Developing the Unambitious
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By “unambitious” I mean the people in your team who deliver consistently and who you have no complaints about because you know they give you 100%, but are happy to stop there and to stay in their current position. Unfairly, I often hear other words for them too – for example Plodders, Steady Eddies or worse.
You see, the thing is, I really like these people – and I believe your organisation should too. It’s tempting to see them as second-class workers – but actually they are the backbone of your team. Day in day out they deliver and get the job done for you.
But the question is – how do you develop someone who just wants to turn up, do their job, and go home?
One answer that is worth considering is whether you have to develop them at all. Often what you will find with this group of people is that they come to work for other reasons. Apart from earning money, it may be to feel needed, to have their expertise valued, or to engage with other people. So if you force them to undertake development they don’t want to do, you may find they start to deliver less than 100% for you.
If they do want to be developed, there are four things you can do that will help:
- Understand their motivation. There is often a reason why they have chosen to be in the group we would call “on track talent” – people who work to live rather than live to work. For example there could be family priorities, they could be focused on community or outside interests, it could be that they’re new to the job and cautious about what they take on, or it could be that they’ve got a temporary challenge in their life that is uppermost in their thoughts. What role does work play in their life? What makes them happy at work? By finding the answer to these questions you can understand how to tailor development towards them.
- Review their performance. In most organisations, as time moves on, the expected level of performance gets raised. This is a real struggle for some people in this group – they have to find a way of delivering more all of the time. As well as being demotivating, it can really frustrate them and make them resistant to changes you want to introduce. So review their performance regularly, ensure that their contribution is recognised, and help them understand what they need to do to keep up.
- Offer regular praise. This is especially important when you see the kind of improvement that you know is valuable. It’s good that they see you’ve noticed their successes, but it’s especially important to praise work that takes them in the direction you’ve asked them to pursue.
- Keep them open to change. The real challenge in this group is that they often don’t see the need to do things in a different way and become very resistant to change. Their aim is to come in, do their job in the way they know how, and then leave work for the day – and they don’t feel the need to change that. The danger is that they can become “fossilised” – and this creates the danger that by resisting incremental change, they get all the change it once – in the form of redundancy. So the trick is to establish an expectation that they will spend a couple of hours each week learning to do something they don’t already know. Slowly drip feed small changes rather than make abrupt changes to the way they need to work. This will help keep them supple and responsive – and open to the changes that you are trying to make.
There is a real temptation to see people who “work to live” negatively. This is partly down to the fact that, as ambitious managers, we can’t understand why they’re not ambitious too. But recognise that when they do their job well, you get an awful lot of value out of them. These people give your team and the company stability; where your ambitious people give it agility.