I frequently hear that people have expectations from their companies and bosses regarding their career progression. It’s when employees ask “What can you do for me?” rather than “What can I achieve for myself?”. Despite 17 years in Asia, I’m still surprised by the prevalent entitlement culture in many organizations.
Entitlement – Employees vs. Employers
I have just come back from Bangladesh where I’m working with a client on developing and implementing talent management tools. One of the objectives is to guide and provide clarifications to employees on what they can expect from the organization along with what’s expected from them in return. These tools help manage situations where employees are feeling the following:
- I have spent 3 years in the company and I deserve this promotion.
- My company has an obligation to give me a good annual raise and a competitive salary.
- My boss should organize this training for me.
- The company should inform me about my future career opportunities.
- I have put a lot of effort in this job and the company should reward me for it.
On the other hand, management would like employees to approach work with the following thoughts in mind:
- I understand that I can only justify my position if I constantly add value to the company.
- This organisation is merit based and I’ll get what I earn.
- I’m responsible for my own career and self development.
- I got this promotion because the company has recognized my performance and accordingly has given me more responsibilities.
- Both the organisation and I are responsible for what happens in the company.
Brad Harms Principals of Ownership Thinking
Brad Harms, the author of ‘Ownership Thinking – How to End Entitlement and Create a Culture of Accountability, Purpose and Profit’ believes that to move away from entitlement thinking you have to help employees see the company as their own. He lists 3 core principles on how to do this:
- The Right Education: Teaching employees the fundamentals of business and finance, how their company makes money and how they add (or take away) value.
- The Right Measures: Identifying the organization’s Key Performance Indicators (with an emphasis on leading, activity-based measures), creating scoreboards and forecasting results in an environment of high visibility and accountability.
- The Right Incentives: Creating broad-based incentive plans that are self-funding (by virtue of the first two components) and clearly aligning employees’ behaviors to the organization’s business and financial objectives.
It has been proven that these core principals work wonders for start-up companies where an employee can hit the ‘money pot’ if the company gets a successful IPO or buy out. It’s probably because people in start-ups think as owners rather than employees.
Eliminating the Entitlement Culture
So how do you get people to take responsibility for their careers rather than expecting the organization or boss to take ownership of their professional growth? Adapting Harms’ principals, I suggest you:
- Provide The Right Education: Explain, teach, coach and help employees understand that taking ownership for their career will (1) lead to better results (2) be more satisfying and (3) allows them to stay on the steering wheel.
- Provide The Right Tools: Provide people with tools and opportunities. I have often seen companies who grandly announce that ‘From now all employees will be responsible for their own career’ but then fail to provide the tools for people to execute that responsibility. You must provide tools and suitable authority for employees to be able to take on responsibility.
- Provide The Right Incentives: Management needs to provide people with the right career opportunities if they want employees to take responsibility for their own professional growth. This can be achieved by ensuring that people who put in the required efforts are awarded results. It will hopefully lead to a chain reaction causing others to take charge of their own growth as well.
Another technique that supports eliminating the entitlement culture is to Shed the Parent-to-Child Relationship in Organizations. How do you help people take ownership for their careers and growth? I would love to hear from you.
Photo Credit: stevendepolo via Compfigh cc
Hi Paul,
Nice article however, from company’s perspective , we always hear and have some limitations. E.g. talking about the opportunities and tools to provide – I have seen that it’s closely linked with the business opportunities the company gets. In fact, in product based company / environment, it seems quite easy to plan ahead and plan for future opportunities based on your own products/services but its really difficult for project based companies where the business outlook is completely depended on dynamic projects coming in every month and where such companies are more vulnerable to business changes. What I am more curious to know, from company perspective, that what sort of tools and opportunities we can provide for our teams. I have heard companies allowing teams to spend time on their personal creative projects so that their creative streak keeps motivating them with fresh ideas (and ofcourse company benefits from them as well) but in project based environment, where you can’t plan much for 2-3 years, where projects changes are on high frequency and other business requirements also change resulting less or no time for the teams to work on their creative ideas/projects, what other opportunities can be provided to them? that’s always a challenge. (sorry for this long question – i couldn’t help make it short for better understanding). Thanks
Great question Samya,
You are right in project based organisations strict career paths and roadmaps are most likely less clear then in more product based organisations.
However in a project based organisation you can also identify and articulate the leadership and functional competencies employees require to be successful in different roles / levels.
When these competencies are clear and communicated to your employees you can provide tools through ‘on/off the job learning opportunities, coaching / mentoring and (e)-learning tools to support employees on their personal growth journey.
More than happy to discuss this in more detail based on a deeper understandings of your organisation
– Paul
Thanks for quick reply, Paul and glad that you offered help. I am very much interested to discuss this in detail. Ours is a digital agency where project frequencies and relative changes are high and so do the competencies with latest trends in technology / tools spanning marketing, advertising, brand creation, social media presence, content management, system design, development and integration. Please let me know where we can discuss this further, either through LinkedIn or emails. Maybe your specific questions to drill down the issue will help me or redirect me into right direction.
Many thanks.
Just send me an email with specific questions Samya and we will take it from there. Paul
Hi Paul,
Thanks for sharing the thoughts. May be I am from the same company where you were engaged for the tool deployment. i must say such thought process & culture would bring appropriate win-win scenario for both employee & employer. Having said that would like to ask a basic question: if an employer cannot identify & quantify expectations from a job role and employee don’t know what achievement can exceeds the expectations, then would it be possible to implement such culture and would it give any positive outcome?
Dear Tanvir, thanks for ur thoughts. You are absolutely right it is paramount for a line manager to be clear on objectives and expectations. As the saying goes “if you don’t know where you are going, every road will take you there”