The primary stage of your business is where you want to find and meet your customers, and it is largely where you want to hire, especially at entry and mid-level. But for particular employees or teams within the organization, you may choose a different stage for temporary assignments, or for specific functions.
For example, if you need an internal team to focus on an innovation exercise, you will want to temporarily guide them into Stage Seven (Questioning Everything), for the duration of that meeting or assignment. But you would not want to send them home in Stage Seven, so be sure to end the meeting with a quick exercise to move them back to something more in line with your business’s primary stage, or something more in line with home life.
Certain job functions also lend themselves to specific stages. For example, Human Resources is very focused on the hiring and development needs of others and might be best suited for Stage Four employees at entry and intermediate levels. High level managers, however, although they should be focused on the needs of their teams, they must also be focused on strategy and long term thinking, making Stage Eight and Stage Nine the best stages for these hires.
Now here’s the hard part. People do not, except in extreme cases, stay in any one stage. They evolve and change over the years and sometimes over the week. It depends on what is happening in their personal lives. While you don’t want to pry, it does benefit you to understand what perspective they are operating from. If you could simply ask them to tell you what stage they are in today, that Is ideal. But lacking that, you will have to proactively work to ensure they are in the best possible stage for their work day, even if only for today. Luckily that is not too hard to do.
Consider the following list of situations and functions and how they match to their ideal stage.
- Stage One – Everything
- Rampant multitasking
- Administrative assistants
- Stage Two – Experiences
- Customer insights
- Product packaging design
- Stage Three – Needs
- Specification development
- Procurement
- Logistics
- Stage Four – Others
- Human Resources
- Entry-Level Management
- Charity projects
- Stage Five – Ideology
- CEO
- Board Members
- CIO
- Security
- Stage Six – Live And Let Live (Passive Ideology)
- Mid-Level Management
- Stage Seven – Questioning Everything
- Innovation teams
- CTO
- Head of Research
- New product development
- Stage Eight – Purpose
- Startup CEO
- Angel Investors
- Startup employees
- Event planners
- Anyone whose life purpose matches the task at hand
- Stage Nine – Consciousness
- Media relations / Public Relations
Stage Ten (consciousness) and Stage Eleven (transcendence) people… that is, people who spend a lot of time in these stages, often do not thrive in any typical organization or business. These individuals have a set of priorities that just will not include anything you would likely want to them to prioritize. That being said, Stage Ten and Eleven individuals make phenomenal contributions to Stage Ten and Eleven organizations.
The lesson is simply to choose your employees and teams carefully, to put the best possible person in the job, and to take into account the stage they spend the most time in. Meanwhile, you CAN influence individuals and entire groups into another stage that may be optimal for their efforts.
