Focus on Growing Your People, Let Performance Take Care of Itself
When we think of the business world, very little of the time we spend is devoted to ‘practice’. Perhaps we prepare for a big presentation, and many of us went to school, but the vast majority of the time is considered the performance: actually doing our jobs.
I think this is incorrect. Businesses are long-term prospects. We don’t start a business, grow it, and then give one good talk or write one good paper, and then wrap it all up. There are challenges today, but there are also challenges tomorrow, next week and next year. What is more productive, delivering the better results this moment at the expense of the future, or delivering better results for all time? If you believe at all in investment, you know compounding results are always better.
The only times of true ‘performance’ are crises. Moments which could break the business and which must be handled decisively using the best tools we have. The website is down. We’ve had a data breach. The plant is on fire. These moments must be handled as the military handles combat, decisively.
Most other moments are not combat however. A quickly corrected misstep, a missaid word, would not hose the business. Absolute perfection, even if it were attainable, isn’t required. In that environment, there are countless opportunities to get better at our jobs, rather than just performing them.
If we can build this culture, we will be improving ourselves and our people every single day, accomplishing what I would say is the ultimate goal: to build a team of incredible people who can get anything done. That should be our true goal, to build a team of people who are so terrifyingly competent they can be trusted with any challenge.
Building an organization which focuses on personal growth also has tremendous recruiting value. What’s easier, to recruit superstars, or to recruit new grads out of college? If you have a system which can train and develop a new grad, you get to hire them. This also has a huge impact on diversity. Underrepresented populations remain underrepresented not because they have less potential, but because they have less experience. If your organization knows how to grow people, you can hire based on that potential.
Potential will always beat current performance in the long run. If you take someone who is motivated, smart, and has the right goals, that person will most likely accomplish those goals because they’re motivated and smart. I would rather have that person do that at my organization than elsewhere when they do.
Fostering personal growth also has a massive impact on retention and employee happiness. If I had to encode what ‘happiness’ is for a human, it would be having connections to people and getting closer to goals every day. An organization which helps you get closer to your goals is one you want to work at, and you want to give your best because you know that will translate into even more opportunities. It’s an organization which makes it’s members happier for being in it, not more miserable.
This is not human development at the cost of performance. There’s a quote by a famous football coach which goes “The score takes care of itself.” If you develop the people, winning is inevitable. In general, if you manage to have the best team with the strongest people, it’s not likely you will fail.
There is a tremendous chasm between beat down employees who rely on a leader to guide them, and empowered employees who grow every day and are able to apply their full mind to the problems they face. One is a company which amplifies the will of one person, the other is a terrifying force of warriors, each owning what their responsible for and improving it every day. I know which I would rather build.
Except in times of crisis, the first goal, above even the quality of our product, should be to improve our skills. That’s an environment where you can delegate confidently, where everyone is growing and learning, and where, paradoxically, the very best products get built.
