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CHAPTER 3

Principle No. 1: You Get What You Give

I have learned that the best way to lift one’s self up is to help someone else.

—Booker T. Washington

IMAGINE A CUSTOMER SERVICE team meeting. You’ve convened to solve a problem that has a direct bearing on the customer experience. It’s not that you haven’t tried before, but the fixes haven’t been working and customer complaints have not decreased. You are happy to see Lucinda enter the room and be warmly greeted by the team. Lucinda is from HR and has worked tirelessly on the employee experience. You ask a team member to outline the problem and the fixes you’ve tried to date. Can Lucinda shed any light on the challenge? She asks for 24 hours and to reconvene the team the next day.

At the next meeting, Lucinda offers some suggestions based on her work. Her perspective points to a communication issue that can be addressed by having a five-minute team huddle at the beginning and end of each work day to address issues that are affecting customers. You call Lucinda’s manager to thank her for Lucinda’s time.

The first Inside Gig principle, “You get what you give,” addresses the importance of creating a give-and-get model around talent, specifically how sharing talent across departments or functions optimizes organizational resources. This principle suggests that a manager should give employees time to participate in projects outside their teams, either to use skills they have but aren’t utilizing in their day-to-day roles or to learn new skills. Thus, managers give away some of their employee resources. What do they get in return? They are able to leverage talent from elsewhere in the organization to contribute to pressing business challenges they are facing.

This talent could perform roughly the same work employees lent elsewhere would do, or it might be to provide skills the manager needs but doesn’t have in the current team. So talent from elsewhere in the company (supply) is acquired in exchange for employees lent elsewhere to learn and apply all of their skills. An employee might have a critical skill set not available from the current team members, a gap that the company would otherwise hire for. By leveraging talent from elsewhere in the organization, the firm saves money; it doesn’t have to bring in a contractor, freelancer or consultant to assist on the project or spend resources onboarding someone new. Managers and team members, when working on a new team, enjoy the benefit of using their skills in a new context, learning from others and gaining new skills and perspectives.

In our work with progressive organizations, we have discovered that managers will share talent whether or not incentives are in place to do so. Creative problem-solving results from sharing talent, and lessons learned will continue to have long-term benefit. One company in particular reported significant savings and more customer goodwill, in addition to a marked increase in employee engagement.

THE PRINCIPLE IN ACTION

Let’s take a peek at how “You get what you give” works in practice. Juan is a manager of a team of five engineers. His boss has asked him to develop a solution to a vexing problem for one of the company’s customers. Juan’s team already has a heavy workload trying to innovate one of the firm’s current products. The timelines are tight for the special project, and Juan isn’t sure his team has the capabilities to succeed. And as is typical, Juan has no budget to bring on a new team member or contractor to help on this—or any—project.

During this high-pressure time, one team member, Kris, asks for permission to participate in a project with another team in a different department where she can learn a new skill related to technology the company is implementing. Juan understands that this initiative is important to her and to the company, so they discuss how work can be shifted to allow Kris one day per week, or a few hours per day, to contribute to the other project. In effect, Juan is “giving his talent away.” He does this despite his team’s ongoing work assignments and the special project they are in the midst of.

In order to solve the problem his boss has assigned him, Juan realizes he needs to get someone with marketing expertise to help his team better understand the problem that the customer has articulated. He approaches Delana, the marketing manager, to explain the problem, and he asks to borrow talent to work on a solution. Delana says she understands the importance of the project and can see how her team member will gain important insights by working with an engineering team for a brief period. So while Juan has given talent away to another team, he gets talent in return. Thus, he has the right set of skills to solve the problem at hand and provides Kris with an opportunity to learn and grow in an area of rising importance to the company. Furthermore, one of the marketing team members gains perspective from the engineering team that will help her become more successful in the future—a win for everyone.

THE TALENT SCARCITY MINDSET

While “You get what you give” is nice in principle, it is the most challenging shift in prevalent attitudes to overcome when implementing the Inside Gig. This is because most managers operate from a mindset of talent scarcity, a mental model that suggests “These are my employees.” In other words, “Hands off. Don’t touch!”

