Organizational Myopia - Why a succeeding employee always "seems" to be doing better than a preceeding employee!!!

"Myopia"?- noun - the quality of being?short-sighted/ lack of?foresight?or intellectual insight.

The word Myopia has been ringing in my ears for a while now and I have been trying - persisting - to find why do I keep finding this word around me? And then I think I found out why. I have been a teacher of organisational behavior before I made the shift back to corporate and this is one term I used to teach my students. "Organizational Myopia" and how it affects our decision - making.

Now after a few years of being back in the corporate; and having unfortunately seen attrition and replacements over many positions; I caught myself thinking of why we feel that the replacement of a particular person or even a new employee usually seems to be contributing way more than their predecessor in that position? That's where the term "organizational myopia" becomes so relevant.

Think about this. Every organization has those "star" performers who seem to be going at it with full energy, coming up with ideas every single day and actually implementing some of them. We look at them bringing in loads of energy to work and finding ways to plug holes and finding areas of improvement in everything. Give these employees a year! Look at their energies post at least a year at their jobs. Do you see the same energy? I bet most of you said NO. That's because, they are exhausted and they have developed a myopia within the organization. A year ago, they were looking at the organization as a third person - a fly on the wall and were able to see what maybe others could not see. Then they got engrossed in their work and started blending in. The struggles of every day took over - lack of resources, office politics, bureaucracy, competition, and whatnot. And their focus which was on the long term gradually started to focus on the things currently resting on their plate. The journey of 100 feet that they started now started to look difficult because the Sun finally came up, the heat increased and they started losing energy due to the environment. Pardon the analogy here; but is it not what really happens to the best of us?

This gets us thinking about the average employee life-cycle within an organization. And brings me back to the story of the hare and the tortoise. Don't judge me but try and make the connection. Very often, we misjudge the slow but steady performers within the team because their results are not visible immediately. Their consistency is missed out due to the fact that they are not seen as "hustling". And then there are the ones who are always hustling, getting things done, and making a lot of noise in the process. Who really would draw attention - you think? But the key which is missed here is the output and the consistency with which that output is obtained. The first part is easy - measure the outputs through KPIs, reward the achievement of KPIs. But where I ask is the consistency being measured. The reliability, the ability to fall back on this tortoise, because we know he/she will always be "there" and dependable.

Don't get me wrong, we need both - the hare and the tortoise and in fact all the other animals in the kingdom with their diverse skill sets. My point here is simple - a hare would develop organizational myopia faster than the tortoise - cause the faster you go, the faster the vision will blur and you will start focussing on just the next 200 meters visible through the daze of the speed and not the next 200 KMs we need to travel. And that brings me to the title of the article - why does the succeeding person seem to be doing better than the preceding person? Pretty obvious now, isn't it? Because as the employee started getting older in the system and developed myopia, they lost their far-sighted vision and eventually ended up fire-fighting in their jobs rather than strategizing for the future. And eventually when this employee separated for whatever reasons, a new one came in with a view of the world; bringing in fresh experiences to learn from and starting with full energy to bring in "improvements". Well, wait till this one develops a "myopia"!!!

My take here - what I wrote is not rocket science. A lot of us have already seen this in our careers. So, why did I write about it? I wrote about it because in our positions as leaders, decision-makers, and even influencers within the organization, we would be able to do justice to our jobs by identifying this syndrome early on - within ourselves first and then the team - and find ways to bring in a fresh perspective through upgrading our knowledge, experimenting, having activities like quality circles and huddles or even bringing in good business coaches from outside to keep mentoring our key players in the organization. Replacing a person just because they are not able to look far might not always be the answer - maybe getting them better glasses is our job as the organization. A little something for us to think about!