Some companies take broadbanding to its limits. At Stryker, a $2 billion medical device manufacturer, the pay band for salespeople ranges from $40,000 for a novice to $250,000 for the best of the best. If you decide to move into the manager ranks, you have to take a 60 percent pay cut — the starting salary for a new regional manager is just under $100,000 a year. What is intriguing is that the top end of the manager band — about $200,000 in total compensation — is lower than the top end for salespeople. The best regional manager in the company can never earn as much as the best salesperson. Why would Stryker choose to do this? All manner of reasons: They value their best salespeople very highly; they want to entice their best salespeople to stay close to the customer for as long as possible; they want each employee to think long and hard before climbing onto the manager ladder. Whatever their reasons, their pay plan has proven very successful. Powered by the best salespeople and the best managers in the business, Stryker has achieved 20 percent annual growth in sales and profit for the last twenty years.
Broadbanding is a vital weapon in the arsenal of great managers. It gives teeth to their commitment that every role, performed at excellence, will be valued. And if the Stryker example appears a little extreme, remember this: During Gallup’s interviews with great managers, we found a consistent willingness to hire employees who, the managers knew, might soon earn significantly more than they did.
CREATIVE ACTS OF REVOLT
Great managers have to survive in a hostile world. Most companies do not value excellence in every role. They do not provide alternative career paths for their employees. And they do not give their managers the leeway to design graded levels of achievement or broadbanded pay plans. If you find yourself living in this restricted world, what can you do?
Brian J. can tell you. His advice: Revolt, quietly and creatively. Brian manages artists in a large media company. His company has seen fit to construct an intricate hierarchy comprising over thirty distinct pay grades, each with clearly defined benefits and perks. One of the rules within this elaborate structure is that you cannot be promoted to a director-level position unless you manage other people. Another rule is that only directors are granted such perks as stock options and first-class seating when traveling.
“I was caught between a rock and a hard place,” Brian says. “I wanted to show some of my best graphic artists how valuable they were, but rules are rules. I couldn’t reward them with a director-level promotion without promoting them to a manager role. But I didn’t want to promote them to a manager role because that’s not their talent. So instead I asked each of them to become mentors for junior graphic artists — they wouldn’t manage these people, they would just be expected to pass on their expertise. I then went to Human Resources and said that, as far as I was concerned, a mentor was the equivalent of a manager and so I had a right to promote them to a director-level position. HR took some convincing, but I got my way in the end.”
Garth P. tells a similar story. Garth runs an applied technology division in an aeronautics company. In his production facilities he employs hundreds of technical specialists.
“The best engineer I had was a guy called Michael B. We’ve got a pretty rigid structure here, so whenever we wanted to reward Michael we had to promote him up the ladder. After ten years of promotions, he found himself doing less and less of the engineering he loved and more and more people management, which, to be frank, he struggled at. So together we decided to create a new position: master engineer. Michael would be a roving genius, getting involved in only the most complex projects. He would also be the main resource, and the last word, on all engineering problems any of the other teams faced. And he would be freed from any manager responsibilities at all. I decreed that this was a vice president-level job, got the okay from personnel, and then promoted him. I can’t think of when I’ve made an employee happier.”
Laura T., an executive in a Texas-based petrochemical company, faced a similar situation but solved it in a slightly different way:
“I have lots of people who want to grow and who deserve to be recognized, but since we aren’t growing right now, new positions aren’t opening up. So I take my top performers and assign them to special projects. These projects are ad hoc. They have a specific objective, with a specific timeline. Once the objective is met, the project team disbands. Special projects like this work really well for me, because they give my talented employees a chance to grow, and at the same time they give me a chance to recognize each of them for excellent work — I got permission from HR to reward each successful team member with a gift certificate for a weekend in Dallas and seats to a Cowboys game. Recognition like that might not sound like a big deal to you, but for a traditional petrochemical company like ours, it’s a whole new way of thinking.”
Each of these managers, in his or her own way, is providing alternative routes toward growth and prestige. Each of them, maneuvering within a restricted world, is devising innovative ways to reward employees for excellent performance, without necessarily promoting these employees out of their current role. Each of them is trying to create heroes in every role.
Three Stories and a New Career
“What is the force driving the New Career?”
Today’s unpredictable business climate has undoubtedly caused a shift in the employer-employee relationship. Employers, acutely aware of the need to be nimble, can no longer guarantee lifelong employment. All they are willing to offer the employee is lifelong employability: “We will provide you with marketable experiences that will make you attractive to other employers, should we ever need to cut back our labor costs.” This is certainly a shift from twenty years ago, but great managers contend it is merely a superficial shift. Very little of substance has changed. Conventional wisdom’s core assumption about careers remains the same, and it remains wrong.
