Ask the Geezers

Where Did My Senior People Go?

Question: The senior people that I develop within my team tend to leave for other teams within the company. Even though it is not impacting the company's overall interest, it is greatly undermining my own team. I invest a lot to develop the staff but I never get to reap the benefits. And the team's productivity is being compromised since we are always developing people but we never have senior people to help out. How can I get to keep a relatively stable pool of the senior people?

Amiram: I see a few issues here. One is that some people get their training in one team, and then look for other challenges in other teams WITHIN the company. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The other issue is that for some reason, the manager of this team is not able to provide the challenges necessary for more senior people. I would add that there's a possibility about the nature of the work, which possibly requires junior people.....

In terms of advice, I would suggest one of the following: either provide room for people to grow, have challenges for more senior people, or continue to provide this great service for the company: educate and train junior staff so they can assume larger responsibility in different teams. I knew at least one manager who used to have this problem. One day she decided to be proud of the fact that she was so successful in training junior people, that they became very desirable to other teams. That's not such a bad forte...

Mike: It is a problem but also a good sign from the standpoint that other teams at Sun find the people in this group attractive. A team gets a good reputation when it delivers good employees. No one would want to work with a team that never produces good people.

Sun is not a place where we expect that people will stay at one job forever anyway. If we look at the overall attrition rate and transfer rate that we have started monitoring among the Solaris group recently, the average time people stay at their last position before the job change is about one to two years. It doesn't represent the average length of time that people at Sun spend on one position over the years, but it says it is not uncommon for people to move around within the company.

For managers: We need to be prepared for this kind of environment where people are interested in learning and doing new things, particularly at a site where people are relatively junior in terms of experience and skills. In my experience, at a young site where more opportunities are being created, the length of time that people stay in one position is shorter than that at a site with a longer history.

I agree that it could hurt the team when too many people move too often. But we can't tell people that they can't move, because it is in Sun's best interest to support people's growth. People will leave if they think that is the only way to advance their career. What a manager can do is to create opportunities for people to grow, recognize and support people's career interests and make sure your team sees that their manager is watching out for their long-term interest.

On the other hand, my advice as a hiring manager to the individual employees is while we definitely support job changes at Sun, they should avoid getting the reputation as a job jumper. Otherwise, future hiring managers may not be interested in them..

Sin-Yaw: It is not fair that you don't get to harvest the fruits of your labor. And you get to watch someone else do that! How frustrating! There are two ways to deal with this: first is to understand that everyone in society enjoys the fruits of someone else's labor. Sometimes you give more than you take, and sometimes it is the other way around. If you stop giving, being bitter about this, you will not really enjoy life much.

Then, you can be more skilled in retaining senior talents. People choose jobs for relatively simple reasons: personal relationship, job satisfaction, future perspective, and financial needs. Senior people have different priorities than junior people. You may have been focusing too much on attracting junior people, who typically value "future" and "peer relationship" more -- your effort in developing them is highly appreciated.

Most senior people look for job satisfaction that comes from being able to innovate and having autonomy. Most importantly, getting the respect and recognition that they earned with years of hard work. In other words, you need to withdraw and give them the stage and lime light.

Lastly, it may be that your organization is simply a "feeder" group that people typically use as a stepping stone for other opportunities. Be proud of that and use it to your advantages. You can motivate staff with it and establish rapport with other "recipient managers" to place your talents in favorable positions.

Posted at 08:54AM Apr 28, 2007 by Wen Michelle Lei in Career Development  |  Comments[2]

When Opportunities Knock...

Question: Please help me to make a choice. I have two team members who are in very similar positions. They have similar education backgrounds, similar technical skills and communication skills. They both have the potential to develop into senior engineers. Now there is an opportunity for someone to take on more responsibility, deal with bigger challenges and learn more advanced skills. The one that doesn't get it this time will have to wait around for similar things to come up next time. How should I decide which one to pick this time?

Amiram: Let's start with a disclaimer. If indeed the two engineers are identical in all aspects, then the only way to make a fair decision will be arbitrary or random. However, it is extremely unlikely that two independent persons are identical. Even identical twins aren't identical. Therefore, the only way to make an informed decision is to use more criteria. You have mentioned education, technical skills, communication, potential. What about ratings, teamwork, actual deliverable, published papers, patents, coaching of others, curiosity, ability and willingness to explore, problem solving, elegance of solutions, quality, productivity..

Prepare a table with as many criteria as you need, rate the two engineers 1-5 in each criteria, and if you still have a draw - expand the criteria until you get a satisfactory answer. Otherwise, throw a dice.

Mike: You can deal with this as if you were hiring someone. Look at what the opportunity needs and the job characteristics required for someone to be successful at the position. By matching the candidates against the job requirements, I can almost guarantee that the two people wouldn't come out equally.

In general the people that are busiest are the ones that can take on more responsibilities. So pick the one that produces the most.

Sin-Yaw: The best opportunity a manager can give to an engineer is the freedom to innovate, not an assignment that appears to be popular at the time. The best engineer is the one who out-innovates others and has the tenacity to see things through. If both are good engineers, tell both of them to come up with good ideas and, equally important, a plan to prototype and productize the ideas. You then fund the better plan (not the better idea) and give the "opportunity" you talk about to the other one.

Posted at 10:25PM Apr 20, 2007 by Wen Michelle Lei in Career Development  |  Comments[0]