Recent surveys have indicated that a third of all employees are always on the lookout for a new job and twice that ratio are still fielding offers during their first few months of joining a new company. Chalk this up to a combination of wanting more responsibility and advancement opportunities, wanting a more compatible workplace environment, being with people they like and a proper balance with their work and leisure time. This is not like their fathers credo of wanting a secure job where they didn’t have to worry about being laid off after the next and inevitable downturn in the economy, keeping their nose clean and being seen as a productive and loyal employee.

Today’s employees are young, Gen Y and Millennials who have also been called the entitled generation. They are educated and tech savvy and have been generally rewarded for just showing up. They have been told that everything they do is just great and most importantly they have not really experienced adversity. They feel that their employers’ job is to make them feel fulfilled and there is always another and better job around the corner if their present one does not suit them. Many corporations are guilty of reinforcing this attitude themselves in a competitive marketplace for people with talent; real or not. Needless to say, not everyone 20 or 30 something fits this stereotype, but enough do so that there is enough of this mind set to warrant both finding “good” employees and having a supply of bench players ready to step in when attrition sets in.

Having said this, how much bench strength is enough? For a company with lots of money, profit and in a strong growth mode, they can afford to have a substantial surplus of staff on the sitting bench, learning and doing enough work until they are needed to be on the first team. But for the typical company where money is tight and the national average runs from 3-5% per annum, a good rule of thumb might be to have 4-8% of the staff as productive benchwarmers. If your turnover is high this should be adjusted accordingly, particularly for highly skilled and critical positions and a high portion of Millennials.

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A recent book called “Leadership is Half the Story” has been making the rounds. The basic tenet of the book is that if one is not the leader they can still be very influential in a support role, sort of like the power behind the throne.

The standard company model may be that if one is not the chief honcho they should go elsewhere to do their thing. Well, to start with there are only so many CEO jobs to go around and most people can get more done by playing a critical support role. This is not to be mistaken as a blind follower or yes man who just doesn’t want to make waves and carries out whatever the boss says, rather this is a skillful team member, often the number two person in the organization. They are confident self-starters who through careful maneuvering can bring out the best in their boss without making that person look indecisive or inept.

We have worked this process in the past with generally good results. It starts with the process I call mutual discovery, whereby one does not bring a fully formed solution to the CEO and ask them to approve it, which is ham handed and often seen as a threat to the CEO’s usually substantial ego and/or intelligence; i.e.: “why did I not figure that out before; am I stupid? A better approach is to deliver a set of facts and alternative set of actions that when analyzed in private with the boss, the alternative that the number two person has put into the mix obviously is seen as the best choice without rubbing a possible poor decision the CEO could have made in their face. But the boss has become the decision maker via this process of mutual discovery, without having to be told what to do. He or she is usually smart enough to understand the finesse demonstrated by their number two person, who becomes a trusted confidant.

Let me provide an example. The company is ready to do an acquisition into a new field. This has long been in the planning process and sold to the team. The only problem is that times have changed and what was a static environment is no longer, with a new technology that will very likely make that deal a very bad one. You as the number two person have just put all the pieces of the puzzle together which no one was fully aware of before, but the CEO has however gone out on a limb, sold the deal, obtained the financing and is ready to go ahead. However, instead of bursting forth with your discovery which might make you look smart at your boss’s expense, you roll out all of the newly discovered intelligence in private, cobbled together very carefully through a variety of sources and let him look like the hero in squelching a bad deal due to his new insight.

To see all articles in this series please go to http://optimal-mgt.com/blog.