This may not be a fair portrait of your management style, but companies do ask a great deal of managers. They’re given ambitious goals, tight time frames and even tighter budgets. No wonder they aren’t willing to part with “their” talent. In fact, they would often be happy to have the talent of other managers as well. The pressure that managers face to achieve their goals despite limited resources creates a mindset of talent scarcity. Budget cuts only exacerbate this tendency. Managers have an ongoing fear that if an employee is lost to a resignation, internal transfer or promotion, there is a significant likelihood the lost position will go unfilled or be eliminated permanently, leaving them to accomplish the same objectives with even fewer people.

The scarcity mindset induces managers to hoard talent. Once they find good employees, they don’t want to let them go. Sometimes managers make great hires with particularly valuable skills and don’t want to lose them because they have a disproportionate impact on the ability of their teams to meet their goals. In other cases, managers have invested in mentoring, coaching or training employees until their performance is key to team success. Either way, managers value those employees and don’t want to see them go elsewhere. While managers may rarely admit to hoarding talent, their actions often speak louder than their words.

Talent hoarders take various actions. They might hold employees down by giving them lower performance ratings than they deserve so that other managers aren’t tempted to poach them. More commonly, when employees ask about promotional opportunities, some managers are quick to say, “I think you’re doing a great job in your current role, but you aren’t quite ready yet for a promotion.” Or if the company has a talent review process in which it discusses potential candidates for special developmental opportunities or promotion, talent hoarders become very quiet about their hidden gems. If managers from other departments inquire about having certain employees transferred, talent hoarders often trash-talk those employees to discourage other managers from taking interest in their stars. Over time, managers who hoard talent gain a reputation as people to stay away from because they’ll hold employees back in their careers. They are toxic to the organization.

Leaders who are rewarded for producing results but not for promoting people internally have no reason to welcome the prospect of losing high-performing team members to other parts of their companies. The 2019 Deloitte Human Capital Trends report indicates that 46 percent of survey respondents say that managers actively resist internal mobility.¹ The Institute for Corporate Productivity’s (i4cp) talent mobility study of more than 650 global companies found that half of the survey participants (and 74 percent of companies identified as low performers) report that the biggest obstacle to talent mobility rests with managers who refuse to encourage movement.²

The talent model that underpins the Inside Gig is antithetical to outdated, bewildering management styles that suppress talent. Even though the talent scarcity mindset is understandable, the business climate has radically changed. This attitude must evolve, too. As organizations compete for scarce talent resources that can make or break their ability to achieve growth plans, holding on to talent within companies is far more important than a manager’s desire to keep their team intact.

The innovation that’s needed is a shift to a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity of resources in an organization. When managers and team leaders let go of ownership of their talent, it is liberating for everyone. This more inclusive attitude helps managers look beyond their own employee groups to solve problems, and allows their employees to explore passions and interests across other groups, teams or departments. This sense of being “boundaryless” as an organization enhances a firm’s ability to innovate.

Different disciplines have their own methods of approaching and solving problems. What possibilities could arise when a customer-facing rep is asked about her thoughts on a supply-chain issue, or a marketing employee is seconded by an engineering department? You’ll never know until you try. But it is a truism that when you examine challenges from different perspectives or with another set of tools, you shine a light on answers that might not previously have been considered. New skill sets can also be brought to issues, adding value and enhancing work products to make them more valuable to consumers. A culture that considers all talent as a company asset and allows and expects people to move seamlessly across the organization will build employees who are well rounded, understand the firm as a whole and have perspectives broader than those focused on a single function.

TALENT MOBILITY

Talent mobility has traditionally been defined as shifting talent around to promote further employee development. For large global companies, this usually meant assigning employees projects to build global competence. Given the complexities of today’s business world, organizations frequently try to move people laterally to boost their breadth of perspective. Talent mobility both increases the visibility of employees within the company and exposes such employees to new experiences (new managers, countries, markets, functions or sub-functions), greatly improving overall competence. In today’s networked and knowledge-based business environment, establishing relationships across an organization and enhancing employees’ wider understanding of the inner workings of either a function or the company as a whole delivers considerable value to the firm as well as to the employees themselves. This is particularly true when cultivating versatile leaders to handle diverse functions. Furthermore, the need to retain and develop top talent grows especially important to organizations as it becomes more difficult to hire the right employees to achieve business priorities.

