So I've talked about how effective human capital management, particularly this partnership approach is about having practices that speak to increasing the abilities of your workforce, their motivation and their opportunities to participate. A really important point that I want to make about this though is that you don't want to think about each of those individual practices as being separate. They tend to be really powerful when they work together as a bundle, when they're a system. One way that we described this as we talk about them as complements. Okay, what do I mean by compliments? The idea of a compliment is basically these are things that go better together. It's a very simple way of saying it. The way that the economists like to describe it is two things that complements when the more that I do have one, the more valuable it is to do the other. Okay, and that's what these practices to promote abilities, motivation, ad opportunity to participate are. What does that mean? Think about, for example, the relationship between abilities and motivation, selective hearing takes time and effort, effective development takes investment. So we're investing in the abilities of our people. That is going to pay a bigger return when those people are more prepared to take those skills and actually do things that we value with them, right? And so if we've made those investments, we also want to have practices to motivate people to make sure that they're actually really leveraging the skills that we've developed in there. The reverse is true as well, right? Takes time and effort to motivate people, it's hard. Having done that, once we got people excited and they want to contribute to the organization. Well, let's make sure that they're actually able to. And so our efforts to motivate people are going to pay off more when people actually have the skills to enable them to help the organization. Same thing when we think about motivation and opportunities to participate. Again, I'm giving people more discretion. I'm helping them, I'm allowing them to make more decisions and all of that stuff. Well, are they going to use that discretion to help me to make the organization more successful, or are they going to use that discretion basically, just to make their lives a little bit easier? If I'm hoping it's going to be to actually help the organization, then I want to make sure that their goals are aligned with mine and then they're interested in contributing to the organization. Similarly, if I'm going to bother to motivate people again, as we said before, part of their ability to contribute to the organization relates their abilities, but part of it also relates to how much opportunity they have to change things. They just cogs in a machine doesn't matter how motivated they are, right? But if they have more opportunities to participate, that motivation is valuable. And then finally, we can say exactly the same thing with abilities and opportunities to participate, allowing people to manage themselves and make their own decisions when they don't know what they're doing. That's got to be a terrible idea, right? So if we're going to let people make more decisions, we need to make sure that they have the abilities to do so correctly. And similarly, if we're going to invest in bringing smart people, then let's make sure that actually they are able to really leverage the skills that we've hired from the skills that we've developed in them. So what we see consistently is that want to think about these things going together. And so rather than just thinking about all this seems like a good idea and this seems like a good idea. We want to do them in a bundle. This actually has some quite important implications for how we adopt these practices, because while it's nice there complements, the downside of this, is if we just pick one of these things and do it on its own, it might not have much of an effect. So, okay, maybe I've persuaded you, development matters right, we want our people to be skilled, maybe we should invest more in development. Well if we're going to invest more in development, but we're not going to give people more opportunities to use those skills and we're not going to make sure that people are actually motivated to use their skills. We might put a lot of money into development but actually end up finding very little effect on performance. So challenge this idea of these things being compliments creates. So we have to be able to do all of these things at the same time. If you think about changing right, we want to go from this more taylor wrist model to this more partnership model, that's super hard, right? When we think about organizational change, we have to think we don't want to do lots of things at the same time. Let's do one at a time and see, as we improve this, what happens to performance? Experimentation again becomes very hard because if we're not doing them all together, it will be hard to see those effects. And so these compliments, they can be a blessing. If you're doing all of these things that can be quite hard for your competitors to imitate you because they have to get all of these pieces right. But for an organization in transition, it can make life really quite hard.
