Engage the best people: Lessons from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

As the “father of management” Peter Drucker pointed out, 21 century is the century of knowledge economy. For a business to thrive in such economy, the most important capital is not physical nor fiscal but human. Who can recruit and retain the best minds in town will be the winner of the game.

Even in an economical downturn like now, while the unemployment rate in United States has gone over 10%, talented people still have plenty of opportunities awaiting them and they ARE making the move. They are not scared of the weak job market. They don’t care about the job security. Because they have a totally different needs than people who are worrying about keeping their jobs in the hard time.

The great psychologist, Abraham Maslow, published a famous theory called “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs” more than 50 years ago in 1943. That theory reveals to us the fundamental and universal human needs.

This theory organizes human needs into five categories, physical, safety, love/belonging, esteem and self-actualization.

Physiological: breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion

Safety: security of body, of employment, of resources, of morality, of the family, of health, of property

Love/Belonging: friendship, family, sexual intimacy

Esteem: respect of others, respect by others

Self-actualization: morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts

These needs are predetermined in that order of importance, often depicted as a pyramid. “The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are met. Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level, needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized. If a lower set of needs is no longer being met, the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs, but will not permanently regress to the lower level.”

In another words, if we would like to engage and motivate talented people, we have to satisfy ALL their needs, from low level to high level.

Here are some examples what tips we can use to satisfy various levels of needs of the talented employees:

• Physiological:
  • No sex harassment
  • Comfortable work environment
  • Pay fairly with a good compensation strategy
• Safety:
  • Play by rule, set the clear boundary at the first place
  • No finger pointing, don’t blame good will
  • Award creativity,
• Love/Belonging:
  • Treat people nicely – Equally, Flexibility of work time, Respect, Intimacy (friendship, family), Fairly
  • Team atmosphere: Create the team (physical tokens, like flags, songs, rituals e.g. weekly meeting), Inclusive, Sharing, Help each other, Protection from outside blames
• Esteem
  • Establish ownership: Specialist, Owner of an functional area, responsibilities, Expertise
  • Contribution: being listened, participated in decision making
• Self-actualization
  • Challenge: Throw challenging works
  • Vision: Clear vision of the future, whole picture
  • Progress: Career path, growth planning, achievements, honors, awards
  • Honor: External feedbacks, Marketing, Ads.

Most importantly, a good manager should assess the right level of needs of his individual team mates. Some people may not be paid fairly. Some are paid well but may be worried about his/her job security. Some may feel safe but may feel isolated and doesn’t belong to the team. Others feel loved but not respected. He/she would like to participant in the decision making process. More senior people may feel stagnant in career and would like to move upwards.

An important aspect of the Maslow’s theory is that satisfied need won’t motivate people any more. Only the unsatisfied needs motivate. That’s why understanding people’s level of needs is the key. Continuing to tend to the low level needs after they are satisfied, e.g. raising the salaries after they are already above market level, won’t help. In the meanwhile, neglecting the lower level needs is also dangerous. Putting a lot of responsibilities to an under-paid employee is a fool-proof recipe to get a resignation letter on your desk.

The talented people are the most valuable assets to our organization. Retaining them requires open conversation with them to find out their needs and thoughtful efforts to satisfy their needs. Maslow’s theory is there to help.

Failed Integration – Orchestra without a conductor

I was listening to the Berlin Philharmonic playing Brahms Symphony No. 3 & No. 4 in Carnegie Hall last Friday night. While I was indulged completely in the beautiful harmony of the music, suddenly I thought about the frustrations I encountered day after day dealing with the Integration of the different IT applications for our company. How I wish those IT systems and the IT teams support them can work flawlessly and in total harmony just like this piece of music! And right at that moment, I realized the key problem here. It’s not because we don’t have the world’s greatest players. It’s because we don’t have a conductor who understand not only all the instruments but also the overall music!

We have a Portal team that develops and maintains our company Portal. We have another team in charge of the application that handles single sign one, authentication and authorization. We have multiple teams who maintains IT applications that specialize in some business functions. We are talking about dozens of IT applications and hundreds of servers. But, that’s the least complicate part.

The most daunting factor is the organization structure. Each application team at least has an analyst team, a develop team, a testing/QA team, and a deployment/configuration management team. On top of that, we have multiple hosting centers, some centralized and some decentralized system engineer, network engineer and DBA teams, various types of technical support teams, performance testing team, capacity planning team, etc. And they are located all over the world in various time zones.

Our goal is to glue everything together, hide all the complexities and give our customer a single entry point for all the business functions they need. This task is certainly no less complicate than the Berlin Philharmonic’s job of delivering Brahms to New York audience.

I can feel that each team is doing their best to make their parts of the system working. Everybody want to do a good job in their own scope. But, nobody really knows how the whole system is glued together, especially the nitty-gritty details. So, whenever an issue happened, people started with saying “It’s not my fault so it’s not my problem” and continued with finger pointing. After several rounds of finger pointing, the right person who know the right details will be dug out. He or she will simply fix the problem in 5 minutes. But it’s never his or her problem since he or she doesn’t even know that integration scenario is possible to come to his/her part of the world!

In my opinion, nobody is in charge is the key reason the integration process functions so inefficiently. We need a conductor who knows how to play violins, what the oboes sound like, how to use to drums. No only that, he/she knows exactly what kinds of music the Orchestra would like to deliver. He/she knows exactly the time when the strings should enter and when the woods should fade out.  He/she will pick the right players into the game and rehearsal the Orchestra time and time again until the end result is satisfactory to his high standard. He/she will be the one who receives the applauds or the blames. Actually, a good conductor will take the blame himself but attribute the success to his/her players.

We have conductors in each application team but we lack such conductor in Integration level. Without this central control person/team, the Integration process is doomed to perform in disarray, like a Orchestra without a conductor, only yielding inharmonic melodies.

