What is searching for discontinuities? Perhaps the title of my write up here would stir curiosity. I know it may sound vague but coming to think of it, do we face discontinuity every day in life? Isn’t there something that we get used to and we keep wanting different things in life every time? I guess it’s natural for us to be comfortable with something which we craved for and then the living with it takes us to wanting more.
Hey, I am not driving your mind to anything else here, come back and let’s start looking at it from the perspective of an organization and leadership of talents. Just start comprehending the challenges that leaders have in managing the discontinuities of the team’s desires of growth. Then start reading on.
A leader makes himself valuable the moment he keeps searching for the discontinuities of opportunities that his people experiences.
The world outside is where your team is at work, they keep doing the job that you assign them. And they execute your directives. They make things happen for you and they hold your work process intact. What a wonderful place it would be if the team holds everything that you want them to in full spirit. But what do you do to them? Do you provide more opportunities of learning for them or do you close the opportunity of learning once you have put the system, processes and workflow in place?
You would be killing talents if you keep yourself in a comfort zone of your team’s adroitness.
You must find trajectories of new opportunities for learning for your team. You need to keep conceiving and executing different opportunities for your team. The work that your team do for you is not just a job but it’s an experience and one needs to value it as an experience than a mere job or task. A leader must visualise how new opportunities of learning can be developed, how new processes can be incorporated, how one existing process can be reengineered.
The team at a leader’s arms would be diamonds if they are constantly challenged to nearing perfection. In HR (that being my subject of interest), for example, a leader needs to find out how best he can make his team or himself connect to his employees, how well he can make the experience of HR in the minds of employees valuable. Here, I see the needs of people, I mean the employees of your organization discontinuing, leading to a new one constantly. An opportunity that you spot to satisfy the employees discontinues at some point after it has been tapped and another one or extension of what you did emerges soon. Similarly, there is always a discontinuity of learning experience that your team will reach, expressing a new one to you.
Searching for the discontinuities of opportunities in that outer landscape is essential for a leader to keep his team talent on the sharp edge. As a leader you need to have an innate ability to find new ways of doing the routine stuff, better way of nourishing the talents in your team, yielding to the healthier organisation.
Searching the intrinsic talents in your team is another quality that a leader must have and a leader should be challenged with. If you discontinue the search for discontinuities in the world around you, you could soon be an extinction.
The world around you, especially the talents around you keep discontinuing what they needed and keep hoping for new. A leader must keep searching that discontinuities and foresee the next that the talents look out to keep managing them to perfection.
The need to look for best talent and also to look for that talent which thrives for sharpness must be an innate quality in a leader who desires success. One need to visualise the need of business, need of a specific function’s objective and must work towards searching for the talent to tackle that consistently.
I have a tendency to keep falling into HR domain. In HR, for example, the search that a leader should be pursuing is to build the trust in the employees of organization on HR team and he must strive to see all discontinuities in them so that a new opportunity can be created or formed or visualised.
Similarly, you should not leave the talents around you uncared. One need to be intimate with the talents, must know the essence of each individual and then start looking at what is needed for them next to make more experience in their life resulting in betterment of your business, function etc. While you search for the relentless nature of talents, you may come across talents that do not go beyond certain limitations of capabilities and that’s when one need to shed that talent or perhaps direct that talent to somewhere else for better suitability. A tough decision, though, but is essential for a true leader. The moment one’s hunger for more discontinues which rarely happens, and it shouldn’t happen when a leader holds the buzzer button on performance always, the time has reached for searching for new talents.
As leaders look for what the market needs and what market stop needing and what’s going to be their need and drive the business models to meeting the perceived need of a customer much before competition dreams of it, it is essential for a leader to identify the discontinuities of the need in talents around and be close in observing the changes in these talents and drive them to steer new business models to success, else one will face a struggle of having lack of talents to meet the new dream of business.
To put things in simple perspective, all of us have desires to perform and grow so do our team down the line. And the beauty is that the desires discontinue once achieved and experienced to its entirety, giving birth to new desires and wants for more growth. This obviously means a leader has a tough job in observing the discontinuities of career desires of the talents that he has to manage. Thus, he needs to steer his actions towards anticipating the new desires and wants that the talents in his team have so that talent drains do not sabotage the organization.
By Binu Prasad
Beans Off the Pod.. 