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Monday, February 23, 2004
Antonio: Money isn’t everything
By Kiko Antonio
Night manager
ALIEN INVADER. There’s more to wealth creation than financial value. Think what rainmaking, reputation, and relationships can do for you and your company.
Effective and efficient people are everywhere in large organizations—in both good times and bad. However, they always seem to follow the same type of story.
Smart and committed, they know a better way to operate. And then, smash! They come up against the organization’s internal defense system.
They go from being the organization’s best hope for making positive changes to being seen as a kind of alien invader. And they never seem to recover from the experience.
But when we look more closely, we see it’s not really about change or resistance. It’s about the hidden factors behind job satisfaction: the reason some people thrive in an organization and others seethe with resentment and ultimately leave.
The critical factor (as most managers know) is not the money or other tangible matters, but whether people feel they are treated as a person with a unique contribution to offer and not as an easily replaced commodity.
It’s not the bosses at the top of the hierarchy, per se, who penalize effective employees. The real force that keeps valuable personnel “invisible” is the organizational culture.
Organizations tend to classify their members into two groups of people. First is the Core Group—those executives (and others) who come first because they are seen as central to the enterprise. Their needs and priorities, even if unarticulated, define the mission of the enterprise.
They usually include the people at the top of the hierarchy, but they can also include gatekeepers (for instance, the head of a critical production plant or union), or people whose personality or integrity has catapulted them to a position of influence throughout the organization. The organization acts first and foremost to meet the needs of the Core Group.
The second group, generally 95 percent or more of the organization, consists of “transactional” employees—people who are contracting, in good faith, to provide a service for the organization.
They feel they’re being treated as commodities because they are, in effect, commodities. They may not be replaceable, but the organization feels that they are.
This sounds like a harsh assessment of organizations, but it’s not as bad as it sounds; you can have a tremendous, highly fulfilling career as a transactional employee, as long as you don’t get confused about your status.
(e-mail: kiko_antonio@yahoo.com.)
(February 23, 2004 issue)
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