Have you ever thought about what creates happiness in your job?

Tip: it is not money, for most people, that creates happiness. My theory is that this is because the item “money” is not part of our childhood desires.

What is part of our childhood desires is: that we do something meaningful.

But what is “meaningful”? Something that is meaningful for you may be different from what is meaningful for someone else. And something that was meaningful for you yesterday may no longer be meaningful for you tomorrow.

My talk will give you insights into how you can find out when you work like clockwork, or when you should rather look for a different job because your performance is bad.

Tip: you should take up a new job if you realize that you will need ongoing and close management and help in order to perform well. Those criteria do not only work for yourself but also for your peers, and for the people that you may be responsible for in the future.

My talk will give you more insights into the following matters:

a) how to be and how to identify Class A people that

b) have a “Good to Great” Level 5 mindset, and

c) that feel that their job is meaningful.

 

Plotting the Various Responsibilities in a Novel Company X,Y-Diagram

My talk introduces you to a new x,y-diagram for plotting the various responsibilities in a company:

Once that has been done it was very clear to me from my own experience of several decades in business what “Good to Great” insight level is required for each responsibility. The green labels above stand for these. Wherever there is a yellow label, that insight level might not always be sufficient to fill out the respective role. And the red labels are those that you do not want, among them putting a “Level 4” insight guy on a strategic responsibility in the upper left quadrant of my diagram.

My next insight was that there are Class A, B, and C players in every position and that the same person that is a Class A player in one position can be a Class C player in another position, and vice-versa. And it is not surprising that this can change over time, for the same person in the same position.

This is the challenge for HR in any company: how to make sure that all employees are running in Class A mode, at any given point in time.

 

Why Is My Talk Important For Entrepreneurs

These questions are also important for entrepreneurs because not answering them forms part of their major reasons for failure.

This is why entrepreneurs often fail:

• not re-investing enough for market response and market validation
• not re-investing enough for selling
• not re-investing enough for experimentation and product breakthrough development
• Not hiring quality people.

There’s an adage that goes: hire the best and cry only once, as opposed to hiring the worst and keep losing them because they either do stupid things, or they don’t show up, or you fire them.

And this is what many entrepreneurs struggle with most: they cannot stand it if their employees are smarter than themselves. But think again, you don’t want to be the smartest person in the room. You want to be the dumbest because you want to learn from everybody. So you want to hire people that are better than you.

 

Here Comes My Talk

You are now ready for my talk which I delivered on 08 November 2022, at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore:

You can download the slides on SlideShare (click here) or here: ABC Class Employee talk 081122

Conclusion

I consider my above talk as one of the most important insights that I have had in my life, and it took me 2 years and various attempts to compile it as I have presented it.

Please share my insight with others.

 

Martin “HR” Schweiger