Are your people your best asset?
Our people are our best asset, a claim often made in many company annual reports. But do the facts bear this out – well yes and no. Can a catalytic leader make a difference? Absolutely yes.
In this article I’m looking at what people bring to your team or company and how you can use your catalytic leadership strengths to make even more of the asset you have in a win-win capacity.
According to Forbes, people in your organisation are your greatest asset. They are usually your greatest brand ambassadors and consumers – they understand your product and given the right support and stimulus are like a mini marketing force in their own way, out persuading friends, families and networks not just about your product but also the ethos that lies beneath the company.
Your people also absorb and share a common DNA and understanding. It’s not a coincidence that you can, in an agile sense, throw a group of your people together and they will find common purpose even without strong direction – there is a commonality of understanding of the company’s purpose. They have an intuitive sense of what is right.
And if you get this wrong, imagine the alternative. Turnover, already and expensive business, goes up, the DNA within your organisation fragments, people become fearful for their jobs and existence or fatalistic about the chances of their ongoing employment which feeds into customer nervousness and dissatisfaction and in the age of “anything can be found online”, your chances of convincing some other folk to come and enjoy the world’s worst party on the deck of the titanic are going to be slim.
Although leaders generally buy in to the principle that people are the company’s greatest asset, behaviours don’t always seem to match that belief. Studies by Gallup show that productivity and commitment of employees is significantly increased not necessarily by paying more but by acknowledgement of their contribution. The strongest positive impact comes from acknowledgement by their immediate line manager (about a quarter of respondents) and then by someone of significant seniority in the organisation (also about a quarter of respondents). One of the weakest affects come through recognition by peers (around one in ten are motivation by this). And here’s the kicker – despite this being super cheap and easy to do, the majority of employees reports seldom receiving any acknowledgement from either of these two powerful sources.
Acknowledgement and recognition takes time. And here’s the paradox. If we’re catalytic leaders believing that people are our most valuable assets, how come we’re so reluctant to take the time to do the things we know empowers those people to do their best for the company? Work in progress.
In a survey by CIPD, around 37% of workers say they have significant skills to do a job of more complexity or seniority than the one they are asked to do. These are skills left on the factory floor unused, but it gets somewhat worse, that in many cases these additional skills are not even known, and if they aren’t known then they cannot be deployed.
What can a catalytic leader do about this? There are lots of options. The common response in organisations is to try and set up a skills database. If only we knew what skills everyone has, imagine what that would enable? In reality it often enables relatively little except perhaps a little resentment of the effort everyone puts into the assembly of a big database that is then not used as effectively as it could.
An alternative for catalytic leaders to try comes from an unlikely source of the Australian outback where communities are relatively small and summoning help from outside it likely to take days if not weeks to arrive. This method, used commonly in social settings is called Asset Based Community Development.
Asset Based Community Development or ABCD for short is an additive process. It believes effectively that within any cohort of people lie a range of skills that are under-known, under-appreciated and therefore under-deployed. These can be skills, gifts, experience or physical assets that are within the capability of an individual.
But this is only useful if there is a way to make these gifts known. In communities this can sometimes be known in neighbourhoods, interest groups, clubs or associations. The human interaction within these is often more powerful and richer than a database. People within an interest group of recycling know that Frank is a retired electrician. But the also know that Frank gets deep joy in bringing things back to life that everyone else has consigned to landfill. They also know that Frank has managed to bring back to life the most unlikely and far-gone cases imaginable by pulling parts out of different things that can’t be repaired and using his years of knowledge and experience. They also know that Frank feels thoroughly satisfied when he sees the joy and appreciation of someone whose cherished item, considered a forlorn hope, is handed back to them working again.
Through associations people start to understand each others’ gifts and interests. Latent talents are also gradually improved through working together on projects. Tom had the physical strength to repair the fence but not the wood crafting skills to make joints accurately. Teamed up with Mike’s carpentry skills, Tom has gradually learned skills from working on fencing with Mike and so the collective community asset is increased.
Institutions form a physical entity that people gather around. The demountable classroom in the neighbourhood school that’s underutilised as school rolls fell, becomes deployed as a repair café for the community. It’s where Frank, Tom and Mike hang out. It’s where senior school students get to learn basic carpentry and repair skills from Frank and Mike. It’s the place for people to gather where Mary, the town’s mayor can see commonality within projects and what she needs to fight for to make things yet more effective.
