If you think your employees are “your biggest assets,” you’ve got it wrong.
Employees cannot be sold, traded, or put in the plus column on your balance sheet.
What your employees are, are your biggest investors. Every day, they invest themselves in your organization’s work/purpose/goals, and one of the most important choices available to you is how they’ll be making that investment.
That project you have them working on or the manager they report to … worth it?
Investing in the wrong place for a week or a month won’t kill anyone. But spending years contributing to something that they don’t really care about, or working for someone who doesn’t care about them, well, that’s a waste of their investment and yours.
This was originally published on Mel Kleiman’s Humetrics blog.