Empowered Individuals and Empowering Institutions - Gary Hamel WSJ

In my last post I talked about the widening fault lines that run between individuals and institutions. Crack open the head of the average manager, and you’ll find a way of thinking that puts the institution in front of, or on top of, the individual. Represented graphically, the thinking looks like this . . . Model I: INSTITUTION –> INDIVIDUAL –> PROFITS The company hires employees to produce goods and services that yield profits for shareholders. In this model, the individual is to the institution what human beings were to the Matrix—raw material; factors of production hired to serve the institution’s goals. In real life, human beings aren’t plugged into machines, but they’re often plugged into roles that don’t suit them and jobs that don’t fulfill them. Usually, it is the individual who must conform to the institution rather than the other way around. If you doubt this, ask yourself what would you wear to work every day if there really were no constraints? What computer would you use on the job if you could pick any one you wanted? And what task or project would you tackle if you were free to choose?

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Destination: Work - Thriving in a Tough Economy by Tapping Into the Discretionary Effort of Your Employees, Ross Reck, Ph.D. & Harry Paul

Has your company’s bottom line taken a serious hit because of today’s lousy economic climate? Has your company tried to fix the situation by undergoing a round or two of layoffs, only to see your productivity plummet because of reduced morale and your better performing employees jumping ship to other companies or surfing the internet for job postings on your time? If so, would you like to turn your situation around instantly—as in overnight? If you think something like this is impossible, think again. The secret for turning things around is to tap into the discretionary effort of your employees—get them excited about coming to work and applying every bit of energy, creativity and passion they have toward performing their jobs instead of doing only what they have to do to in order to stay employed. How important is discretionary effort to the success of a business? Towers Perrin looked at 50 global companies over a 12 month period and found a direct relationship between discretionary effort and company performance. They found that the companies that received high levels of discretionary effort from their employees had a 19 percent increase in operating income and nearly a 28 percent increase in earnings per share.

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