What binds everyone together is their sense of history and believe in a sense of place. This town was settled by among others, Frank’s grandparents who on their journey towards the west coast decided to settle here and make it their home. They survived hardships of winters and hot summers and people have a sense of love for the place and a drive to make long departed ancestors proud as well as a great home for the children yet to come.
And binding all this together are what everyone known in the town as the connectors. Julie, Jane and Greg are the folk who seem to know everyone and be everywhere. They pop into different settings, they encourage projects and collaboration, they introduce people to each other, they air problems to be shared and solved together, they create a sense that everything is possible if we work on it together. Everyone knows that if you’re introduced by Jane it’s a special accolade and it really means something. Everyone admires Greg’s optimism. Everyone is fascinated that there is no challenge that Julie won’t consider taking on.
ABCD has been used by local authorities across the globe to restore community cohesion, particularly against a backdrop of harder economic times and to reduce reliance on state resources to provide everything.
But catalytic leaders can also use and deploy ABCD techniques within their teams to great effect. Instead of seeing themselves as the civic leader that every decision goes through. The catalytic leader can foster the ABCD culture and climate within their team that means the team starts to solve its own problems, create its own solutions and back to our point at the beginning, ensure more of the skills that are available are actually used.
It starts with recognising and fostering communities of interest. This can be done online, tools like slack for example make this relatively easy. It can be more formally created through special interest groups whose role it is to go out and find people with complementary skills. These mini hives then start to develop a better shared understanding of individual’s values, beliefs and skills.
We then need to create a focal point for these skills to come to life. This could be through a community giving project, it could be a special project that cuts across typical hierarchical lines. Having fostered individual communities this next step is about finding the way of making these communities accessible to other communities, making them intersect together on common missions so they start to overlap with each other. In your organisation you may have a coding community, a charitable community, a community to support development of female talent. Finding a project where these three communities can connect in common wil start that process of cross-over.
Let’s say for example this happened – and on the first Friday of every month, in the atrium of your building these three interest groups ran basic introduction to coding classes for young mothers in the local community, giving them the means to be able to eventually return to work in higher paid, better appreciated roles than is typically afforded part-time workers. This project even goes on to be a useful source of new hires to the company – the office is the focal point for visibly bringing this to life so that others can see and believe in the sharing of gifts and talents.
And seeing the building used in this way sparked another group of people to do a big skills swap where a group of people elected to do a one for one skills swap – teaching somebody something they knew in return for being taught something they didn’t already know.
Binding all this together were the community connectors. No one appointed these people, they just emerged from individual groups as those who were sufficiently curious and driven to ensure a difference was made. Their energy constantly buzzing around the organisation, making the audacious asks brought out skills no-one knew existed, brought to life in very visible projects in the organisation.
And when the catalytic leader had a challenge and needed people to face into it, the culture and climate of people raising their hand and volunteering their skills was a far cry from the old ways of the leader and her star chamber sitting in a room, flicking through mental images of headshots in their minds picking their winning team based solely on the partial information and experience of what they knew of their team.
Try this out with your team
Get your team together with a bunch of post it notes. Ask everyone to write down a skill they have and stick it on the wall. Repeat this process ten times, if people feel they are drying up before this they’re not thinking hard enough, it doesn’t have to be obviously skills practiced in the workplace but also in home and leisure life.
Now group these. We have now transitioned from individual skill to collective skill. Any of those post it notes can be blended in recipes to make interesting combinations you may never have thought of before.
Next ask the team to write down a skill they know they can find or ask of someone in their circle that could be got without paying for or bartering in return. Do this five times and add these to your board.
Now group these. We have now transitioned from the collective skill of the group to the collective network skill of the group. Once again any of these post it notes can be blended into new and interesting recipes.
The maths of ABCD is pretty simple. Let’s say I have thirty skills. That’s great. But if I know ten other people who are up for working and sharing with me and they each have thirty skills then between us we now have access to a maximum of three hundred and thirty skills. A lot more than I had alone.
If we then factor in the additional skills that exists in each of our own circle and networks, we could be approaching thousands of skills at our disposal. It’s the multiplier effect in itself.
The common lament of most leaders is that I can’t get this done because I don’t have enough people. As the research from CIPD shows, it’s less about having the volume of people, it’s getting the work you need to do better matched with the skills your people have.
