Assign your most mundane tasks to your best people

SUNDAY, 20 NOVEMBER 2011 18:30 MICHAEL SCHRAGE

AT a recent dinner with several successful Internet entrepreneurs, the conversation quickly turned to talent. How do you get the best value from your best people? The majority insisted that top talent’s time should focus on the firm’s highest value-added opportunities. Align your best people with the challenges that only they can surmount.

That’s where the contrarian view kicked in—which is one I happen to agree with. Of course your best people should focus on your biggest issues. But one of your biggest issues is—and will always be—the horrendously inefficient scut work that all organizations accrue as they grow. Next Jump’s Charlie Kim, the founder of one of the Internet’s most successful loyalty and rewards programs, argued that as organizations scale, they often slip into less than mediocre processes just to get the job done. These processes are deadly dull to manage and excruciatingly boring to fix.

What talent-loving CEO would assign his best people to such tasks? Kim would. Savvy leaders understand that, as their operations scale, the real barriers to growth don’t have to do with the ingenuity of value-added implementations—they’re found in the necessarily evil support systems and the half-baked infrastructures desperately attempting to support them. Typically, talent-rich organizations assign their mediocre people to solve these seemingly mediocre problems. But that, Kim says, is shortsighted.

Have your most talented people deal with your most stultifying issues. They’ll come up with solutions that annihilate inefficiencies and enable new opportunities for value-added growth. Successfully confronting scut work can stimulate the best of both worlds: rickety, unreliable processes are eliminated and everyone in the organization now has more time and energy to add more value.

That’s a big win. It’s also great for morale. Having your most talented people solve your most mind-numbing problems sends an important cultural signal: Improving organizational efficiency and effectiveness is a priority for both top management and top talent.

It may sound paradoxical, but if your very best people aren’t involved in fixing your organization’s most persistently boring processes, then you’re failing as a leader and a value-added manager. It’s time to get your best people excited about transforming the dull, the boring—and the essential.

Michael Schrage is a research fellow at the Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Serious Play and the forthcoming Getting Beyond Ideas.