Employees today are very keen to grow – in role and in capability. They
want to see that the Organization is making a genuine effort to enhance
their skills.
I want to share Sunil’s case here. It is Sunil’s 4 th year with the
Organization. He likes his job and his co-workers. He also respects his
manager a lot. He is a great performer and is well recognized. He has
been performing steadily in this Organization and has been getting a
substantial raise in every performance assessment cycle.
In fact his salary is almost on the 99 th percentile of professionals in similar roles and experience bracket. He is working on the latest technology which many aspire to learn. Despite all this, he plans to leave the Organization. Sunil wants to change his job because of fear of stagnating. He is certain that he will continue to get more more responsibility, autonomy and salary here. Sunil is however worried that he has stopped learning and he is not growing professionally. He admits that his manager has been giving him great opportunities – but those opportunities were in existing areas that Sunil was logically expanding into. He feels that there is no effort by his manager or Organization to train him and grow him. Sunil is sure that to move to the next level of management he needs a different skill set. He has to evolve more, know more, develop a strategic vision and get better exposure. The current Organization wants to retain him by correcting the package and presenting the lure of continuing to work in the same city. Sunil is unmoved, he says “ even now I am not in my hometown, so it makes no difference if I go to any other city in the country”. Interestingly the new offer is not substantially higher in terms of salary hike, but very attractive in terms of the “structured learning” it offers. They have “personal / individual goals” in addition to “business goals” and “Organizational goals” There are several Sunil’s in Organizations across the country. They are in the highest quardant of the “performance – potential grid” and the Organization makes grandiose plans to reward them and groom them. Typically such employees get good salary hikes but the Organization misses out on a concerted effort to develop them.This is very unfortunate because Organizations spend a lot of resources on engaging employees yet miss out on what is important to the employees.
Organization’s must create “IDP’s” – individual development plans for 100% of its employees. These plans use diverse tools – classroom training, on the job training, reading, presentations, mentoring, shadowing, et all. Developing employees is a dual edged sword – it motivates the incumbent and at the same time it increases the “group performance norm” of the Organization by increasing the productivity of each employee. Quoth Richard Branson “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to”