How To Manage Your Most talented People

Executive Summary

Contrary to what we have been to believe in recent years, companies are not utterly at the mercy of their highly creative and smart people. In most cases, clever people need the organization as much as the organization needs them. That’s the good news. The bad news is that all the resources and system in the world are useless unless we have clever people to make the most of them; they know very well that you must employ them to get their knowledge and skill.

Top executives today nearly all recognized the importance of having smart and creative people on staff. But attracting them is only half the battle.You must not only attract talent but also foster an environment in which your clever people are inspired to achieve their fullest potential in a way that produces wealth and value for our stakeholder.

From my career experience, I have met this type of people. I start my career at PT. Kalbe Farma as one of the IT staff. One year later, I received promotion at supervisory level and had 3 staff as my sub ordinate. I find no problem leading them because I much older than them and much more experience. But when I moved to PT. Indofood and recently to Rentokil Initial Indonesia, I found myself in a position to lead staff that much more senior and had a lot more experience than me.

This is not an easy job. If clever people have one defining characteristics, it is that they do not want to be led. This clearly created a problem for us as their leader. And with globalization, the challenge has only become greater than before. Globalization means they have more opportunities. They’re not waiting around for their pensions; they know their value and they expect us to know it to.

Using Organizational Behavior theoretical framework, I will try to find the best management approach to answer this question. How do you manage this kind of people who don’t want to be led and may be smarter than you?

Things You Need To Know about Clever People.

When we join an organization from the middle level, we probably will found our self in position of leading a team that consist of senior people in the organization and possibly had more experience than you.I had this experience in the two latest career I had; at Indofood I must lead a team of very senior and professional development people to work on a project and at Rentokil I found myself in the middle role of an IT Operational unit with staff that already work over 10 years in the organization and had a great professional knowledge.

From organizational perspective I try to find out some characteristics of this highly skilled and senior people. I believe if I can found out more about their characters, I can response better and greatly increase my leadership values.

First of all, I will try to find out why they seems very difficult to lead and sometime it looks like they can do something to impact more than me. From organizational behavior we can found out that there is 6 type of power in an organization:

a.Legitimate, is the capacity to influence others through formal authority.

b.Reward, is derived from a person’s ability to control the allocation of rewards valued by others and to remove negative sanctions (Negative Reinforcement).

c.Coercive, is the ability to apply punishment.

d.Expert, this power mainly originate from the within each person. It is an individual’s or work unit’s capacity to influence others by possessing knowledge or skills that they value.

e.Referent, people have referent power when others identify with them, like them or otherwise respect them. Like expert power, referent power comes from within a person.

f.Information, there is two form for information as power. First, people gain information power when they control the flow of information to others. These information gate keepers can alter perceptions of the situation and restrict information as resource that others need to accomplish their work. Second, information power is higher for those who seem to be able to cope with organizational uncertainties.

When you are appointed into a position, automatically you are granted the power of legitimate and possibility some level of reward power.On the other hand, clever people automatically will have expert power and in some cases referent power if they already worked in the organization for a long time.

This fact makes sometime clever people that work as your staff had more power in the organization than you. And this fact combined with the nature attitude of your staff will make them very difficult to manage or at least makes you think that they will be difficult to manage.

According to Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, both researchers at Harvard University, leaders should be aware of the characteristics most of clever people share, which collectively make them a difficult crew to manage.

1.They knowtheir worth
The tacit skills of clever people are closer to those of medieval guilds than to the standardized and communicable skill that characterized the industrial revolution. This means you can’t transfer the knowledge without the people

2.They are organizationally savvy
Clever people will find the company context in which their interests will be most generously funded. If the funding dried up, they have a couple of options: They can move on to a place where resources are plentiful or they can dig in and engage in elaborate politics to advance their pet projects.

3.They ignore corporate hierarchy
If you seek to motivate clever people with titles or promotion, you will probably be met with cold distain. But don’t assume this means they don’t care about status.

4.They expect instant access
Clever people usually hope that because of their job and skill they will have instant access

They are well connected
Clever people are usually plugged into highly developed knowledge network; who they know is often as important as what they know. These networks both increase their value to the organization and make them more of a flight risk. MSDN Community for example is a community of highly skilled people with computer application development background.

6.They have low boredom threshold
In an era of employee mobility, if you don’t engage your clever people intellectually and inspire them with organizational purpose, they will walk out the door.

7.They won’t thank you
Even when you’re leading them well, clever people will be unwilling to recognize your leadership. Remember, these creative individuals feel that they don’t need to be led. Measure your success by your ability to remain on the fringes of their radar.

Clever people want a high degree of organizational protection and recognition that their job and idea are important. They also demand the freedom to explore and fail. They expect their leaders to be intellectually on their plan – but they do not want the leader’s talent outshine their own. Clearly the physiological relationship that leader will have with their clever people is different from the one they have with traditional follower.

What can we do to lead them?

To lead a team of clever people first of all we need to gain their trust on us and on what we believe in. To build this team the best type of team building we can use is interpersonal process type of team building. In this process, all team members will learn to continually manage constructively their relationship with each other, solve conflict and work on weakness of other team member.

To gain and build their trust, you must get into the second level of leadership or higher. As John C. Maxwell mention in his books, we can divide leadership into 5 levels that is:

a.Position, people follow because they have to.

b.Permission, people follow because they want to.

c.Production, people follow because what had you done to the organization.

d.People Development, people follow because what you had done for them.

e.Personhood, people follow because who you are.

