The People Cycle

There is a natural life cycle for the people in the business. Broadly, they join, they do stuff, they leave. What can we learn from this, and how can it help us to build aligned, purposeful organisations?

I’m going to suggest that there are three cycles within this, and each cycle has three parts to it. The three cycles are Attraction, Development and Retention.

I'm not going to go through all the details of it here, you can read about it in Change Magic and on the excellerate website anyway. What I will show you is the kinds of questions we ask to understand what's happening in the people cycle and to reveal where it is disconnected:

Attraction: How does your brand attract the people you want?

Recruitment: How do you create and advertise roles that attract the people you want?

Selection: What criteria and assessments select in the people you want?

Induction: How do you induct people into the culture in a way that creates genuine desire for the right people and lets the ‘wrong’ people make a clear choice?

Performance: How do you set and measure objectives in a way that recognises the desired culture and behaviour?

Development: How do we develop and support the right skills and behaviours?

Alignment: How do we align high performing individuals into high performing teams?

Succession: How do we ensure the long term success and stability of the business?

Exit: How do we manage people out of the business as thoughtfully as we brought them in?

Everyone I've spoken to does some of these things well, because they're the activities they focus on. For example, I haven't met anyone yet who puts as much effort into a person's exit from a business as they do their recruitment. You might wonder why you would bother? You might do an exit interview, find they're leaving for more money (which isn't the real reason anyway) and then file that in a drawer somewhere.

What I mean is this: the way that people leave the tribe says a lot about the tribe.

Imagine a floor of financial brokers. The boss comes out of the office, publicly calls out the sales figures, the lowest performer clears his desk and security march him to the door. What does that say to the others?

Now imagine that everyone who leaves has a leaving party or presentation, a card, hugs, "we'll miss you", "you've been a valuable member of the team" and so on. How does that make people feel? And how likely is that person to come back, or to recommend his or her friends to you?

In Mission Impossible 3, the baddie says "You can tell a lot about a person's character by how they treat people they don't have to treat well"

Many managers in many organisations think they don't have to treat people who are leaving very well, because they're leaving. Why should you care about someone who's not going to be around tomorrow? Perhaps because of the message it sends to the people who remain.

I worked for a company once where we had a very good manager, except if he heard the slightest hint that someone was thinking of leaving, he would cut them off completely. He would regard them as disloyal, stop inviting them to meetings, give them a beaten up, second hand company car and so on. Well guess what? People have dreams, they want to get on and do stuff in their lives. And if I can't do that here, what choice do I have? And so, seeing this, other people would keep their career plans very much to themselves, and the first he ever knew about it was when he got the resignation letter.

Another thing to consider is that the team will look to the manager for reassurance that all will be OK after someone has left. The manager needs to show the team is still intact, even when members of the team change.