It assumes that the energy for a career should emanate from the employee’s desire to better herself, to fill herself out with attractive experiences. She should not linger long in one particular role. Instead she should skip from one role to the next every couple of years so that, over time, her résumé becomes impressively varied. Under the terms of lifelong employment, the employees with the most impressive résumés were the most likely to be selected for the next rung on the internal ladder. Under the terms of lifelong employability, the employees with these attractive résumés are the most likely to be snapped up, externally, by a new company. The location may be different, but the assumption is the same: Varied experiences make an employee attractive. Therefore, from conventional wisdom’s perspective, a career can be best understood as the employee’s focused search for interesting and marketable experiences.
Great managers disagree. Acquiring varied experiences is important but peripheral to a healthy career. It is an accessory, not the driving force. The true source of energy for a healthy career, they say, is generated elsewhere. Listen to enough of their stories and you can start to figure out where. They tell stories of people who took a step, looked in the mirror, and discovered something about themselves. In some cases the person looked in the mirror spontaneously. In others he had to be coaxed to turn his head before seeing himself clearly. There are stories where the discovery was a confirmation to stay the course. There are stories, like the three that follow, where the discovery prompts a change in direction. But whatever the details of the story, it is always the same story.
Their recurring story reveals that self-discovery is the driving, guiding force for a healthy career. The energy for a healthy career is generated from discovering the talents that are already there, not from filling oneself up with marketable experiences. Self-discovery is a long process, never fully achieved. Nonetheless, great managers know that it is this search for a full understanding of your talents and nontalents that serves as the source of energy powering your career.
#1: Dr. No’s Story
George H. was the vice president of developme
nt in a large real estate development company. He had risen through the ranks as a project manager, and now, midway through his career, he found himself second in command to a creative, articulate risk taker called Howard P. George was perfectly suited to his role. While Howard dreamed up wildly elaborate and expensive schemes, George identified all of the impediments, all of the pitfalls, that could derail Howard’s plan. George called this his “parade of horribles.” Everyone called George “Dr. No.”
Dr. No was respected and admired. He was honorable and courageous and detail oriented. And the whole company knew that every plan was strengthened by exposure to Dr. No’s refining fire. He was a most valuable executive.
Then Howard left, and Dr. No was promoted, and quite soon he lost the admiration of his colleagues. You see, Dr. No’s particular talent was to make small things out of big things. This talent had enabled him to take Howard’s crazy ideas and break them down into manageable projects, each of which could then be analyzed for costs, benefits, and risks. But this talent was rendered useless without raw material, without a dreamer to dream up the humongous, outrageous idea. And the dreamer had moved on.
There were others within the company who would now present Dr. No with an Everest of an idea, but he would immediately slice it up into a series of middling hillocks, small projects, low risk. And, thus dismantled, the idea lost its impact. It was no longer worth the effort. By the middle of his first year Dr. No had red-lighted every single project.
Dr. No knew what he was doing, but, strangely, he couldn’t prevent it. When he imagined the sheer size of the risk, so many variables, all out of his control, he would feel his throat begin to constrict. As he played out the project in greater and greater detail, his throat would close so tightly that he could barely breathe. It happened every time and a little worse each time. At work he now felt physical pain and the attack of panic.
Panicky feelings like this can sometimes bring clarity. As the year progressed, Dr. No came to understand what everyone else already knew: He would never get anything going. The talents that had served him so well as the dreamer’s partner would forever strangle the organization. Left to his own devices, he would always kill big ideas.
So Dr. No removed himself from the position. He set himself up as an independent contractor, where he would be paid to conceive, design, and execute lots and lots of small ideas. He can breathe more easily now.
#2: A Touching Story
Mary G. has fingers that are as strong and as firm as they appear, and powerful forearms. Standing up straight above you, she has shoulders that seem to stretch from wall to wall, and as she reaches back to twist her hair out of the way, you notice that her elbows are surprisingly rounded. Later, when she bears down on them, they feel as though they must be six inches across. It is a good feeling.
Mary is a massage therapist, and she was born to touch. “Other people’s bodies fascinate me. When someone is lying in front of me, it’s like their skin is transparent. I can see the bands of muscle stretched up and around their shoulder blades, across their back, and down their legs. I can see where the muscles are pulled taut and where they are all scrunched up in an angry little knot. I can almost see the nerves, too. I sense that with one person they might like long strokes that pump the muscle and get the blood going. With someone else they might prefer shiatsu. That’s a technique where you use pressure points on the body to stimulate the nerve endings and open up the whole nervous system. Everyone is different.”
Three years after finishing her training, Mary found herself the most sought-after therapist at the exclusive Arizona health spa where she worked. The word had spread. If you want a massage that pummels and loosens and opens you up, but with no pain, you must schedule with Mary.
