What If Every Employee Was Your Most Strategic Employee?
Imagine how your business would benefit. Here are three key employees you’re overlooking and tips for tapping into their strategic potential.
By Karin Stawarky
All organizations have the potential to thrive in our uncertain, complex, dynamic world. However, the resources required to do so often are not recognized and therefore remain untapped. These riches lie in the minds and energy of all your employees.
How do you better tap that potential? Challenge the assumption that strategic contributors sit in the corner office, have lengthy resumes or hold multiple degrees. Asking the question – what if every employee was your most strategic employee – can surface unique value from unexpected sources.
Three examples of employee clusters often overlooked:
The front line employees
Those on the front line, directly serving your customers, have access to a treasure trove of customer insights. They have the ability to detect changes in preferences, new product opportunities, service enhancements, or new competitors. While sometimes subtle, these “weak indicators,” when aggregated over time, offer valuable intelligence. With insights from emerging data patterns, companies can design low-risk experiments to evolve the product, service offer or customer experience – well ahead of competitors.
Consider how bottled water rocked the soda industry. Coca-Cola and Pepsi had to play catch-up to niche companies who, as first movers, established brands, captured market positions, and built loyalty. Yet, Coke and Pepsi had scouts who could have tipped them off that a change was afoot: employees who drive delivery trucks, visiting bars and restaurants each and every day to restock coolers and shelves. If those individuals were asked to pay attention to what they saw and heard while in customer establishments, imagine what picture would have been revealed (e.g. observations of more young people carrying around Nalgene bottles of water). What can your customer-facing employees tell you about your customers in real time that no market research will be able to provide?
The youngest or least experienced employees
When young employees join an organization they are often rushed directly into training programs to provide them with tools and knowledge to accelerate their productivity. The flow of knowledge sharing is typically one way, with a view that they are ‘blank slates’ to be developed. But how many times do we ask them to teach us?
Finding ways to harness the Millennials’ technology savviness and energy can catalyze innovation. Milennials think innovation is essential for growth, yet few believe their organization’s leadership encourages idea generation and sharing regardless of seniority. Crowdsourcing innovation can be a powerful “two-fer”: sparking new product/service concepts and business improvements while strengthening engagement. The Millennial Action Project spearheaded Hack4Congress, three hackathons mixing millennial political thinkers with technology experts to address dysfunction in Congress. Issues covered campaign finance reform to facilitating cross-partisan dialogue and modernizing congressional participation; solutions included policy innovations to new digital tools, like Coalition Builder, a free, open source tool for Congressional members to search issues colleagues are championing. Multi-national companies to non-profits are increasingly adopting this format –hackathons or ‘shark tank’ exercises – to unleash creative thinking and tap the collective passion of this generation.
MasterCard, where Millennials are 38% of the workforce, takes this concept a step further. MasterCard Labs plays host to numerous mini-companies spawned from innovation contests on new product / service concepts within the organization. An example is ShopThis, a 9 person company with a 25 year old at the helm, which lets people buy products directly from pages of digital magazines. The value goes beyond revenue generated from these ventures. Actions like this provide powerful ways to surface entrepreneurial talent existing within the organization – and act as a valuable platform to attract more of that talent. This is particularly critical for a generation where the majority would prefer to work for a start-up than a global behemoth.
The experienced new hires
Most onboarding programs for experienced new hires focus on defining ‘what we do’ (think: products, markets, customers), intended to help them “get up to speed’. But often ‘how we work’ – and the relationships needed to effectively get work done – is not explored. What if these employees could make contributions of value from day one while simultaneously accelerating their learning of the culture? Yes, it’s possible.
Experienced hires offer fresh eyes and no ties to established routines. Giving them license to ask WHY, long-held assumptions and deeply grooved ways of seeing and doing are tested. They should be tasked to actively observe the organization’s practices: Why do we to do things this way? What problem are we trying to solve? Are there different ways of solving that problem? Or, is it even a real “problem” in the first place, one that is still relevant?
At Organic, a pioneering agency in digital advertising, the CEO frames this as the "CEO Challenge." This positioning underscores his belief that from day one a new hire has a significant opportunity to contribute value. In the Challenge, he deputizes new recruits to observe and tell him what they see the company doing (that should stop), not doing (that should start), and do differently. The Challenge offers a forcing function to pause and reflect on how work gets done. In some cases, the rationale for why things happen in certain ways is no longer valid … or it didn’t really exist in the first place (e.g. “because Bob did it that way, so we just started doing it that way”). What if you gave new hires license to observe and challenge the practices of your organization?
The key ingredient is creating a context where the organization actively asks for the contributions of all its employees. And when a contribution is made, it is acknowledged and appreciated. Such a reinforcing loop will encourage employees to continue providing contributions over time. So the next time you walk down the hall and pass by the college intern, or the newest recruit from your competitor, or the individual at the reception desk, ask yourself: what if she is my most strategic employee? What does she know, see, or experience that I could learn something from? I guarantee you’ll be surprised at what lies beneath the surface.