Give Me Your Superstars
November 14th, 2006[ Office Gossip ]
I’ve spent years mouthing off about how important the systems and environment around a companies people are. I used to work the argument from the improvement angle, let’s improve our systems in order to get more out of our people. Stereotypical manager types are tough to convince of this and tend to take the ‘few bad apples’ approach to explaining away any problems.
Next I moved to the ‘give me your bad apples’ approach. Give me your supposed rejects and I’ll work the environment around them and shape them into A players. That still didn’t seem to convey the point.
Of late, I’ve landed on this one. Give me your A players, your superstars and let me run the environment around them. I guarantee you I can ruin your A team within months. Not only that, I promise to only use techniques that are published, acceptable HR techniques and practices within the world’s top 50 software companies.
All of the above are simply meant to illustrate that the talent myth is just that. Getting a company to allow me to prove it is another thing. Hey, this has TV show written all over it!