You’ve heard this line and so have I. More often than I’d like. The CEO says it, the managing director says it, the owner says it. Almost always with relief, like someone waiting for a fever to break on its own.
The reasoning is tempting: if we’re struggling to find and keep people right now, it’s because the economy is running too hot. As soon as the next economic cold snap arrives, there’ll be more people looking for work, everyone will pull their socks up, and this pain will sort itself out.
It’s an understandable idea. And it’s false. If you wait for the economy to solve this for you, you’ll be waiting a long time while the problem grows. And the problem, almost always, is one of execution capacity.
I call it a limiting belief. We all have them. They’re thoughts that served us in the past and don’t anymore. Their sell-by date expired, like the yoghurt in my fridge. But a belief is something you lean on to make sense of the world and to act. That’s why it’s limiting. It makes us act badly.
Having the right team isn’t a question of the economic cycle
The right team is the one that can deliver what the business needs. The people you trust to deliver what’s expected, come what may. Your commitment to the client and your business plan depend on them. How many of your teams, and how many of their managers, give you that peace of mind?
When a team isn’t the right one, the implications cost time and money. They create suffering for the people on that team, for other teams, for your clients and for the bottom line. And that suffering damages the teams, making them even less right for the job.
Frequent turnover, the loss of important people, the time it takes to find replacements, the time it takes for them to grow, the toll on those holding the fort in the meantime, the risk that people don’t fit. And plenty of other reasons. The teams end up with less capacity, and the company becomes less reliable and less pleasant for the people working in those teams, or with them.
The market already cooled. The problem didn’t go away
A looser labour market doesn’t fix a talent shortage: there are more candidates, but not more candidates who are right for the critical roles that hold the strategy together. I’m not talking about a hunch. I look at markets that have already lived through what may be coming for us.
The UK has spent a couple of years with a looser labour market: unemployment has risen and vacancies are at a five-year low. A weaker market hires less and pushes up the theoretical ratio of candidates per role. Exactly the scenario many here are hoping for as a cure.
Well, going through the Open University alumni mail I come across the latest Business Barometer. And it says something that stings:
The majority of UK organisations continue to face skills shortages despite employers increasingly benefitting from a looser recruitment market.</cite>
And it hasn’t just failed to improve: the share suffering it rose on the previous year, with more candidates available.
Why?
Because more people looking for work isn’t more people who are right for the roles that matter to you.
The cold snap fills the river with fish, but not the ones you need to catch. And nobody calls you for the easy role: we’re looking for critical people, the ones who hold the plan together. Or we’re looking to refloat a team whose real capacity has collapsed. And that’s uncomfortable. If the person reads it, it puts them off; if they don’t find out until they’ve started, it deflates them.
A lack of capacity feeds itself
Here’s the idea I really want to leave you with, and it’s the most uncomfortable one:
When a team is short of capacity, that shortage becomes the main reason more capacity gets lost.
Follow the thread. A team short on capacity is a team under strain, with its wellbeing dented. The Barometer itself confirms it: those shortages affect employees’ wellbeing, which hits productivity and the ability to keep hold of people.
And this matters because people only learn and improve above a certain level of wellbeing; below it, we improve nothing at all. When contribution drops and the wear and tear rises, the valuable people, the ones who were holding everyone else up, leave. And when they go, more capacity goes with them, the team is left shorter still, and round we go again, a little lower each time.
And there’s an accelerator almost nobody names: when a team suffers, some of that suffering starts to come from the team itself. If people don’t understand the impact they have on one another, or if their own suffering makes them stop caring, negativity spreads and capacity falls faster. That’s why individual responsibility isn’t a soft topic: it’s a source of pure capacity.
Progress or survive
A team’s development has a threshold below which things simply stop improving. When a team has lost enough capacity, it stops getting better. It doesn’t work worse: it just survives. Like a restaurant running on empty that plates up the food and gets through the shift, but doesn’t improve the operation, the menu or the kitchen. It doesn’t evolve. Surviving isn’t progressing.
