Resourcing Paradoxes
In this context, resourcing is the act of choosing the best fits for people and projects within an organization. Let’s also start by…
In this context, resourcing is the act of choosing the best fits for people and projects within an organization. Let’s also start by assuming that excellent resourcing means finding places where interests, strengths, and business needs overlap.
The hard part tends to be the interplay between interests and strengths. For the vast majority of us, there are gaps between what we are excited to try and what we are already known to be excellent at doing. So begins the conundrum!
When we are looking for a new project, role, or job, we want to maximize on our interests, which tend to be areas where we are good but still need or want to grow. One of the biggest reasons for attrition in the workplace is having people in roles where they don’t feel like they can or are growing, so this is pretty important.
However, when we are responsible for business outcomes and need to make resourcing decisions, we want to fit strengths against business needs and in a ruthless sense the business doesn’t really care about our interests, except for when not fulfilling them leads to unhappiness and as a result low productivity or quitting.
As a result, a lot of business cultures have tended toward helping individuals each find their strengths and self selecting into the roles where those are most heavily leveraged. The problem is that in the long run resourcing toward strengths alone leads to discontent. Our natural disposition in a knowledge economy is toward growth-how do we learn the next interesting thing that will help us as we move along in our careers? For a business resourcing via strengths, the tendency is to articulate as deeply as possible what someone is good at and then look for matches between those things and business needs. The result is burn out; people feel used for leveraging their strength and assess that they are not learning. This model also leaves something to be desired because it wouldn’t scale well in other contexts. For example, if we only focused on making strengths stronger then infants would never grow because we’d fail to give them a chance.
Instead, we need to be thinking about role shifts in terms of holding some factors constant and changing one or two risky ones at a time. For example, if we know Steven is excellent at detecting business value and he knows Manufacturing really well, and he is a proven team leader, then in his next role, we should think about changing one of these at a time so he can stretch and grow but also without risking the business. Steven could switch industries, for example, or he could remain in the same industry but focus on a different part of the value cycle, either way, he’d grow and learn something new and the business would get value. The mistake, in this case, is to keep asking Steven to run similar teams of similar scale working on similar topics, but it happens all too often. For the business, the incentives are hard to ignore-we know he’ll do a good job and we have the need.
Originally published at http://adamjudelson.com on August 18, 2016.