Organizations generally hire people for the purpose of performing certain tasks, for which they require certain specific competencies. Few care about knowing their true potential in depth - beyond their short-term myopia - and systematically monitoring their personal and professional development. I have seen surprising cases of companies whose warehouse or workshop personnel included people who were fluent in three or four languages, without any of those in charge having bothered to find out.
Such waste has several consequences. On the one hand, the opportunity to offer internal promotions is lost and new positions end up being filled from outside the company, at a substantially higher cost, even though many times this could be done within the company and with notable signs of commitment to the growth of the team members. On the other hand, people who would have much more to contribute to the organization lose interest in what they do and begin -now they- to look outside in search of new job opportunities. And the most harmful: they are kept performing tasks that do not necessarily use their best abilities and are therefore almost always performed suboptimal.
The responsibility of leading a team includes that of knowing in depth the competence profile of each of its members. It is necessary to give them the greatest possible opportunities for personal fulfillment, highlighting and using their strengths in tasks that contribute to adding value to the processes and always maintaining a precise focus on the needs and expectations of internal and external clients.
The result? Teams motivated thanks to a recognition that goes beyond mere speeches, which is not frequent in organizations and which, for this reason, is particularly valued by those who work in it. Experience shows that this kind of intangible remuneration is more effective in retaining talent than a salary increase - and also much more beneficial to the organization.
Push or drive
Instead, we do something with our equipment that we wouldn't do with our car, because that would be pretty stupid. It would never occur to us to push the vehicle all the time, instead of sitting behind the wheel and assuming our role as drivers: operating the commands to tell it where to go, which way and at what speed. The force of the impulse comes from the heart of the car; it is he who responds to the slogan, because he is fulfilling his specific mission in the way in which he knows best.
It is true: he does not think. And yet we respect it. We would not fill your fuel tank with water, which "costs cheaper," nor would we ask you to overexert, because we know we could destroy it.
We transfer these reflections to the scope of our work teams. You will notice that the management tactics of people that we tend to apply amount to resigning from our role as responsible drivers and put at risk the integrity of the group that we have the mission to lead. We ignore the internal power of the teams and try to replace it with sheer pushes, with little vision of the consequences, because it is the only thing we have learned to do. Controls and supervisors seem to have the sole purpose of subjecting people to excruciating pressure until they become ill or quit. Is it simply because we don't know how they work?
Intelligence vs. brute force
My father was a typing instructor back in the 1950s and published a manual that was widely used in administrative training institutions at that time. He was typing very fast, but it wasn't noticeable. To such an extent it was imperceptible how fast he was doing it, that a co-worker - a cultivator of the old "two fingers" method whose frenzied movements made him seem very, very fast - challenged him to test who could write the most words per minute. My old man won by destruction.
Many years later I was discovering the lessons that could be obtained from this anecdote. They are precisely those that underlie some of the simplest and most powerful process improvement principles that we use today in organizations:
1. prepare properly
2. place each team member in the right place
3. do things in the correct sequence
4. avoid unnecessary tasks
5. automate everything automatable
It is surprising that these apparently elementary rules are capable of multiplying productivity several times in any work group. And, of course, with much less effort. But first, it is necessary to know perfectly what skills each of the members of our team can contribute to the common project and be able to agree with them an organization of the tasks that allows them to develop those skills with all the strength of their incredible internal engine: the motivation.
What is involved, then, is to understand the mechanisms that activate our neurophysiological resources to use, at all times, those that are most efficient. This is part of the knowledge promoted by Bioliderazgo and that is available to anyone, through the book Bioliderazgo: Keys to unleash the hidden power of your team (available on our website bioliderazgo.org).
