Who would you like performing your heart surgery: The hospital’s best heart surgeon, or a doctor supervised by the hospital’s best heart surgeon? Healthcare has a process of rewarding newcomers with the opportunity to fail. I have seen this happen over and over, and yes; I have been a contributor.
The specifics can vary but the process goes like this:
Mary is an outstanding therapist. She engages her clients, she has good documentation, and she has days filled with lucrative billable hours. Mary is a good worker, liked and admired by her peers, and has that “gold star” next to her name on the lists of her manager and her manager’s boss. She deserves being rewarded.
To do this, Mary’s manager gets approval to promote her to a supervisory position. This will mean more responsibility for the performance of others, and less therapy. But it is something Mary is happy to accept. She will be earning more money and it advances her career. Eight months later, Mary is terminated because she has failed at her job. Productivity in her staff has fallen, there have been many staff complaints and Mary has been frustrated and disillusioned.
The outcome? The company is losing a once engaged and beloved employee, leaving everyone to wonder how such a wonderful worker ended up failing so badly. How did this go so wrong?
American business is often set up as a pyramid. Line staff are paid the least, with pay going up through various supervisory and management positions, up to the CEO who makes the most money. This is so common and natural that we think nothing of it. It’s just normal procedure to reward a good employee with a promotion. The problem is, not everyone will succeed in a new job. This was pointed out by Dr Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book, The Peter Principle. In it, they showed the concept that people in a hierarchy tend to get promoted for doing a good job into a new position for which they may not have the right skill set. This can result in people, who used to excel, in jobs they cannot manage. In trying to reward excellence, we instead create mediocrity and failure.
I have developed a concept I call “Paying in Place.” The idea is to reward good work the employee is doing right now. If someone is a great therapist, reward her for that. If someone is a great engineer and is vital for your business, reward him for that. It does not have to be raw salary. Maybe there can be some sort of profit sharing as is given to upper management.
The core point is that these engaged and productive employees are vital to your success. In an age when employees are resigning in large numbers, they are the employees you should most want to keep. Of course, this runs directly into the old hierarchy system. Someone managing the team might be paid less than some of its members. Maybe a lot less. You may have someone getting paid more than the CEO herself. But as hierarchies settle in, pay gets linked to position, and the pyramid becomes more and more rigid. Unless the company agrees to “Paying in Place,” local managers have little power to make changes.
To answer the question we started with: I know who I want operating on me. How about you?
Bryan G. Stephens is a former executive on a mission to transform the workplace. He is the founder and CEO of TalkForward, a consulting and training company, utilizing Bryan’s clinical and management expertise to develop managers and teams in a corporate environment. As a licensed therapist with strong understanding of developing human potential, he is dedicated to the development of Human Capital to meet the needs of leaders, managers, and employees in the 21st Century workplace.
Bryan has an Executive MBA from Kennesaw State University, Coles School of Business, and both a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Psychology.
