RELEVANCE IS PARAMOUNT

Best workplaces

BY Prasenjit Bhattacharya

Is your business structured to create relevance for high performers and are you motivating them to learn faster even if their capacity to learn is varied? This is what I learnt about being relevant in a company.

I worked for a company that manufactured industrial motors and our sales structure was divided into four regions with west being the largest. Our second line of command in all the regions was very strong and the young sales managers reporting to the regional sales heads routinely exceeded their targets.

So we decided to do away with the regional sales head posts for the north, south and east, and granted an enhanced role to the sales managers of these regions who had to report directly to the head of sales in the west who was redesignated as the National Head of Sales.

Instead of being happy with their enhanced roles and anticipated higher compensation, the sales managers – with the exception of one who went on to progress in the company – were quite disgruntled.

One manager began complaining about everything in the company and finally, he was asked to leave. Another’s performance crashed quite suddenly because without supervision, he was spending too much time helping out with his family business.

So why do good people fail when they’re rewarded for their performance with larger roles? Or become detractors who talk ill of the organisation that gave them the opportunity to grow?

In this case, the reason was simple…

The supply chain management of this company was in disarray and the regional sales heads would spend too much time sorting out delivery issues with the head of distribution. Nobody prepared the sales managers and explained their role in this process. Furthermore, they also didn’t have the capacity to deal with the head of distribution who was related to the owner.

Meanwhile, without the regional heads, some of them started taking shortcuts for standard processes like order bookings, invoicing and collections. These were previously being reviewed by the regional heads. People were given greater responsibilities without adequate preparation. The organisation also didn’t realise that its costly senior regional sales heads were compensating for the lack of a well-oiled distribution and delivery service.

The lesson here is for both the individual and company.

Individuals can view the lack of adequate business support as an opportunity or exploitation, and this has a direct impact on their engagement and careers. Organisations invest time focussing on engagement and attrition. Senior managers and human resource leaders often forget that the most important contribution to one’s employees is relevance rather than engagement.

Your high performers will stay with the company if you help them to stay relevant. Everything else – such as compensation, career and recognition – will follow only if they have relevance.

Engagement without relevance therefore, isn’t sustainable.

Good companies will always create opportunities for relevant high performers and if you’re a manager, you can help high performing team members by transforming the opportunity to be relevant into one of actually being relevant.