In a presentation during the CIPD L&D show by Rambutan, they brought a real customer to help with the pitch. While their presentation was very interesting and I will write about it in more details on a separate post, I specifically wanted to write about a model shared by the customer in that presentation.
There are 2 intrinsic concepts linked together in an 8-shape – Results and People. Results can be profits, finance, attrition, margin and so on. The People section would include things like communication, behaviours, self-awareness, leadership and coaching, etc. What we often see is that the C-levels would heavily invest in the Results part of the model and ignore the People part. The universal language for them is numbers. So they see a lot of logic behind putting more resources into the Results element.
But the truth is that these 2 elements are very much linked together one-directionally. You can’t invest in Results and expect that People will raise as well. BUT if you invest in People and help them become better managers, coaches, communicators, you can be sure that the Results will follow as a direct link. In other words, if you input to People, the output will be in Results.
Another important thing to remember that the 2 elements should have a 50/50 weight. If you overdo it in one area, that will negatively impact the other. So once again in comes down to having a healthy balance.
Another thing I also noticed is that this concept will work on both large and small scales. Executives can apply it when making strategic decisions. But as a manager of a small team you can also keep the model in mind when trying to achieve your quarterly targets.
My personal experience with this was with one of my managers. He would always say that the most important thing for him is to cater to our needs and do everything in his power to develop us as professionals, regardless of what the business thinks. This one single message was not only powerful in itself but also made us be grateful and wanting to do more for him and the business. It’s kind of like that principle where if you want someone to like you, ask them to do you a favour. So by asking us to develop ourselves, we gave back to the business.
I tried finding the original model but to no avail. If you’ve heard of this or if you know where I can find more information, please let me know.