We live in a market culture that organizes itself around scarcity and barter. What’s in it for you, what’s in it for me, let’s make a deal. It treats us as if we are essentially economic beings, motivated by self-interest. As if we believe, as Adam Smith wrote, that without self-interest, no butcher will cut your meat for a meal tonight.

Aligned with the belief in self-interest, we are seduced by the desire to know what will happen next. In many ways, organizational life is designed for control and predictability. This is almost an organizing principle of management. Do anything that you want, just don’t surprise me.

This passion for certainty surfaces even when organizations declare they seek innovation. The first question on anything new –– no matter where: private sector, city hall, social service, or philanthropy –– is “where has it worked elsewhere?” Makes me want to move to a city called “Elsewhere.”

Now is a moment to seriously question how we respond to the worship of barter, self-interest, and predictability. Especially in the workplace. Especially in the community sector. This is also calling to us by a generation that leans toward purpose over promise. Purpose over upward mobility. A signal from people who do not want to go back to the office, even if they are ordered to.

Purpose over Promise

Years ago, a friend of mine, Ken Murphy, introduced me to the story of Ernest Shackleton. Ken was an executive with Philip Morris and used the story as a metaphor for the uncertainty that his cigarette company was facing. The story:

In 1915, in England, Sir Ernest Shackleton had a recruiting and retention problem much like we face today. Shackleton was planning a long voyage to cross the Antarctic overland from west to east. He was undercapitalized, was recruiting as the First World War was brewing, and was offering a workplace of difficult and challenging proportions. Shackleton became a popular icon because of his determination and will that saved the lives of his crew after their ship became icebound early in the voyage. What I am more interested in here, however, is not his heroics on the ice, but the faith and realism embodied in his recruitment strategy.

He advertised for his open positions with the following inducements:

Join an Antarctic Expedition! We promise you:

  • Low Pay
  • Poor Climate
  • Safe Return Doubtful

Shackleton believed that it would be a privilege to be part of his adventure. His advertising got results; 5,000 people applied for the trip. Even though the economic climate in 1915 had its own reality, I think he was onto something for our time. He, in essence, took the stance that the way to recruit and retain people was by naming the opportunity, fragile as it was, and then making demands on them instead of feeding their sense of entitlement and materialism. No barter. No career promise. No venture capital around the corner. You share the risk, not knowing if and when you will be rewarded. Or even come home.

Low Pay, Poor Climate, Safe Return Doubtful

This invitation offers a journey that proposes surprise and a larger meaning that you would be a part of creating. This purpose was compelling to many: to put your feet on land that had previously been unexplored. Perhaps to depart a life that had its own questions. Five thousand people answered Shackleton’s ad, and that was without social media or a digital reach. It was an ad in a newspaper in one city.

What form might “safe return doubtful” take today? Where does the Antarctic reside in the modern market world where our communities and workplaces exist? Are there explorations compelling enough to give up a safe return? To refuse the allure of barter? To depart the call of evidence residing or working elsewhere? Suppose this was “Elsewhere.”

Human Resources and Organization Development the Shackleton Way

For most workplaces, human resources is framed for operationalizing barter and the assumed motivation embodied in the promise of an attractive future. It is assigned the task of finding, training, and keeping people. Organization development is also an important player in this system. Its job is to make this contract of self-interest and future promise work well. For HR, the conventional wisdom is to offer people the possibility of a big and compelling future, and the training to qualify for it. Benefits now and instant wealth upon hiring or coming later with the rising stock price. Salaries and stock options are tools of choice.

This way of thinking and operating may have lost its utility and glamour. When the market is volatile, and the future increasingly unpredictable, we can be frozen in a form of thinking about what attracts good people. Many companies still offer “retention bonuses.” We have become so doubtful about the inherent keeping power of our organizations that we think we have to offer incentives for people just to stay put. Safe staying doubtful.

This same mentality exists in our thinking about how to organize employee learning. This is where training and development groups come in. OD and learning are efforts to help make living in this barter, control, and predictability world more human and relational. Our learning groups also work to make a safe experience likely. We offer easy learning. Long distance, anytime, anywhere, online, in the comfort of your own home, your car, and you can learn in bite sized segments. All useful. All offering safe return likely, easy access likely.

The training industry also tells you exactly what you will learn, how it will improve your performance, and how the skills are portable. Take this course and here is what you will leave with. We offer programs on nights and weekends so the time comes from your personal life and not your job.

Whether we are recruiting for employment or for designing for training, the strategy seems the same: Sell, make it convenient and undemanding, and promise a better future path.

Recruiting

If we want to create a workplace of accountability and collective responsibility, we need to contract very differently at the first moment of recruitment. Instead of nurturing entitlement and self-interest, we might confront people with a recruiting offer something like this:

Join Our Organization and Become Part of a Place Where We Learn from You

You help create our culture, our journey, as well as learn how to adapt to who we are. No more onboarding. This partnership takes the form of:

  • You are expected to care primarily for the well-being of the institution and the larger society. We have no mentoring program, offer modest benefits, and have no organized way of planning your career. Cooperation and peer relationships are more important than competing.
  • Our purpose is to do something important and worthwhile. Recognition comes on its own schedule.
  • The chances of getting rich quickly are slim. Only a few players in our industry will really prosper, so come to work at a place where the experience of each day is its own reward and let tomorrow take care of itself. Which it will do anyway.
  • Safe return doubtful. Our company has its risks. The work is hard, the environment is unpredictable, and the management keeps changing its mind. Messages about imminent improvement and optimism about our future are ways of managing the news.

This kind of promise will attract adventurers with a heart. It defines the meaning of accountability and offers some emotional integrity. It will draw people we can count on, people who cannot be bought with an appealing promise. Based on this offer, the ones that do show up will be the ones you want to build a business with.

Rethinking Retention

People stay in an organization that respects their freedom and gives choice about their learning. Our training efforts would change radically for the better if we solicited participation with an offer similar to the recruiting promise. It might look something like this:

Choose Among Our Training Offers

Here is what to expect:

  • Your learning is in your hands. We want to support your participation in a long-term learning commitment. This effort requires time, depth, and personal engagement. Nothing of real and lasting value can be achieved in a few hours, on your own, or on the run.
  • Our programs provide experiences where your participation and connection with other learners is at the center. While we offer programs which focus on what we think is essential, you will not be presented with immediately applicable skills, tools, or techniques. Nor will you be asked to end this program with a list of action steps. You have all the skills and tools you need.
  • Our purpose is to shift our thinking and consider the possibility of creating meaning. Simply choosing to go to and reach our Antarctica is the point. Especially since it is getting warmer.
  • You will not be asked to evaluate the presenters, only to evaluate the quality of your own participation.
  • Come by choice. If others want you to attend, stay away. If your boss thinks this experience would be good for you, ask why. Then make your decision. You know what you want and need to learn. Come if this fits. The years of being a good son or daughter are over. Besides, by design, for our live events, the food is mediocre, the chairs are uncomfortable, and the location inconvenient.
  • One useful question in choosing is “What courage is required of me now?”

The Point

These offers, while a little extreme, reflect life as it usually turns out to be. Plus, when we approach recruiting and retention as a marketing and selling task, we devalue ourselves. When we treat employment as something people have to be talked into, we are converting our own doubts into institutional practice. Institutionalizing us as partners rather than parents is a shift worth considering.

By the way, the real trip to the Antarctic ended with the ship hopelessly stuck on an ice floe. It sank. The crew made it to solid ice. And then waited. Shackleton heroically took a small boat to seek help and succeeded against all odds in saving the crew and getting them to safety. Safe return, though not promised, did occur.