Situation: A company’s staff is made up primarily of knowledge workers. These are highly skilled individuals who excel in their roles. The CEO wishes to shift their focus to servant leadership – where the focus is the growth and development of the company. How do you grow knowledge workers into servant leaders?
Advice from the CEOs:
- One option is to create a different set of incentives. Offering key managers the option to invest in and hold shares in the company will change their perspective. This, in turn, can change their behavior because servant leadership will improve company performance and the value of their shares.
- Another option, used by Accenture and many Fortune 500s, is to hire a lot of the best and brightest individuals that they can find out of college and see who rises to the top.
- The ratio in large firms is generally 15 hires to produce 1 high performer. Another CEO at the table is now shifting to this model at his company.
- Create an entry level position for recent graduates that will allow for this sifting without disrupting the company’s culture.
- Speed identification and retention of the best talent through annual evaluations of the company’s talent. This includes ratings by employees’ supervisors of both how the individual is doing and their ultimate potential within the company.
- Be aware of the downsides to this model. One is that the two groups that tend to leave of their own accord are the best and the worst employees.
- A third option is to create two career tracks within the Company.
- One track is upwardly mobile. This is the track that identifies, develops and grooms future servant leaders.
- The other track is a specialty track, which can produce servant leaders along a different dimension – breadth of experience and expertise in key skills of value to the firm.
- This second track also allows for growth, characterized by levels of title, salary and recognition that reward the acquisition and perfection of skills in key disciplines.
- Several “kinder, gentler” environments such as 3M have used parallel tracks with great success.
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