As the name implies, an individual contributor (IC) is a professional employee without management responsibilities who independently helps an organization support its goals and mission. IC’s typically report to someone within the organization, but they’re not responsible for managing anyone except for themselves. Although they may be the manager of a process or project that they can complete as part of a team or individually, they are not responsible for managing a team.
Many companies that employ IC’s overlook developing their leadership potential and thus miss the challenge of harnessing their skills and talents. According to employee experience expert Juliet Connolly, assistant Vice President of strategy and experience at Rightpoint, “We’ve had one model of reward and recognition since the industrial revolution. And the model only works for those on the management track.” The conundrum? How can organizations engage and motivate these mold-breaking individuals and keep them loyal to the business? Connolly offers three engagement and motivational strategies:
How to motivate and fulfill an individual contributor and keep them loyal to your business
She insists an organization needs to consider not only who is an IC, but also the role they play in the business. “Individual contributors aren’t robots that just sit in the corner and churn out work, albeit that the introverts amongst them might prefer that,” she said. “The challenge with individual contributors is that they require an investment in a personalized approach up front when you are crafting their role to determine how they contribute, how they are measured and rewarded and most importantly how you keep them connected to the organization as a whole.”
Connolly insists what’s crucial is that they can’t exist in the dark. “Rather you need to bring them into the light and ensure that their contribution is shared across the business,” she added. “You want to look for those places where they add the most value—especially in creative opportunities. As for how you get them to stay loyal to your business, the driver for every individual is different, but in the cases of these unique contributors—the opportunity to do meaningful work that has substantial impact is usually the best loyalty driver of all.”
How to recast reward and recognition as hierarchies flatten and new types of employees emerge
“I’m fascinated by how we are already breaking the mold of what constitutes reward and recognition,” Connolly said. “I see this as having two lenses, both of which put the onus on leadership to be more adaptive and empathetic.” She describes the first lens as leaders needing to understand what motivates employees above and beyond remuneration. “That requires personalization and tailoring to each employee to understand their internal motivators and how they respond to recognition,” she said, adding that the second lens is organizations need to look at career pathways more holistically. “Specifically, we need to look at job roles through the lens of providing employees access to new and stimulating work opportunities that add to their capabilities while simultaneously providing meaningful and impactful chances to be creative and learn,” she said, adding that both lenses need to be tied to OKRs (an acronym for Objective and Key Results). This goal management framework streamlines employee focus towards unified goals for growth so they can receive and act on feedback on how their individual contribution relates to the success of the business unit and corporate strategy.
Why employees increasingly say that managing people and building a team isn’t their goal
According to Connolly, there’s a growing recognition that it isn’t enough to “manage” people, rather the capability is leadership and many organizations simply aren’t investing in preparing people to lead teams—so it appears that people management is a sure fire pathway to fail without support. She noted that Forrester—which helps business and technology leaders use customer obsession to accelerate growth—has shown that the average time between someone being promoted to managing other people for the first time, and the time they receive their first training in “leadership” is on average four years, and the investment in developing new leaders is less than $1,000. “So despite every organization saying that their people are their biggest asset, very few of those organizations are actually investing in them,” she said.
Customizing The Employee Experience
More business leaders, in addition to Connolly, contend that “personalization” and “customization” are tickets to recruiting top talent and harnessing the skills of individual contributors as well as regular employees. They are pushing for a new focus on how to personalize the employee experience—both in letting people craft their own careers, but also how to help and empower leaders to support that. Michelle Wax, founder of the American Happiness Project, recommends businesses use customization in order to accommodate employee demands for solutions to allow more flexibility, creativity and freedom in the workplace. This trend is increasingly seen as a way for businesses to attract and keep top talent in their organizations.
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3 Strategies Organizations Can Use To Engage And Motivate Individual Contributors - Forbes
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