To Compete, Start At The Bottom (Part 2)

A Valuable Conversation

Some of you wholly disagree that to compete with the world, we should start at the bottom. And if you're a thinker, it IS counterintuitive. But that's the point. Let me explain based on my real-world leadership experience from a military unit that supported worldwide combat operations.

As the commander of the 317th Maintenance Squadron, I had the responsibility of building an excellent team into an outstanding one. While I won't go into details here (I've written of this transition before here on LinkedIn), the previous commander to me had built the organization up into a formidable machine. Morale, peformance, and intangible measures were all off the charts. But when I looked more deeply, one area that was ripe for improvement was our worst Airmen.

They hadn't been overlooked as much as they hadn't been prioritized. So, that's where I put my emphasis, the bottom 25%. They began to get the attention and resources they needed. I told my first line supervisors to make them average. Of course, they looked at me as if I had stolen their favorite wooby. But I said it again to make sure they understood, I want my worst to be everyone else's average. It took a few more times before they got the message, I'll distill it here.

The top 10% are prototyically self-motivated. They choose to excel because that's how they're built. Perhaps they had the schooling or family structure for formal success but they no longer need much extrinsic motivation to succeed. The middle 65% will find their way, they may be average or above average, but they're more motivated not to fail than to succeed greatly. They flourish under excellent supervision and care because they respond to their environment more than they're intrinsically motivated. They don't need much, but what they do need is enough subliminal cueing that their performance elevates without much conscious effort.

The bottom 25% are different. They're in need of specialized care. They need more than a supportive environment, they're rarely intrinsically motivated or by the need for self-actualization. Nothing is wrong with them, per se, they just need a differentiated, personalized attention. In fact, the same energy we often give the top performers, if we gave it to the bottom performers, would see more return on investment.

In other words, the energy it takes to make an "A" student into an "A+" student might be better utilized transforming "D" students into "C" or even "B-" students. At first, they didn't get it, why would we want more "C" students on our team? Why not make sure the best were ever more capable? Why waste the energy on those with the least promise? They asked all the normal questions that confirmed their paradigm.

I simply stated that if we want to raise the mean and the median, if we are serious about raising the standard, then we need to push the average as high as possible. Getting our "A" students to "A+" didn't result in raising the average nearly as much as getting underperforming Airmen up to the highest performance they were capable of achieving. Marginal gains (2 - 3 percentage points) at the top give you nothing more than bragging rights but major gains of 10 - 12 percentage points among a large minority not only gives those same bragging rights but results in significantly increased average performance AND a higher median performance.

But there's another upside to that investment - one rarely mentioned. The self-starters and highly motivated will see that gap closing behind them. They hate the thought of being too close to the average so they redouble their efforts to stay at the top. They want to stand out, and when they see the progress of the bottom 25%, you better believe they will figure out how - ALL BY THEMSELVES! This is win-win! The return on investment is double, or even triple, when you factor that in. Helping improve the bottom 25% not only pushes the median to the right, it pushes everyone above them to try harder. No one wants that relative gap to close.

Can America Do This?

She better! Because the world is nipping at our heels and our decades of coasting on the Greatest Generation or The Baby Boomers is over. Gen X received the last of America's great public education. The systemic erosion of that system, since Brown v. Board, has made public education suspect, and we have the scores to prove it. Again, don't look at the highest 25% vs. the world, look at our lowest quartile (and compare it to the industrialized world's lowest quartile). You'll see a gap that should concern us all. But it doesn't have to remain.

America has the resources to make the lowest 25% of our performers as good as any nation's average. But that will require a national will. I had the distinct advantage of a hierarchical system that made me it's formal leader. Even though I chose to consult my senior leadership team, I had the authority to make the decision, the responsibility to see it through, and the ability to command resources to support my vision. The nation isn't made like that. We have a messy, slow, and cumbersome (by design) system that takes time to deliberate and act. That system, which, when it is working properly, results in gradual change. But when everyone agrees that a common goal is worthy of speed, like the Space Race sixty years ago, the nation can marshall its resources at world-changing pace.

I don't doubt most Americans want our best and brightest to rise to the surface. But to do so, it may mean making some choices that are counter to America's current social hierarchy. It may mean that people who haven't been seen or treated fairly by the American education system have more chances and more choices than they do now. It may mean that to remain competitive, America may have to see itself as the catalyst to make the least of us as competitive as the rest of us.

To Compete, America Must Start At The Bottom.