If you are a manager at a NextBillion enterprise, pause and ask yourself:- What attracted you to development through enterprise?
- What attracts members of your team to this sector?
It's interesting to see how employees bring diverse motivations. Understanding what drives them is key to retaining your top talent.
Is it the mission?
The recent buzz and interest in development has seen quality talent from countries such as the US take up positions in developing countries, often with significant pay cuts.
Is it the money?
For many loan officers at microfinance organizations such as mine, even USD 100 a month can be a great salary.
Is it a hybrid?
As a colleague told me, "I'm happy to work in this sector as long as I can manage a certain lifestyle"
Is it a short-term stint?
Development startups depend on talent working as interns or for short stints ahead of graduate school, or a career change.
When I first considered the sector, driven by Prof. C. K. Prahalad's HBR paper on "Serving the World's Poor, Profitably", what attracted me was the elusive idea of doing good and doing well at the same time. While market mechanisms may not always work from the get go, it was a concept that I found very attractive.
Indeed, understanding and being true to your motivations might help you be satisfied. Especially in a context when business schools applicants like my friend ask, "How important is it to do some non-profit work?"
It's an exciting time as the development sector is changing very fast and will look very different in a couple of years.
With NGOs converting to market-driven structures or philosophies, some of our favorites on NextBillion are making a big transition - in terms of their vision, capital and team structure - bringing unique challenges from inertia to compensation policy!
For quality talent considering the sector, the opportunity to work on highly entrepreneurial assignments with a lean, high caliber team remains a great draw.
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There are several competencies required for the successful management of one of our project sites:
It is a very rare individual who possesses all of the skills. In fact, across projects right now I’d say there is no one in the field who can do all of these things well. Rather, we’re forced to rely on putting together teams that collectively represent these competencies.
We’ve found is that it’s easy to hire local talent, at wages that are quite acceptable, that possess 2 or 3 of the requirements I’ve outlined. The struggle is to organize the team in such a way that the strengths of each team member address our needs, rather than the weaknesses of certain team members binding the strengths of others. This is what’s keeping me up at night.
As far as foreign talent is concerned the length of stay and cost of employment is prohibitive. I, myself, am an American MBA. I’ve taken a large pay cut to live in India, and I was only willing to sign a year long contract. Finding others such as myself to work for 3 months is easy, longer is proving difficult. In a limited timeframe, the ability of individual to make an impact is also limited. Additionally, introducing someone to the communities we work with for such a short stay would be quite disruptive.
At this point, and in my experience, the best path is to assemble teams of locals to support our projects. We must then pay special attention to the competencies required, and work painstakingly hard to make sure that the output of the team is in the direction required.