Why is proper placement such an important issue? Are you placing your people in positions that provide for career growth? Are your people working at or above their level of competence? Does the organization’s culture support leading edge thinking in all disciplines or is it just satisfied in meeting its competition? Do you energize your employees to go for the gold? Why do some of your best and brightest fail to meet expectations? These questions need to be considered seriously as you take over the managing of your department. You’re in the process of building an effective department not only for today but also for the future. The organization has a major investment in your staff and thus part of your responsibility is to make sure that it continues to provide the competencies now and in the future.
While there are no simple answers to these concerns and questions, we do know that unless managers raise expectations people have a tendency to become comfortable and lose interest, and then their energy tends to wane. Unless there is a continual emphasis on personal improvement, performance will decrease. Group performance will decline unless each manager strives to place people in positions that allow for growth. Of course the expectations need to be in line with the available resources and the organization’s objectives. The process begins by providing specific assignments for growth to people who have the basic competence but need to acquire additional knowledge and experience to be professionally fit for the future’s more challenging assignments.
Managers enhance career growth by providing new opportunities. Every new opportunity affords new experiences. In today’s world, where so much emphasis is placed on specialization, it becomes even more important to provide new opportunities in related disciplines or subdisciplines. Segmentation of disciplines and overspecialization in a subdiscipline eventually leads to obsolescence, and the knowledge and expertise of that subdiscipline are no longer required. The time to prevent obsolescence begins long before it occurs, which is one more of your responsibilities as the manager.
We all begin our careers in some particular discipline. As we progressed in that discipline to become professionals we encountered many other disciplines that played a major role in our performance and that of the organization. During that period we should have learned something not only about the needs of those other disciplines but also how to make the necessary accommodations. As an example, marketing and product development groups continually find themselves in contentious relationships and too often to the detriment of the organization. Marketers and engineers do not think the same way. Engineers want specifics, marketers want flexibility. Marketers complain about the engineers’ obstinacy in disregarding their marketing requirements; engineers complain that marketing can never define the product requirements. Both groups are right and both groups are wrong.
From the engineers’ point of view, marketing comes to them with the customers’ wants or needs, with limited information to justify assigning the resources and with impossible delivery dates. Marketing seldom meets with the people who would actually be using the new product. When asked for evidence of the need and the specifics, they have little to present. Marketing can seldom make sales forecasts on new products or services with sufficient accuracy for the engineers; they’re either high or low but seldom right. 3M’s Post-it Notes provide an excellent example; marketing initially didn’t think the product had any possibilities.
From the marketers’ point of view, engineers often try to introduce more bells and whistles than marketing suggests. They refuse to change the scope of the project once it has been finalized. Engineers want to use the latest technologies when the latest technologies really provide no short- or long-term benefit. Engineers want too many details and get caught up in the minutiae and forget about the big picture.
So how do you bring these marketers and engineers or any other two or more groups together to resolve their differences and reduce the countless hours of misplaced effort? As a rule, marketers know little if anything about engineering and engineers know little or nothing about marketing. An exchange of positions would be a possible solution but would most likely end with disastrous consequences for the organization. In my career I have been on both sides of this divide. The solution is simple. Start bringing people together from different functions. In this case, send the engineers out in the field with the marketers to gain first-hand knowledge from the customers. In many situations engineers can ask the right questions and gain insight into the use of the new product or suggest modification to a current product. Let the marketers spend some time with the engineers in developing the conceptual models of the new product. They need not be technically competent. They only need to be able to translate the customers’ needs and their thoughts to the engineers.
Bringing marketing and engineering together begins with selecting the two people who have the best chance of demonstrating what can be accomplished when people work toward a common goal. You don’t necessarily need your best marketer or best engineer. Select the people who have some people skills and can find a common interest. As a manager you have a responsibility to bring those isolated silos together. Will it take time? Yes. Will it be difficult? Probably. But it’s worth a try.
There is another approach if the organization’s top management believes in multidisciplinary involvement. As a young engineer I was expected to attend several of the organization’s trade shows and do booth duty and face the satisfied and unsatisfied customers just as my counterparts in marketing and sales were doing. This gave me face-to-face contact with people who used the product and told me in no uncertain terms what they liked and disliked about it and the organization. What an educational experience. What an audience from which to get new ideas about meeting customer needs and developing a network for providing feedback.
This example basically says to let each person walk in the other’s shoes to gain some idea of the problems. They really don’t have to walk very far. Give them an opportunity to understand the limitations and restrictions under which each works. Don’t try to make engineers out of marketers and marketers out of engineers, just focus them on getting an understanding of each other’s requirements.
While this example uses the introduction of a new product in an industrial setting, the same principles apply to all activities in academia, government, and other not-for-profit organizations. The academic community and government, like industry, are made up of independent silos called departments that are essentially autonomous. Each department has its own agenda. Occasionally groups will join forces. Academic departments operate independently with little if any concern for the greater system called the university. Government agencies seldom cooperate in joint ventures that would provide improved services or reduce costs. Attempting to convince a group of academicians to focus on a problem from a system perspective rarely occurs. Many governmental decisions focus on some single issue and totally disregard the impact on other entities. The not-for-profit organizations crosscut many different interests and operate within their own independent silos; fund raising, operations, future directions, and so on.