The Greatest Salesman in the World

I just finished reading an interesting book, “The Greatest Salesman in the World” by Og Mandino. Its Chinese translation was marketed in the name “Scrolls of Wealth” in China and was very popular.

I didn’t realize it was published just 40 years ago in 1968, a best-seller since then, until I read some critics about the book. The story of the book was set in biblical time in Arabic world. It’s about a poor camel boy, Hafid, who eventually became the greatest salesman in his time with unmatchable wealth. However, I can see the story is just a “make-up”, like all the stories in the TV advertisements. Essentially, the author would like to sell his “manuals for salesman”, which he developed for his insurance company while working in rural New Hampshire, as he disclosed in the preface of the book.

The author is indeed a very good salesman for his ideas. The story is catching, persuasive, full of drama, even having a mysterious link to the Bible. Obviously, he followed his own advices to sell, capturing people’s interests, making connections through familiarity (Bible story), demonstrating success stories happened with other ordinary people, and making the items for sale seems scarce and rare thus valuable. Another interesting way he did his selling is to command the reader to read each principle (a chapter or scroll in the book) three times a day for a month. That’s almost like a religious practice. I have to agree it’s the best way to build the principles into habits.

History of New Jersey

 

Living in New Jersey for almost 10 years, I recently grew some deep interests in the history of New Jersey. After all, knowing the place we are living make us comfort and proud in our everyday life. The places we are driving by everyday start to become meaningful if we can tell their histories. I don’t feel like a stranger or a foreigner as I felt before. “Blossom where you are planted”, my newly acquired motto, starts from knowing the history of where I am planted.

I just came across a good description of the history of New Jersey. It’s short enough to read through quickly but thorough enough to cover all the important points. I like its way to see the history. Not as a boring sequence of “big events” like we used to read in text books, but as a continuous changes of people’s ways of living, driven by economical, technical and political forces.

Hope discovering the history of the place you live and work will give you the same joy as I do!

Friends or Enemies? – How to deal with our business partners

Serving in an IT department of a non-IT company, I learned over the years one or two things about our business partners, who are our best friend and patrons, at the same time our ultimate source of headaches.

Bittersweet Partnership

After all, my job is to help them to be successful in their fields, in Sales, Marketing, Finance or Service. In a sense, IT department exists only because our business partners need us. And we need them too, to define the requirements and specs, to decide about the business logics, to promote the products we developed, to sponsor our projects, to give us feedbacks for improvements, etc. So, it’s truly a partnership.

However, we constantly fight with our business partners. They want too much from us within unrealistic short time. We insist on an absolutely necessary infrastructure change they don’t understand and consider too risky. We are furious that they keep changing their mind about the requirements in the last minute. They are bitter about the delay of the new release. This list can go on and on.

Business History Resources

Business History is a field that studies the evolution of business in all periods and all countries. It’s an interesting multi-discipline field that involves research by historians, economists, sociologists, and scholars of business administration.

Associations

Association of Business Historians

Business History Conference

Japan Business History Society

European Business History Association

Journals

Business History Review

Books

The Oxford Handbook of Business History by Geoffrey Jones (Editor), Jonathan Zeitlin (Editor)

Business History around the World by Franco Amatori (Editor), Geoffrey Jones (Editor)

The Management Century by Stuart Crainer

Other Resources

BusinessHistory.net

The Basics of Business History: Top 100 Events at a Glance

Challenges of Re-factory

In the recent town-hall meeting, our vice president of application development mentioned that in her experience, usually applications will only become great in their version 3.0. That’s in terms of feature richness, usability, stability and performance.

This insight fits well with my own experience and observation. The implications are developers are spending a lot of their times doing re-factory, which means rewriting the underline implementations for the existing functions.

At the first glance, re-factory seems to be an awful thing: tedious, time-wasting, boring, but unavoidable. However, if we really want to tame this beast, we need to take a deep look at its origins and natures. And it may come out as a necessary and valuable way to improve the quality and the business values of our applications.

Alternatives for Coding

At the days when the first computer was designed in 1940s, the software development business was born. It has been evolving fast and furiously ever since that.

Talking of software development, we, developers, will immediately think of programming languages like C++ or Java or their ancestors like FORTRAN or COBOL. Programming with those languages, or “coding”, is at the center of our software development career.

However, several new software development trends started to threaten the crown position of “coding” in the kingdom of Software Development.

 

 

Light In The Darkness

Happy New Year!

I guess a lot of people are very happy to see the year 2008 passed by, just like myself. What a dramatic year! First we witnessed the house value dropping and foreclosures in the neighborhood, then the crisis of the subprime mortgage. Soon, the bad news crawled all over the financial sector. Investment banks, insurance companies, commercial banks, even big names like Bear Stearns and Leman Brothers burned down into ashes overnight. The darkness, like cancer, continued to spread into other industries, such as automobile and even high-tech. The stock market crashed. The unemployment rate soared. The words we heard most in the past several months are “great depression” and “bail-out”, not what we usually heard even in a bear market.

And the worst part, it’s not over yet. Although debating among each other, the economists agreed the economy won’t recover until the later half of 2009. And that’s from the most optimistic point of view.

With all the negative news, it’s very easy to feel depressed or stressed out in this unpleasant time.

Kind of like feeling depressed in the winter in the northeastern United States (where I am living), chilly, heavy wind blow, cloudy sky, crooked tree branches and yellow grass, no sign of life.

But, wait! We still got Christmas in winter time! Even the darkest nights were lightened up by the holiday lights!

Where can we find hopes and opportunities in the depressing days like now? Here are four directions to look:

Happy New Year

Wish every one a healthy, peaceful and happy new year!

May all our dreams come true in the coming new year!