Using All The Available Talent

Someone told me this story recently and I listened to it I found myself wondering how often know-how and learning in a company is not shared because of a lack of expectation or management support. As I listened I found myself wonder just how a company could exist when it was only getting a fraction of the potential from its staff. Let me tell you the story as it was told to me.

The person had been head hunted to join an important department in the company. He created his first strategy paper and submitted it to the manager. It came back with many corrections almost to the point of being unreadable. He thought it was a case of a difference of style so made the corrections and resubmitted it. Again it came back with lots of corrections on it. He was standing at the coffee machine looking rather glum when someone in the department asked what was wrong. He shared how he had submitted the strategy paper and it had come back with lots of red on it and even when he updated it, it had yet again come back with lots of red on it. The person listening broke out into a smile, “The first thing you have to learn in this department is that the boss doesn’t think anyone can do the job as well as he can so no matter how good the paper is he will rewrite it and rewrite it until you can’t recognise it and it is almost as if he had written it in the first place. Do what the rest of do, create something that is good enough, submit it and let him work himself to death redrafting it”.

In organisation clever people are hired but do we always listen to them? Or as someone said recently, “we don’t know at which level the good ideas are being squashed”. When I asked about it he suggested that the company couldn’t possibly be hiring people who were obviously smart and yet they were still doing things the way they had always done them.

Knowledge is like any other resource, it needs to be nurtured, if you ignore it, it will wither and die. If you are a line manager or perhaps an executive, what are you doing to ensure that the situation that I recalled above isn’t happening in your organisation and you are allowing staff to operate on two cylinders rather than four.


Knoco Ltd