Managing to replace people

Someone quit this week. Not just anyone, but one of a handful of market specialists. As she was going out the door, three other people came in. Doing the math, you could say we're up two. But when it comes to people, business isn't based on the numbers. That's because people cannot be replaced; companies can only reorganize around their departure.

The insight is not mine. It is, for one, Thomas Stewart's. He is a writer and editor at Fortune. In his 1997 book, "Intellectual Capital: the Wealth of Organizations," he found that just as access to resources had previously given way to access to financial capital as the primary ingredient to business success, technology had now triggered a shift again, this time to what companies know.

The book is worth reading (especially for people in professional services businesses), but I don't intend a precis here.

As companies become less and less like Lego constructions and more like an Alexander Calder mobile, losing a piece has serious implications for movement overall. This is made more acute as progress or growth or momentum have become as much measures of success as is the bottom line -- the latter puts food on the table, but the former feed our psychology. The risk to either requires persistent forethought and contingency planning.

How do you anticipate the worst yet not succumb to its inevitability? By focusing on the outcome or, as we say around the office, the business benefit.

Departures trigger arrivals. They lead to freah analysis and a realistic view of reputation, opportunity and focus. With benefits such as these, why wait for a departure? Recruiting, interviewing, hiring and reorganizing are ends in themselves.

The key to avoiding the enervating potential of people taking new jobs, is to keep giving people fresh positions and finding new people to join the party; to manage for growth. A former colleague once said, "no one wants to work for a firm that's not growing." He was and remains right.

That does not make departures easier to accept, but it does put them in a practical perspective which, in turn, makes it harder to think the sky is falling.