Ben Franklin, back when he was a quiet working professional, said that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Of course, the second law of thermodynamics creates another certainty: increased entropy. And there’s no clearer example of increased entropy than the business world (which, incidentally, can also provide good evidence of Franklin’s truism). What this means is that the chaos of the business world creates a veritable army of the Unserved: those individuals who are seeking jobs but not very actively or who are quiet working professionals, dissatisfied with their job but not really looking for a way out. Take a look at your work situation; is enough being done to maximize your talent force?

A common trait for a lot of the Unserved is a sense of weak leadership. Recruiters often tell horror stories they’ve heard from disgruntled job-seekers about how under-management essentially drove them from the previous job. A post on Web Worker Daily suggests that “there’s an epidemic of undermanagement in business, that ‘leaders, managers, and supervisors are not leading, managing, and supervising’” (quoting Bruce Tulgan’s podcast on the subject). Quiet working professionals who find themselves in such a situation can stagnate, and that’s bad both for the professional and business. In their book Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business, Rusty Rueff and itzbig’s Hank Stringer remind managers that

“the more you work to recognize, attain, nurture, and develop the spectrum of talent in your organization, the more the organization will realize its potential and the more successful it will be.”

Maximizing quality interaction with talent makes the talent want to do better work and more of it. This notion should be HR 101, but it’s not as widely practiced as it should be.

These notions echo what we’ve said before about graciousness, about creating and maintaining a smoothly-operating workforce through careful and deliberate interaction. Dissatisfied workers really only create two situations for employers: they either create a talent vacuum when they leave, or they wither in their position, like a weed in a yard, neither excelling nor going away. The latter situation makes business stagnate; it hurts the bottom line and that hurts everyone. The previous situation, i.e. losing talented workforce, is something management should always be wary of, no matter the state of the workforce. As Bill Vick points out on Employment Digest today:

“It might be hard to imagine making a switch at this stage [age 50+], but the biggest job gains for the past few years have been among older workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And some industries, including health care and education, are actively recruiting people over 50.”

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