One of the experiences you get from using LinkedIn — other than a feeling of torment or self-persecution that sometimes accompanies seeing success stories of individuals popping up on your feeds– is that you get to learn from and share thoughts with other brilliant minds on the platform. Yes, I get that regularly, and sometimes I get inspired to post my winnings too. Of course, LinkedIn is one of the go-to-places to jolt yourself up for growth; it’s a place of many great opportunities.
The other day, I latched onto an opinion piece on LinkedIn which caught my attention. The poster, a Nigerian-American lady, leads a company in the US and has many years of recruiting experience as I discovered in her profile.
In the post, the lady declares her newly developed insights in talent sourcing and people’s management, and she claims her philosophical compass was a management nugget by Jim Rohn – Never send your ducks to eagles’ school!
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Jim Rohn has used this nugget to explain the Mystery of motivation, and how managers must always take cognisance of the Mystery in people’s management. However, how this generally applies in people’s management remains a case for subjective analysis. The lady made the following remarks based on her understanding of the analogy:
‘’This lesson has guided me in my hiring decision as an executive. You don’t train people to be the best at what they do. If you want the best, you hire the best and empower them to be the best.
‘’Some organisations hire ducks expecting them to become an eagle. They invest much in training and development, hoping to turn ducks into an eagle. A duck and an eagle differ in motivation, drive and attitude. These are qualities that you can’t reach’’ she said.
At my first assessment of the foregoing proposition, I could only think of heuristic and how this has influenced many recruitment decisions in corporate management.
To start with, how do you distinguish an eagle from a duck in the recruitment process? If you only work with certain values in mind, you may be dealing with a parrot or a dove or a crow or a chicken without even realizing this. In this article, it has been shown how incompetent leadership has been encouraged due to emphasis on traits such as confidence, overbearance, masculinity, self-promotion, impetuousness etc over empathy, humility and courteousness.
But of course, my rejoinder to the post was not based on that line of thought. I’d rather consider the subject from a structural functionalist perspective.
My point is this: I’d rather have fewer eagles than ducks, and as a leader, I shouldn’t be bothered about having to turn a duck to an eagle since both have their unique purposes to fulfil within the corporate system, one handling strategic decisions and the other dealing with the operational routines.
I believe an organisation that hopes to have steady growth as well as stability would endeavour to not make the mistake of having more eagles than ducks or solely eagles. I came to this realization a long time ago after observing the inclination of the eagles towards office politics compared to the ducks. My experience informed my second book, Moral Licensing Syndrome: How Your Category-Best Employees Can Endanger Your System.
Eagles are highly expensive to maintain, they rarely can be domesticated and they’d often find it condescending doing the routines which are best suited for the ducks. Also, due to their high competitiveness, eagles are more calculative, self-serving and fleeting, hence, their loyalty is seldom guaranteed.
The self-serving and fleeting proclivity of the eagle is further explained here by Dharmesh Arora, regional CEO of Asia Pacific at German manufacture Schaeffler having understood in the hard way why it’s no use trying to keep a star-performer who’s already decided to move on.
On the other hand, the only way ducks compensate for their shortfall against the eagles is loyalty. Generally, ducks appear weak not because of a lack of talent but because of low self-esteem resulting from lack of self-awareness and poor exposure. When you train and motivate them enough, the result is often magical.