People and Jobs

People join and use organizations to secure benefits they want and need in their lives, not, necessarily, to get and do the job you are offering. People’s wants and needs change over time.
People’s motivating needs can be generalized into a small number of categories (Security, Acceptance, Respect, Autonomy, Satisfaction in Accomplishment). These general categories are of little use in retaining any particular person.
People stay in – and leave – jobs based on their specific wants and needs at a given time, not on general categories.
People have minimum requirements for each of their specific wants and needs; if minimums are not met, they will leave. (These minimums tend to float from month to month, based on general market availability of whatever it takes to meet the need.)
Individuals are able to change more quickly and more easily than organizations can change.
In times of great change in the outside world, people (who have a choice) will tend to move to new, more fulfilling organizations before their current organizations are able to adapt to compete to keep them.
Much of the knowledge and skills – even certain personal qualities – that make an employee valuable can be retained even though that person leaves the organization.

If Knowledge Management is to become a way of business life, the work, responsibilities and activities of managers must radically change. Supervisory work will disappear. Groups will be self-organizing and self-managed. Individual work will be collaborative. Managerial work will shift from maximizing efficiency (for profits) to the creation and expansion of “knowledge capital" in their organizations.

People and Jobs

General Principles