If you are a new member in an organization and you are not someone famous of your expertise, you must work your way up from position level to permission level or higher. And to lead a clever people as your staff you need them to let you lead them. It’s mean that you must as soon as possible raise your leadership value in front of your staff.

From this understanding now I will try to formulize a couple of things that we can do to gain their trust and let us lead them, harness and develop their talent.

1.Give them protection from organizational politics.
Organizational politics by definition are behavior that others perceive as self-serving tactics for personal gain at the expense of other people and possibly the organization. Given their mind set, clever people see an organization’s administrative machinery as distraction from their key value adding activities. In most cases they tend to avoid office politics and even hate everything about it.

2.Keep the rules & procedures simple.
Having them protected from corporate politics is necessary but not sufficient. It’s also important to minimize the politics by creating an atmosphere in which rules and norm are simple and universally accepted.The organizational behavior theory stated that organizational politics flourished under the right condition. One sure condition is the scarcity of resources inside the organization. The conditions that fuel organizational politics also give us some clues about how to control these activities. One strategy to minimize and create the atmosphere needed for us to lead clever people is to introduce clear and simple rules to specify the use of the limited resources.

Savvy leaders take steps to streamline rules and to promote a culture that values simplicity. Free our clever people from administrative task are one of example.

3.Keep them informed to key development of the organizations & its business.
Even though clever people are tend to ignore the corporate politics, it doesn’t means that they don’t want to know everything about the organization or about what happens in the organizations.

By telling them what transparently everything they need to know about the organization will make them feel they are part of the organization and everything that happens inside it.

There are other advantages on if you do this to your people. Because when you give transparent information that your employees need to know, it will decrease communication misinterpretation among your employees.

4.Sincere appreciation to their jobs and talent.
Most clever people are quick to recognize insincerity and response badly at it. And I think almost everyone can recognize if someone give insincere appreciation to them. When there are issues or things that need to be worked out, straightforward dialogue is important, out of respect for their intellectual capability.

5.Let them take the initiative
To become a smart leader, we must also realize that sometime the best ideas don’t always come from defined company projects. They enable their clever people to pursue private efforts because they know there will be payoff for the company, some direct (new business opportunities) and some indirect (ideas that can be applied to the workplace). Google is the most recent sample of this culture.From the book published about google entitled “The Google Way” we learn that employees at google may spend one day a week on their own start up ideas. The result is innovation at a speed that puts bureaucratic organizations to shame. A lot of google’s features we enjoy today is started as one of the employees personal project.

6.Show them your credibility
Although it’s important to make our clever people feel independent and special, it’s equally important to make sure they recognize their interdependence.We and other people in the organizations can do things that they can’t. They may over estimate their cleverness in their area, so we must show that we are competent to help them. To do this we must clearly demonstrate that we are expert in our own area either supplementary or complementary to our clever people expertise.

But we must also be careful not over doing it and not to de-motivate our clever people.

7.Support and motivate them especially when they face failure
It’s easy to accept necessity of failure in theory, but each failure represents a setback for the clever people who gambled on it. Smart leader will help their clever people to live with their failure. Smart leader must provide support, providing them with space and helping them to move on the new project and life goes on.

8.Build a relationship with them
Many executives who attempt to foster trust, optimism, and consensus often reap anger, cynicism, and conflict instead. That’s because they have difficulty relating to others, especially those who don’t make sense of the world the way they do. Traditional images of leadership didn’t assign much value to relating. Flawless leaders shouldn’t need to seek counsel from anyone outside their tight inner circle, the thinking went, and they were expected to issue edicts rather than connect on an emotional level. Times have changed, of course, and in this era of networks, being able to build trusting relationships is a requirement of effective leadership. Some action that you can do to achieve this relationship are:

a.Spend time trying to understand others perspectives, listening with an open mind and without judgment.

b.Encourage others to voice their opinions. What do they care about? How do they interpret what’s going on? Why?

c.Before expressing your ideas, try to anticipate how others will react to them and how you might best explain them.

d.When expressing your ideas, don’t just give a bottom line; explain your reasoning process.

e.Assess the strengths of your current connections: How well do you relate to others when receiving advice? When giving advice? When thinking through difficult problems? When asking for help?

f.Pay attention to how you communicate.

From my experience, the bottom line for all of our effort is creating relationships with your talented people. Don’t try to be a perfect leader for them, because no leader is perfect. The best even don’t try to be one. They concentrate on honing their strengths and find others who can make up for their limitations. And keep in mind that in the organization there is no boss. We all hired by the organization to work for them so even you got higher position in the organization it doesn’t mean that you can boss your staff around.

Summary

As corporate business need clever people to run their business, so does clever people need corporate business to develop their potential. It’s not an easy task for the leader of the corporate business to balance this matter to form a mutually beneficial relationship for both parties. But one thing is sure that to do this we need a leader that can became a mediator for both parties, mediator that able to build and gain trust to lead all of them and their talent aligned into corporate purposes and operation.

Martin Sorrel (Saatchi & Saatchi, 1975) once comment “If you want them to turn right, tell them to go left”. His comment reveals an important truth about managing clever people. If you try to push them, you will end up driving them away. As many leaders of extremely smart and highly creative people have learned, you need to be a benevolent guardian rather than traditional boss. You need to create a safe environment, encourage them to experiment and even fail, and quietly demonstrate your expertise and authority all the while.

One thing that I remember is leadership is like a jigsaw puzzle, every one of us got all the part we need. The problem is how we can arrange them into the complete picture of our leadership.