Managing momentum

The hardest thing to do in business right now (a time frame that has held for years and is likely to hold for years more) is to recruit and retain the right kind of people. For every company, institution and club, the "right kind of people" is differently defined. But they are a definite class; and if you can't find them, convince them to join you and keep them, the odds of your overall or long-term success are lower than deserve a bet.

It is clear that finding the right kind of people is more than having a good recruiter; someone who knows the business you serve, the products you offer and the proper balance between cost-based risk and potential-revenue reward. Equally helpful is having (or seeming to have) the right market position, the right business model, the right customer set and the right mix of people already that, together, suggest financial growth, career making opportunities and a brand that will add weight to the professional stature people passing out your business cards.

This is no small feat. It takes hard work to gain such a balance even for a moment, let alone see it gather momentum. Managing the variables in an increasingly competitive market, over time, is akin is akin to how a bird flies; held alot only by the microsecond manipulation of each of a million feathers. Birds do it, of course.

For people, it comes down to being able to simultaneously offer guarantees of qualities that can appear to be in conflict. Flexibility is one; consistency is the other.

Flexibility is possible only when a company is so confident of its destination, it is willing to change its course in the face of events and opportunities. Think of the companies you know from the inside. How many are as flexible as this?

Consistency is possible only when a company can find a persistant link between its repeated actions and success. This may be even more difficult than being flexible because, unchanged, a company will one day find the world changed around it.

So how on Earth can anyone hope to meet these factors that, together, represent a threshold of opportunity sought by each of us individually and our colleagues in general. The answer may be to look at flexibility and consistency as analogs for what most of us really want. Opportunity rooted in growth.

A respected colleague once said the key to successfully managing people was successfully mangaging the company. "People don't want to work for a company that is not growing." He might have meant growth as measured by revenue, employees or locations (in fact, I think he did), but it can also be found in the quality of the customers, public recognition, staff development and fresh opportunity. It is this last which trumps them all.

Despite the talk of generational differences that make it unlikely for someone entering the workforce today to spend 30 years at the the same company, it is really a function of fresh opportunity. If an "A-player" is given a new set of responsibilities along a respected career path (alas, there are still some careers few people want) every two or three years, he or she may stay with the same company.

Conversely, without fresh opportunity, people will move to find it. As Casey Stengel once said, "You can look it up."

It places a terrible burden on managers, but the payoff is long-term success based on a stable team which can deliver strong results for the business on the basis of its shared and near-intuitive understanding of the market, powered by the beleif that the winds won't blow things off course, but will, instead, keep them aloft.