A Google search on “people assets” yielded 664 million results! That is very nearly two thirds of a billion. Mind-boggling! (As is the fact that these results were yielded in 0.36 seconds, less than half a second!) Clearly it is a topic that a lot of people think about and even talk about: I would be a very wealthy man if I had received a pound every time I heard the expression “People are our greatest asset.”
Despite this, the very first page seems to challenge this. Three of the first five results are either questioning or denying the statement. The fifth result actually links to a December 2011 article in the august Harvard Business Review titled “People are not your greatest asset.” Hopefully your response to that is the same as mine: “Then try running your organisation without people!”
Moving beyond the headline (and a first paragraph that claims people can actually be liabilities,) the authors acknowledge the importance of people. They go on to claim that an organisation’s greatest asset is actually “how you empower people.” This makes the headline seem little more than an attention grabber. And while it may be a good one, and the article’s points sound, it can still be harmful.
This is not only because it gives the wrong message to people who only see the headline and who are sceptical about the idea of people being assets. The idea of optimising people is likely to be almost universal; the concept of “empowering people” is not and making it an asset is tantamount to making your people management systems and/or your organisational culture an asset. It may be a worthwhile aspiration; it is not a very practical one.
On the other hand regarding people as assets is inherently more practical, if only because people are physical beings and thus more tangible. Furthermore the nature of their contribution is no different to that of any other asset. As you saw earlier you cannot achieve anything without people. So, why should a computer be an asset and a person not? Indeed, you could easily argue that persisting in managing people solely as costs, as convention currently does, precludes the ability to optimise their contribution and mitigates your ultimate performance and hence the degree of your success.
Historically the challenge has been how to assign a value to people. That, however, is not an insurmountable one. Indeed it is essential that we do find a way to do so, because to consider and refer to people as assets, but to persist in accounting for, managing them and treating them solely as costs is the great management paradox.
The article claims that “more empowerment typically leads to more productive work.” We likely mostly all agree on that, as well as the further point that “requires forming communities around a meaningful and common purpose.” What can you do to stimulate that?
Like many others, I would argue that you can only do this by:-
- Enabling the individual to optimise their own potential;
- Creating an environment where optimising their potential corresponds with optimising their contribution to your organisation; and
- Ensuring that the individual and organisation share the benefits of their efforts.
That is my raison d’etre; to help organisations like yours do all three.
Bay is the founder and director of Zealise, a company created to help larger small to large business organisations to properly value their people and thereby inspire them to optimise their self-worth and so engage them that they transform organisational performance and bottom-line results. Bay is also the author of several books, including “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” and “The 7 Deadly Toxins of Employee Engagement.”