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| U Manage - The Relationship is the Asset |
By Tom Graves
writer, researcher, educator
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 Tom is a writer, researcher and consultant in the education of intuitive skills and their use in personal and business environments. An author, he was a developer of desktop publishing, and has worked in and around the computer trade for more than 20 years. He also plays flutes and plants trees.
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"Our people are our greatest asset!" - how often have we seen some company make that proud claim? But just stop and think about it for a moment: what does it actually mean?
Tangible assets are things that can be bought, sold, bartered, traded, owned. But that's not a good way to describe the people who work with you. It's not a good way to describe yourself, either.
People can't be owned: the moment we think otherwise, we're in deep trouble. To describe people as 'assets' is an insult; describing them as 'human resources' is possibly worse. Either way, corporations usually get what they deserve. Surly, disaffected robots tend not to be very productive; but people in organizations which do respect this human side of systems tend to be very productive indeed. |
| A Shift in Perspective |
The key to that productivity is a shift in perspective: a corporation's greatest asset is not its people, but its relationships with those people. After a decade or two of downsizing, people aren't expendable any more.
If not treated with respect, 'our' knowledge, skill, inventiveness and creativity may well walk out the door and go work someplace else. And if the people can't walk out, they'll just shut down - and expend most of their energies on office politics instead.
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| Relationship Defined - It's Not About Being 'Nice' |
So the relationship is the asset - not the people. It's the link to 'our people', the reason for 'our people' to want to work with the company, to express the company's purpose. And without that link, they’re not 'our' people. No relationship, no reason to work: it's as simple as that.
A relationship isn't a 'thing' in itself: it exists between people, or between people and some entity such as a company. So although it's an asset, it's not something that can be ordered, demanded, owned. Neither can it be traded: it either is, or isn't, dependent on people and their human feelings and motivations.
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| The relationship involves far more than money, too: it's about treating people as people, not coin-in-the-slot work-machines - as human beings, not 'human resources'. If ignored, those relationships can soon fade away to nothing; they can fall apart very quickly if they're based on bullying or cajoling, or one-sided 'agreements'. |
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And if we want 'our people' to be productive, it's our responsibility as much as theirs to ensure that the right relationship exists between us.
This isn't about being 'nice' to people - though that attitude would certainly help, as long as it's for real. It's more that those relationships are our company's greatest asset - perhaps the company's only real asset - and we need to take care to protect them as such. Time to do a serious rethink about those relationships, perhaps? |
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| Additional Resources |
Overviews/Principles
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger (Perseus Books, Cambridge, 2000)
Principle-Centered Leadership, by Stephen R. Covey (Franklin Covey Co., 1990)
The Fifth Discipline : The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, by Peter M. Senge (Random House, 1990)
Practical Guides in Business Contexts
The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook : Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization,
by Peter M. Senge (editor), Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, Bryan Smith (Nicholas Brealey, London, 1994)
Embracing Insanity: Open Source Software Development, by Russell Pavlicek, Robin Miller (Sams Publishing, Indianapolis, 2000)
Learning to Fly : Practical Lessons from one of the World's Leading Knowledge Companies,
by Chris Collison and Geoff Purcell (Capstone, Oxford, 2001) |
Additional Lessons for Living and Learning
U Manage - Intuition in the Workplace
U Manage - The Labyrinth of Skills
Working with Life's Weirdness
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