Talent mobility improves levels of employee engagement by allowing people the opportunity to move around within an organization to foster new skills, be exposed to stimulating experiences and prove themselves. To fuel a company’s growth, talent mobility is needed to keep employees learning and engaged in order to retain them, as well as to build a broader understanding of the business, enhance overall organization performance and achieve competitive advantage. Given rising talent shortages, the approach of simply hiring new talent when demand increases or a different skill set is needed doesn’t work as well as it once did.

Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report shows that 20 percent of C-suite leaders (executive-level managers who often have “chief” in their title) rate talent mobility as one of the top three most urgent issues for their companies, while 76 percent of survey respondents rated it as important for their organizations.³ This is largely because many companies are experiencing historically low unemployment rates and a growing skills shortage. To make matters worse, only 15 percent of global employees are engaged at work, an amazing level of wasted potential.⁴ Interestingly enough, while only 10 percent of the workforce in Western Europe is engaged, 33 percent of the U.S. workforce is engaged. This suggests that management practices are providing a competitive advantage to U.S. employers, although they, too, are leaving a great deal of worker productivity on the table.

CASE STUDY: THE GAP INC.

Let’s look at how one company Edie Goldberg consulted with cultivated an appreciation for the importance of internal talent mobility to develop the general management or strategic leaders needed to run it. In 2003, the chief financial officer (CFO) of Gap Inc. realized that most of the professionals in his organization were developing themselves as specialists. For instance, when employees joined the tax sub-function of finance, the next career moves they considered were the subsequent steps up the tax corporate ladder. Such an employee went from being a tax analyst, to a manager of tax, to a senior manager, then director, and finally a vice president of tax. Employees didn’t naturally think about rotating through the various sub-functions within finance (e.g., financial planning and analysis, tax, treasury, investor relations). Most of Gap Inc.’s finance employees were becoming deep specialists within their own sub-functions. As a result, when one of the Gap Inc. brands (Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, etc.) needed a CFO, it had to hire talent externally; none of its employees had the broad expertise required to fill the position. This caused a significant morale and retention issue, since employees felt they would never be considered for such important leadership positions.

Edie was asked to help Gap Inc. find a solution, which led to the creation of Shaping Your Future Gap Inc., a career management program that defined the lateral career moves necessary to become a finance generalist and indicated a career web (rather than ladder or path) that showed the various routes one could take to achieve individual career goals—such as CFO (generalist) rather than head of tax (specialist). Managers were trained to have career conversations using the new tools, and corporate leadership set the expectation that talent mobility was essential to build the broad leaders the company needed to fill senior leadership positions.

After an employee has been in their role for two years (the first for learning, the second for mastery), their manager has a career conversation that strongly encourages changes in internal assignments based on the employee’s career goals. If employees would like to become a CFO one day, they’re moved to different sub-functions within finance or outside the finance function to gain broader business experience. If they’re interested in becoming a deep specialist, then a rotation to another role that builds deeper expertise within the sub-function is recommended. As a consequence, Gap Inc. has been able to build the leadership bench strength needed to promote from within, which has helped to engage and retain finance talent.⁵

THE BENEFITS OF THE BOUNDARYLESS ORGANIZATION

In chapter 2 on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we touched on continuous learning as an aspect of the new employment contract. If there is one thing that is well understood about millennials, it is that this generation, more than any before it, thrives on change and on learning on demand. Maybe that’s because they were born during a time when everything changes quickly and the half-life of skills is plunging. For business success, you must create a continuous learning culture. In fact, on most employee opinion surveys, the lowest-scoring item is satisfaction with career development. This is most likely the result of people working so hard that they can’t “take the time” for learning. The Inside Gig can be a vehicle for on-the-job learning in small bites. Whether employees apply their skills with a new group of people (where they’re learning from others and broadening their perspectives), use their skills in a new context (deepening their understanding of their skill sets), or work on a project slightly larger than they’ve experienced before and take on new responsibilities, the Inside Gig gives employees opportunities for continuous learning. Both “giving” talent and “getting” talent in return deliver learning and growth for all employees involved.

In today’s hyper-competitive talent market, it’s essential to give employees opportunities to spread their wings and try something new or employ underutilized skills so that they feel more purpose and meaning at work. Competition for talent is one of the top challenges facing companies today, ahead of compensation.⁶ So a crucial element of any talent strategy is to find ways to offer employees the experiences they value; otherwise, they are liable to leave to find them elsewhere.