Law firms are rarely considered cutting-edge organizations, but with their use of graded levels of achievement, they are far ahead of most companies. Although all lawyers are free to choose more conventional career paths—moving into the management of other lawyers, perhaps, or becoming a legal generalist for a corporation—these levels of achievement provide lawyers with an alternative, but equally respected, path to growth. It is a path that offers them both the opportunity to become experts and a simple way to track their progress.
Lawyers aren’t the only ones to realize the power of these levels of achievement. In medicine the levels build from intern all the way to senior consultant over a period of, at minimum, fifteen years. In professional sports you can measure your expertise as you progress from rookie to second string to starter to all-star. In sales the entry grade might be the Million Dollar Roundtable, an important first step for the fledgling salesperson, but the pinnacle is the Presidents Club, where the criteria for membership are ten million dollars in sales and perfect client-service scores. And in music you track your progress not by whether you are promoted from the violin to the conductor, but rather by your journey from the most junior third-chair violinist to concertmaster or first-chair associate.
In fact, anywhere individual excellence is revered, you will find these graded levels of achievement. Conversely, if you cannot find them, it means that, either overtly or accidentally, the company does not value excellence in that role. And by this standard, companies don’t value excellence in most roles.
As we stated earlier, great managers rebel against this. They believe instead that every role performed at a level of excellence is valuable, that there is virtuosity in every role. So no matter how menial the role appears, they work hard to define meaningful criteria that can help a dedicated employee track his or her progress toward world-class performance.
AT&T provides help desk solutions to hundreds of companies. AT&T managers decided to organize each help desk according to the complexity of the client’s question. Level one deals with simple queries like “How can I turn on my computer?” Level two addresses slightly more difficult issues. Level three handles the panicked “What do I do? I think I’ve just crashed our entire intranet!” inquiries. These three distinct levels are not only the most efficient way to structure the operation—each level has a different pace, a different call volume, and so on—but they also provide a genuine career path for employees who want to grow into superior technicians rather than into supervisors.
At Phillips Petroleum, managers provide employees with a well- respected engineer career track. If the employee can show proficiency in the required procedures, then she can gradually progress through the different levels of this career path, all the way up to a director-level position, where she will he recognized as one of the most accomplished engineers in the firm.
In the mid-eighties Gallup worked with Allied Breweries to measure the performance of bartenders in pubs. One of the signs of greatness in bartending is an ability to remember not only the names of regulars, but also the drinks that go with them. We devised a program called the One Hundred Club. Any bartender who could prove that he knew one hundred names, and the drinks to match, would be awarded a button and a cash prize. The levels progressed up to the world-class Five Hundred Club, which brought better prizes and bigger bonuses.
When we started the One Hundred Club with Allied Breweries, few managers believed that any bartender would ever reach the Five Hundred Club level. But by 1990 Janice K., a bartender in a pub in the north of England, became the first member of the Three Thousand Club. She knew the names of three thousand regulars and their favorite beverage. From this angle Janice was the best bartender in the world.
It just goes to show: In most cases, no matter what it is, if you measure it and reward it, people will try to excel at it.
These are just a few examples of managers guiding employees with a series of levels that lead to world-class performance. Levels of achievement like these are invaluable for a manager. When confronted by that thorny question “Where do I go from here?” the manager is now able to offer a specific and respected alternative to the blind, breathless climb up.
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