Do you remember from your child-hood the story of the goose and the golden egg? A man buys a goose that lays golden eggs, and he makes lots of money, selling those golden eggs. Until one day he decides that the goose isn’t laying fast enough, and he decides to get all of the eggs out of the goose in one go, by killing the goose. As we all know, that’s not how egg-laying works, and he found himself with a dead goose and no more golden eggs.
The story is an analogy for how we treat our people – our egg layers. They produce deliverable after deliverable, each one a golden egg. But they, our geese, need to be looked after, so that they continue to lay those golden eggs. That means that they need downtime to recouperate and renew – slogging through every evening and every weekend will not produce golden eggs. Our people get more and more exhausted, and recent research has proved what we all knew all along, that working sustained long hours actually decreases our productivity.
Equally, expecting our people to continue to produce those eggs, without feeding them with praise, thanks and encouragement is a sure fire way to stop them laying in quite the same motivated way. Yes, we have a lot of highly self-motivated people in our company, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need to hear that they are doing well. Particularly our millenials, who are so used to receiving immediate feedback from their computer games and their parents.
And what are they getting out of working here? Are they in meaningful roles, that they are passionate about, and that stimulate their creativity? Or are you ripping their guts out by giving them trivial, meaningless tasks to do?
Have a think about it…how are you slaying the golden geese around you, and what will you do to help them to lay golden eggs once more?
