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The competence of each individual person is dynamic and tends to move along a Life Cycle.
Key people want to feel that they grow in competence, so they wish to gain experience from work in challenging projects together with other experienced professionals with whom they feel a personal positive chemistry.
The professional junior is a novice who usually costs more in supervision, training and assistance than he or she is able to create in revenues. The capacity to create added value increases rapidly by experience but so do also the costs for remuneration, secretaries, fringes etc. The rapid growth in experience is itself motivating. Creative work is however very demanding on human nature and at some stage in the carrier there comes a creative plateau.
There are three possible management reactions to this plateau:
The two first managerial answers to this universal problem are traditionally more common than the third.
A common situation is that a professional feels the threat of a non-growth plateau approaching and attributes this to wrong-doings of the management - not to him/herself. If our organisation has lost image or if we have not allowed the members to gain experience or if we have grown into an organisation with a chemistry in which they feel alienated they might decide to leave our organisation. They reconsider their membership and ask themselves whether a competitor might give them better learning opportunities or higher salaries. They will open up for head-hunting.
The competence of the personnell is an asset not owned by the company but it may enhance the corporate image if used properly. Customers are sensitive to the reputation of the company's best people so one way of increasing the reputation is to recruit or develop real high-flyers who are able to more than fulfil the customers' demands.
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