From today’s excellent ERE.net article Employees Are Not Assets:

Employees As Investors

One of our problems is that we think of employees as assets, or things we control and dispose of as we see fit. Unfortunately, this characterization leads to behaviors that are incompatible with reality. Employees cannot be owned, taxed, depreciated, or disposed of as machines or other tangible assets.

They are investors in our organizations and they freely choose to share their expertise and skills with us or not. Each employee has a built-in return on investment meter that is constantly sampling the atmosphere and deciding if she is gaining or losing from a continuing association with the firm. As long as employees feel they are gaining, they don’t look for different jobs.

But in this job market, whenever the balance shifts even slightly, employees become vulnerable to any offer that may present itself. That is why having managers who have a history of good employee loyalty and low turnover are so valuable.

I think the author makes a great point in the context of today’s talent demands.  He couches the article around the need to allow employees to have positional movement within your company.  It is a compelling argument.

The key here is to monitor your manager’s retention rate within his department and within the company (do employees want to stay with the company but get out of that dept.?).

About 5 years ago we worked with a large company who had many sales managers within its divisions.  It was quite clear which managers were adept at growing their people and retaining top talent.  There was one manager who was able to retain his “right-hand man” and nobody else – his department was a consistent turnstile.  After our first meeting with him, it became quite apparent why this was.

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I posted on these automated response programs recently. Well, I just received a different promo email for a more “automated” program:

For the first time, there’s a service that finds 100’s of perfectly matched, available jobs & instantly applies to them FOR YOU, every day. It’s called __________ and it automatically: searches all the top career sites at once, finds all new jobs matching your criteria, applies with your resume to matching jobs, personalizes your cover letter for each application & provides a history report of jobs you’ve been applied to.

Keyword-driven connections – both in the ad and the resume hunt – lead to, well, candidate spam. At times I wonder if the attempt to automate resume submissions and applicant tracking systems dilutes the entire process.

I know it does for sales. We need to see the applicant’s approach, listen to his or her abilities and observe how they handle pressure. None of these tasks can be easily accomplished with an automated approach process.

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This week’s trait is one that measures a salesperson’s ability to remain detached from an emotionally-charged situation.  Sales requires a cool, level-headed approach even in instances where emotions are high.  We highly value salespeople who can keep their personal self detached from their work self.

Internal Self Control
This is the ability to maintain a steady and controlled level of internal emotion in a stressful or emotionally charged situation. Although it directly affects self-composure in a difficult situation, this capacity is more an examination of a person€™s tendency to allow the external environment€™s level of stress to affect their internal levels. If Internal Self Control deals with an ability to keep outside emotions out, Emotional Control deals with keeping internal emotions in.

A salesperson with strength in this capacity will be better able to keep his or her internal level of emotion (stress, excitement, fear, etc.) unaffected by external influence. A good example would be an emergency room physician. They must continually prevent the strong emotions of those whom they treat from interfering with their thought process. They must be able to separate themselves from the outside emotions involved and logically deal with the situation at hand.

A salesperson with weakness in this area may have difficulty accomplishing this separation.  Instead of isolating outside emotions as those of others, they over empathize and allow themselves to become emotionally charged in the same manner. They do not separate themselves well and may instead become caught up in the excitement, fear, sorrow, etc.

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