We practice a wide variety of rituals at The Ready, but one of my favorites is how we recognize team members who are leaving the firm for a new chapter in their career. We gather our team to mark the occasion, and anyone who feels compelled can share their gratitude for their departing colleague. A week later, our alumnus receives a globe selected just for them—a token of our appreciation and a reminder that we hope they’ll change the way the world works wherever they go.
At the beginning or end of your next meeting, ask everyone to stop what they’re doing and think for a moment about something or someone they’re grateful for and wish to recognize within the team.
We need to create work environments with high social density where members with different levels of knowledge and competence can work and learn together.
maturity models stem from our misguided desire to cram all that complexity into a complicated framework. An ever-evolving spectrum of knowledge and skill becomes a fixed number of levels, each with its own qualifications. These models promote conformity to dogma and reductive criteria that can quickly become the focus instead of actual competence. In order to attain this rank you must know these things. A black belt in karate who has never been in a real fight meets a cage fighter with no formal training. Who is more likely to win? Who is mature? Luckily, it’s easy to abandon the exhausting administration of these models for deliberate practice and knowledge transfer between masters and apprentices. It’s harder work, but we can stop chasing colored sashes and start getting good at what we do.
(1) What could this person get elsewhere? (2) What would we pay for their replacement? (3) What would we pay to keep this person, if they had a bigger offer elsewhere? The goal is to consistently keep each employee at the top of their own market value.
To make this real for your team, start by asking everyone to articulate the role(s) they’re already playing—including the role name(s), purpose(s), and general accountabilities. Have everyone evaluate which roles they want to continue to play and which ones they’re ready to hand off. Next, give your team the responsibility to create, modify, and remove roles going forward. From here on out, every team member will be responsible for their own role mix, and every team for the roles within it. Of course, you’ll have to decide whether roles are filled by appointment, election, or two-way negotiation, but that can be done on a role-by-role basis.
