Master

“When a work lifts your spirits and inspires bold and noble thoughts in you, do not look for any other standard to judge by: the work is good, the product of a master craftsman.”  

- Jean de la Bruyere

We had some plumbers over to the house a couple of weeks ago.  The team consisted of a confident, experienced plumber and another guy who was clearly new to the job.  I was asking him how long he had been on the job, why he chose to work there, and how he liked it so far.

He had been there for a few weeks.

He heard good things about the culture of the company.

He believed he wasn’t choosing a job, but a career.

And then he told me how long he would be an Apprentice, then a Journeyman, and finally get his Master’s license.

In a world where the majority of new hires are making decisions to leave in the first sixty days (and many of them do), this man, only a few weeks on the job, was laying out the next 4-5 years of his career with this company.  And he was genuinely positive and excited about it.

Do you think this guy is a unicorn?  

Do you think he is a rare human being?

Are you hoping I have his contact information?

I don’t think the employee is rare.  I think he is being managed in an uncommon way.

Dan Pink’s “The Surprising Truth about Motivation” has been viewed over sixteen million times on YouTube.  We’ve shown it to hundreds of leaders, and have probably quoted it to more people than that.  The primary thesis of the video is that beyond the compensation level needed to meet our basic needs, an overwhelming percentage of us are not motivated by money.

He proves that the primary motivators for us are:

  • Autonomy

  • Mastery

  • Purpose

Our Position Agreements (job descriptions on steroids) powerfully check the box of helping employees operate with more autonomy and a sense of ownership.  Purpose is one of the concepts that we more powerfully coach as an essential building block of every intentional organization.

But Mastery!  While we understand the concept and can speak to it well, we haven’t had a lot of luck in rolling out a system for this with our clients or our own companies.  And it is a really big deal.  Especially in a world where our workforce is largely transient and breeding a sense of ownership and long-term commitment to the job is incredibly rare.

So we are taking Dan Pink’s incredibly compelling research to heart.  We’ve already taken Autonomy and Purpose to heart and now we are going after Mastery.  We created installer levels for all the construction crews at our contracting businesses.  And while we are still working on the details as we roll it out, we created five levels:

  1. Apprentice

  2. Novice

  3. Journeyman

  4. Craftsman

  5. Master Craftsman

Each has degrees of proficiency, qualifications, years of experience, etc.  Each will align with increased compensation and other privileges.  We believe it is a significant piece of the puzzle.  We’ll let you know how it goes.


Consider

  • Do your organization and employees operate under a clear sense of Purpose?

  • Do you have clear roles and responsibilities defined through something like Position Agreements to create Autonomy?

  • Do your employees understand what Mastery looks like and how they will grow through their careers?