A leader struggles with two seemingly conflicting objectives.
One objective is to put the best man for the job and the other is to support the development goals, by giving assignments where the skills levels of the employee are low and learning potential is high.
The first objective works on getting to maximize the productivity and the second works on maximizing the potential. Given that organizations are demanding higher productivity, efficiency and the appetite for mistakes is low, the first objective seems to be the norm. In that case how does a leader address the employee aspirations?
Before we get into resolving this perceived conflict, It is easier said than done to put the best man on the job. If you do a general survey, you will have many employees who are thirsting to be given assignments, which can leverage their current capabilities. In other word, the first responsibility of a leader is to ensure that employees in his team are not ‘under-employed’.
Post fulfilling ‘well-employed’ objective, longer-term investment into employee learning, is must . A lack of on-the job learning will lead to low level of employee engagement and therefore decrease in productivity. A leader should pursue the development goals for employees, while not significantly impacting the productivity or quality of outcomes.
Here are some tricks to resolve the conflict perception:
- Invest leader’s own time: Taking note from situational leadership model, an employee having low-skill for a given assignment, will need a mix of continuous direction and hand-holding from the leader. A leader will need to invest time, so that he is able to maintain the desired productivity and reduce the level of risks.
- Assign a buddy: Another employee with expertise on the given assignment can play the role of a guide or a help-point, if employee runs into an issue. The buddy can also review the deliverables on interim basis.
- Make an employee work in a support capacity, before taking charge: If you want to given an employee the project management responsibility for the first time, he may spend few months by being an assistant project manager with an experienced project manager.
- Start small: Taking the same examples, an employee may handle a sub-project, before he graduates into managing a project and then a program.
- Look at the aptitude: The level of ‘newness’ of the task assigned to an employee should be based upon the leader’s assessment on the employee’s inherent capacity to handle the unknowns and his grasping power. It also depends on inherent competencies. For example if an employee is great business systems analyst, he should be able to handle an entirely new system in a new subject domain.
Content of this post are referred from Maximize output first and then the potential
