Investing in Everyone
Recently, I had a conversation with a friend in which she described many challenging aspects of the business culture she works in. What I remember most vividly: “When you combine the traits we value in people, it creates a lot of room for a**holery.”
What stood out from her further description was that when people in the company talk about the high percentage of new employees that leave within one year of joining, that fact is almost like a badge of honor. The implicit belief is that someone not surviving one year means that the individual was not good enough to be successful, and that “the best” will rise to the top.
Of course, her company isn’t the only one that believes in somewhat draconian approaches to finding and keeping the “best” talent. For example, in No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer describe Netflix’s “Keeper Test” to generate talent density thusly: “If a person on your team were to quit tomorrow, would you try to change their mind? Or would you accept their resignation, perhaps with a little relief? If the latter, you should give them a severance package now….”
Organizations can choose another course.
The Freakonomics podcast recently published a series of episodes about college education. In one of them, Steven Dubner interviewed Ruth Simmons, who is the current president of the historically black college Prairie View A&M University, and the former president of Smith College and Brown University. Dubner asked Simmons why historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) “produce 25 percent of black graduates in the STEM fields” when they account for only 10 percent of black college enrollees.
She responded: “The mission of H.B.C.U.s is to make sure that their students are successful. [...] We’re looking to make sure that every single person who comes into this university is successful. Now, let me switch and talk about the other model, which is a more competitive model. [... That] model is to eliminate.”
Simmons continued with this example: “So think of engineering at Princeton and Harvard. You come in and you take prerequisites. And what do those prerequisites do? They knock you out of eligibility to pursue engineering. So, most of the students coming in who want to do that have to switch to some secondary interest. One model is about eliminating people so that there is a special class of achievers at the highest end, and that’s where they make their reputation, the other model is about making sure everybody gets through.”
What Simmons highlights is that an institution’s choice about what model to follow is reflective of its values—not a reflection of students’ talents.
John Zenger and Joseph Folkman make a similar point in The Extraordinary Leader about organizations’ choice between “an elitist approach and a more egalitarian posture” toward leadership development. They write:
“Many organizations in the past have focused all their leadership development efforts on a small handful of people who are currently in senior positions or who were perceived as being ‘high potential’ because of some psychological testing and interviewing or assessment center procedures. In marked contrast are the organizations such as the U.S. Marine Corps and Southwest Airlines, which have concluded that the organization will be stronger if everyone is a candidate for development.”
“High potential” is in quotes above because the criteria used to make such designations are often unreliable. As Kim Scott writes in Radical Candor, “Most people shift between a steep growth trajectory and a gradual growth trajectory in different phases of their lives and careers, so it’s important not to put a permanent label on people.”
In Managing the Non-Profit Organization, Peter Drucker puts a finer point on this when he writes, “I have been working with organizations now for around fifty years, and my experience is that the correlation between the high-promise people at age twenty-three and the performers at age forty-five is very poor.”
The U.S. Army Leadership Field Manual instructs leaders to invest equally in all of their team members, precisely because they cannot reliably predict future success.
“Mentoring is totally inclusive, real-life leader development for every subordinate. Because leaders don’t know which of their subordinates today will be the most significant contributors and leaders in the future, they strive to provide all their subordinates with the knowledge and skills necessary to become the best they can be—for the Army and for themselves.”
For me, the egalitarian approach to development is more sustainable. Very few organizations—e.g., those that are truly #1 in their industries, certain high-growth startups, IP-centric firms like pharmaceutical companies—can reliably recruit and rely on stars to drive their organizations. Everyone else has to find average talent and create a context in which those people can perform in an above-average way.
As one of my favorite quotes from The U.S. Army Leadership Field Manual says, “None of us is as smart as all of us.”