And here the usual instinct is the wrong one: when a company isn’t happy with a team, it tends not to give its manager more resources. It sounds reasonable, and it’s exactly what sinks it. It’s another limiting belief because, below the threshold, without reinforcement, the team’s capacity will only get worse, to the point of hitting and threatening the capacity of other teams.
Making the most of good people’s contribution
A point that reinforces all this comes from another advanced market. A recent analysis by Tim Ballard (University of Queensland) using Australian data confirms something we suspected: young people are staying at the same company for less and less time.
People stay at a company for less time than they used to, and the employee’s age shapes that decision
Of those who started a job at 20 in 2000, only 11% were still there ten years later. In the following decade, those who started at the same age in 2010, fewer than 6% were still there after ten years. In a decade, the figure had roughly halved.
Before reading this as a generational problem, it’s worth recalling what Nano de Gabriel wrote recently: almost every time we ask about generational problems, what we find underneath is organisational design. Calling young people “lazy” is tempting and easy.
The question that interests me more is this: when is a person a good fit for my company, and when is my company a good fit for that person? Keeping people for many years isn’t the definition of success. Extending the cycle of those who fit best, that is an important factor. If there’s no reason to stay, people take flight. And if an economic chill makes them decide not to fly (and it’s true that crises do cause that), they switch off, which is worse.
The good news: this can be measured
So much for the diagnosis. Now the important part: all of this can be measured, and from that visibility you make far better decisions than from judgement, or bias.
Think about the typical reaction when someone performs below what’s expected: “this person isn’t up to it, we need to get rid of them.” It’s the easy move, and it’s almost always a judgement, not a fact.
We do something else. We turn up, we ask what’s expected of each person and what they’re really contributing, and above all we look at two things at once: contribution and wellbeing. Not just of the person underperforming, but also of the one overperforming, because the one giving you a ten today may be about to break, and sometimes they’re the one you watch least precisely because they deliver.
The right balance between the contribution and wellbeing of its members maximises any team’s operational capacity
We look at which factors are reducing the team’s capacity. With that picture, you decide differently.
Sometimes the recommendation is to clarify roles or to work on the team’s connection. Sometimes, counterintuitively, it’s to lower some people’s load, or to free up half a day a week of joint work that creates connection, wellbeing and, with it, capacity. And sometimes it’s bringing in another technician, but bringing them in so you can look after and protect them, not burn them out in the first month.
Every time you improve wellbeing and contribution, you almost always improve capacity. I’m talking about operational capacity: what the team is actually able to do and achieve.
You’re still pouring water into a leaky bucket
If we add resources, good ones, it can’t be to lose them. If something these people are about to experience is frightening, or hurts, you’ll be pouring water into a leaky bucket. And the water (talent, money, energy) escapes through the same old holes, a little faster.
The problem is almost never how much water you pour. It’s how many holes the bucket has, and whether anyone has measured them.
That’s what we do: we measure the gap between what your strategy needs and what your organisation can actually deliver. And we regenerate that much-needed capacity.
Think of it this way: your strategy sets a structure, and that strategy only works if the people can hold it up. If it fails at the bottom, the best strategy falls apart at the top. And the next economic cold snap won’t fix that: what fixes it is looking inward.
So I’ll leave you with a question for this week:
In your most critical team, do you really have the capacity you think you have?
Or have you spent a long time pouring water in, trusting that an economic slowdown will plug the holes?
PS1: I’ll spare you yet another World Cup image, using the excuse of the word “team”. After a month, it feels a bit tired. 😉
PS2: If you’d like, we can take a look together.
FAQ
What is a limiting belief in team management?
An assumption that once served you but now leads to poor decisions, such as believing an economic slowdown will fix a talent shortage on its own.
Why doesn’t a looser labour market solve a skills shortage?
Because more available candidates doesn’t mean more candidates who fit the critical roles. Evidence from markets like the UK shows shortages persist and even worsen.
What is a team’s execution capacity?
What a team can actually do and achieve. It depends on the balance between its people’s contribution and wellbeing, not just on filled headcount.
How do you improve a team’s capacity?
By measuring each person’s contribution and wellbeing, spotting what reduces capacity, and acting: clarifying roles, easing loads, or reinforcing the team while protecting new joiners.
Article originally published on LinkedIn Pulse
