Productive workers
are not the busiest worker. They are the people who focus where a
difference can be made. It is surprising the management miss this simple concept.
Have seen managers reward workers who show up on time and
crank out volumes of simple, repetitive work. Easy to do because these people
are not encountering hard problems that require manager’s time & attention.
They generate good metrics and free your time.
However your most
valuable employees tackle the more difficult work. They are not going to
crank out numbers fixing typos. They do research.
They negotiate with other
departments, suppliers and customers to find
good solutions.
Managers have ignored female coworkers contributions I have
worked with. It’s because they don’t pay attention to their informally teaching
coworkers skills, and ignore how difficult are the issues they tackle. It creates
resentment and often leads to your best
people leaving.
An Insurance Company rewarding their best salesman. This
company focused on the metric of sales
calls per agent. The vice president giving the award note the best salesman
only made half the sales calls per the goal. “Can you imagine how many sales he
would of made if he met the sale call goal?”
The agent responded “Can
you imagine how much your sales team would sell if they made as few sales calls
as I do?”
The question is Where Can You Make a Bigger Difference at Work?
This riff was inspired by
Bloomberg’s Jerry Useem’s well thought out “The
Hardest Workers Don't Do the Best Work”. Worth your time to find out why
your best workers “do fewer things, and seem to have better developed
mechanisms for deciding what not to do.”
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