward.
Although each of us is motivated by money in different ways, the fact of the matter is that few of us are repelled by money. All of us may not hunger for it, but only a tiny minority of us find money positively distasteful. Therefore the simple truth is that it will be much easier for managers to redirect employees toward alternative career paths if some of those paths involve a raise in pay.
The ideal pay plan would allow the company to compensate the person in direct proportion to the amount of expertise she showed in her current role — the more she excelled, the more she would earn. In practice this ideal plan is complicated by the fact that some roles are simply more valuable than others. On balance, a pilot is probably more valuable than a flight attendant. A principal is more valuable than a teacher. A restaurant manager is more valuable than a waiter. Any pay plan must take these value differentials into account.
But before we design our plan, there is one final twist to consider. Some roles performed excellently are more valuable than roles higher up the ladder performed averagely. An excellent flight attendant is probably more valuable than an average pilot. A brilliant teacher is more valuable than a novice principal. A superstar waiter is more valuable than a mediocre restaurant manager. The perfect pay plan must be sophisticated enough to reflect this overlap.
Simple and effective, it is called broadbanding. For each role, you define pay in broad bands, or ranges, with the top end of the lower-level role overlapping the bottom end of the role above.
For example, at Merrill Lynch the top end of the pay band for financial consultants is over $500,000 a year. In contrast, the bottom end of the branch manager pay band is $150,000 a year. This means that if you are a successful financial consultant and you want to move into a manager role, you might have to endure a 70 percent pay cut. The upside for the novice manager is that the top end of the manager pay band runs into the millions. So while you may have to stomach the 70 percent pay cut initially, if you prove yourself to be excellent at managing others, then in the end you will reap significant financial rewards.
The Walt Disney Company takes a similar approach. As a brilliant server in one of their fine-dining restaurants, you might earn over $60,000 a year. If you choose to climb onto the manager career path, your starting salary will be $25,000 a year. Again, once you start to excel as a manager and are promoted up and through the various supervisory levels, your total compensation package can take you far above $60,000. But, initially, your pay packet will be sliced in half.
Even traditional, hierarchical organizati
ons are starting to experiment with broadbanding. Martin P., the chief of police for a state capital in the Midwest, describes the conventional career path from police officer to police sergeant — the front-line supervisor role — to police captain (he removed the lieutenant role a couple of years ago) to assistant chief to police chief. “Time was,” he says, “when the only way to earn more money was to move into management — to go from officer to sergeant. Now all my pay grades overlap. If you are a superb police officer, you don’t need to get promoted to sergeant to earn more. The fact is, my very best police officers earn more than their captain does.”
On the surface, broadbanding appears disorienting. Front-line employees earning two or three times what their managers earn? This is a world turned upside-down. On closer scrutiny, however, broadbanding makes sense.
First, with its broad bands of pay, it provides a way to value world-class performance in a particular role very differently from average performance in that role. As with levels of achievement, wherever individual excellence is revered, we see broadbanding. In professional sports, no matter what the position, the superstars at that position earn multiples greater than the average players in the same position. This also applies to actors, musicians, artists, singers, and writers. In all of these professions the broad range in pay encourages the person to refine his talents and so become world-class. Great managers advise us to apply the same logic to all roles.
Second, with its overlapping bands of pay, broadbanding slows the blind, breathless climb up. It forces the employee to open her eyes and ask, “Why am I angling for this next promotion? Why am I pushing so hard to climb onto the next rung?” Without broadbanding, the answer to these questions is clouded by her knowledge that the next rung brings more money. With broadbanding the employee can answer only by examining the content of the role and weighing the match between its responsibilities and her strengths. Her answers will be more honest and more accurate. She will make her career choices based at least as much upon fit as upon finances.
First, Break All the Rules Page 19
