Interesting Management Critique

I saw this post earlier this week and I’ve been meaning to point to it since then, but well, the long holiday (not to mention my 40th birthday) weekend kind of distracted me from it.

Anyway, here it is, from the Brazen Careerist Employers Mistakenly Reward Longevity When Aiming for Loyalty

Ultimately, it’s the small acts wherein you put your employer before yourself that make one loyal.

Employers: reward that. And if that happens to line up with someone who has been with your company for five, ten or twenty years, even better. But be careful about simply rewarding longevity — there’s nothing really difficult or impressive about sticking with a mid-level position, working in auto-pilot, for decades. And if Gen Y sees that that’s all you really value, you’re not giving them much of an incentive to show you any real loyalty.

It’s an interesting observation. I’ve worked in enough places that don’t act this way, promoting from within based simply on who had been there the longest, without realizing that in some cases, those people weren’t so much loyal as they were unsuited to looking for and succeeding at another position. Is that really something to reward?

I think you’d be much better off recognizing and rewarding the truly loyal people, who do everything they can to get the job done, regardless how long they’ve been there.

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