Hippie CEO Life #40 - Embrace Your Employees Individual Genius
January 13, 2023
“Multipliers invoke each person’s unique intelligence and create an atmosphere of genius—innovation, productive effort, and collective intelligence.”
― Liz Wiseman
Part of what i love about running a small company is that we can truly invest the time to understand, at a very deep level, each of our employees unique intelligence in such a way that we are able to unlock incredible results, brilliant innovation, and astonishingly high levels of productivity.
Things that previous employers were not able to fully unlock or in extreme cases things previous employers felt were entirely impossible to unlock.
You see, as companies scale, they look to find efficiencies in every part of the business. On the surface, this isn’t a bad thing, businesses should run efficiently but this desire to optimize every part of the business effectively optimizes the humanness out of the business.
Employees are no longer seen as individual people, with unique intelligences, but are defined by a job code — Mr. Lloyd, you will now be known as Web Application Developer II.
This code determines everything for the employee from what they can earn, to where they can sit, to the tasks that they are approved to perform. To be efficient, everyone has to get stuffed into a pre-defined box the determines their common intelligence.
This means that we miss out on Mr. Lloyd’s unique talents, unique ability, unique perspective of the world because all Mr. Lloyd can be is a Web Application Developer II. Even if Mr. Lloyd attempts to break out of his pre-defined box, he won’t be successful, he will be labeled as a troublemaker, management will have to keep an even closer eye on him or else his uniqueness may start coming out and we simply can’t have that in our super optimized, highly efficient corporation.
And while putting employees into pre-defined boxes may create efficiencies, may help businesses “scale”, are we comfortable with the costs?
Dehumanizing employees.
Missing out on incredible ideas.
Regressing to the mean.
Being ordinary.
While i understand the extreme challenges with scaling businesses, i will never understand scaling strategies that are known to dehumanize employees. There simply has to be a better way.
