Mobility and performance

Traditional view holds that from the perspective of an individual the best approach to career development is to move positions every three to five years. Less than three years and you will come across as an organization climber who will most likely have not had enough time to actually pick up the experience or the skills of the previous position. Or worse yet, fast moving individuals may move fast because they get canned as soon as it becomes apparent that they are little more than hot air.

But stick around in a position for much more than five years and very often development on a personal level grinds to a halt. I had the pleasure of serving two steps underneath a brilliant boss for a while and he held the view that you should do a single thing three times; on the third time your performance will peak. The rationale is simple. On the first round you have no clue what you're doing. The second time around you have some clue and can formulate a more educated plan. But it is on the third time around that you are able to truly refine the process and will have become increasingly adept in what you are doing. But on the fourth time people tend to get lazy, if we put it in a simplistic fashion. Efficiency and output quality may begin to deteriorate.

So extrapolating from those viewpoints, it is thus fairly logical that it is both in the individual's as well as the organizations' best interest to have individuals move around. But I recently read some interesting bits about why taking this approach too far is also very counterproductive. In a recent article the Economist talked about Barca, the football team, and how it has achieved success while emphasizing on local values and growing its own players, as opposed to using big money to attract high-fliers. The article continues and cites studies which show that successful individuals on Wall Street will very often suffer deteriorating performance when they switch to other organizations. This would then suggest that it may in fact be in the organizations' interest not to necessarily go along with the rapid ascent of individuals.

So, where then is the balance between acquiring fresh blood and new ideas versus cultivating a strong internal culture and values? The counterargument to the culture and value argument is that very often when organizations grow old and large, they tend to begin to detach themselves from the "real" world; they gather inertia, organization builds on top of organization and performance deteriorates. Amusingly enough literature is full of these cases. Just look at any piece of cutting edge management literature from a decade back and skim over the examples of successful firms. My hunch is that most of them will have succumbed and are either in trouble or have already folded. Of course if a company is able to keep its well functioning culture and cultivate it appropriately, superior performance should ensue. But take for instance Google. The question is that has Google already peaked? It may still continue and churn out very hefty profits, but has the rapid recruitment drive already hampered what originally was the coveted Google culture? Have large numbers of employees already lowered the average performance of individuals; has mediocrity taken over the company yet? If not, chances are good that it will in a while. Because examples of this type of dynamic are plentifully around.

Riddle me this...

If every company only hires (according to HR, anyway...) the top-of-the-class, top 1% of the population types, why isn't the unemployment rate at 99% yet?