Soon her employer decided to promote her to manage all of the massage therapists at the resort. This meant more money, more security, better benefits, and fewer appointments of her own. And she was miserable.
“I missed the intimacy. As a massage therapist, I stand in a room with another person for an hour or more, in silence, and look through their skin and see their pain and ease their pain. I come to love each one, just a little bit. I love the immediate gratification of releasing someone’s stress. They look different afterward, immediately afterward. Their skin looks brighter, their eyes are clearer. And I know it will last. It is a great feeling for me and, I hope, for them.”
Mary wanted to get that feeling back. So she quit her job, moved to Los Angeles, and set up her own practice. Her appointment book is filled up, and once again Mary gets to touch people every single day.
#3: Mandy’s Designer Story
We met Mandy back in chapter 5. She is the manager of a department that designs logos and other images to drive a product’s brand identity. She tells this story:
“I inherited this woman, a design consultant, called Janet. A design consultant has two responsibilities — first, to interact with the clients and find out their needs; and second, to manage the designers so that they deliver what the client wanted. Janet was very ambitious, very talented, but she wasn’t performing either of these roles very well. She wasn’t failing, but she wasn’t a star, either. And she was the kind of person who needed to be a star.
“She realized pretty quickly that I thought she was mediocre, so her attitude took a dive. She wouldn’t tell me directly, but I got word from her best friend in the office that she wanted me to fire her so that she could collect unemployment. It pissed me off that she wouldn’t come clean with me, but I was damned if I was going to let her manipulate me into firing her. I wanted her to be honest with herself about her feelings and her intentions. I wanted her to understand that, in the end, she would be rewarded for her honesty.
“So I waited her out. And over a period of about four months, we started to talk. We discussed her performance, her strengths, her weaknesses, likes, dislikes, that kind of thing. I told her that it wasn’t her fault she wasn’t excelling in this role, but that, together, we would have to find a solution.
“Then one day it occurred to me that she should go back to school and become a designer herself. She was very curious about the business, very creative, and much preferred to do a job by herself. She played with the idea for a while, and then she acted on it. She enrolled at New York University, got her degree, and is now at a large advertising agency as a designer. And very successful.
“Janet wasn’t a bad person. She had just picked the wrong career, and having started it, she didn’t want to admit to herself that she had made a mistake. I helped her.”
With self-discovery as its energy source, great managers now paint this picture of a healthy career. Guided perhaps by her choice of college major, perhaps by her family, perhaps by necessity, the employee selects her first role and jumps into the fray. In this first role she is unsure of herself. She is unsure of her ability to perform, unsure of her talents and her nontalents. As she achieves certain levels of performance, she might then move into different roles, or she might simply grow within that first role. Either way it is now her responsibility to look in the mirror and ask, “Do I thrill to this role? Did I seem to learn this role quickly? Am I good in this role? Does this role bring me strength and satisfaction?” It is her responsibility to listen for the clues that this role plays to her talents.
She might have started in sales, then moved into marketing — in this new role does she like being further removed from the customer? Does she love dealing with the patterns and concepts inherent in marketing, or does she miss the direct interaction and the knowledge that she, and she alone, made that sale? She might have started as a flight attendant and then moved into the training department — does she like helping novice flight attendants grow, or does she yearn for the drama and the challenge of winning over tired, nervous passengers?
As she looks in the mirror, she learns. Each step is the chance to discover a little more about her talents and her
nontalents. These discoveries guide her next step and her next and her next. Her career is no longer a blind hunt for marketable experiences and a breathless climb upward. It has become an increasingly refined series of choices, as she narrows her focus toward that role, or roles, where her strengths — her skills, her knowledge, and her talents — converge and resound.
Deep down, most people probably know that self-discovery is important to the building of a healthy career. The difference lies in the way great managers use self-discovery.
First, they give self-discovery a central role, making it an explicit expectation for each employee. Mike C., a manager in a courier company, describes how he turns self-discovery from a theoretical concept into a simple, practical demand:
“When someone joins the team, I tell him that one of our major goals in working together is to help him figure out who he is. I tell him to look in the mirror. And if he doesn’t know how to do that, I tell him to use the Sunday night blues test. If he doesn’t feel that little stab of depression on Sunday night, if he actually finds himself looking forward to the week, then he should stop and ask himself, ‘Why?’ What is it about the role that he loves so much? Whatever he answers, he should scribble it down and make sure that he keeps it in mind when he chooses another role.
“If he does feel those Sunday night blues coming on every weekend, then it’s not necessarily his fault. It’s not some failing in him. But he does need to ask the same question, ‘Why?’ What does he need that his current role is not giving him? Again, he should bear his answer in mind as he looks for other places to work.”
First, Break All the Rules Page 20
