Andrea Belk Olson Why we confuse tenure with experience
A tenured employee is someone who has worked for a company or organization for a number of years. Employees that have worked for a company for more than five years are considered long-tenured employees, while those that have worked for a company for less than five years are considered short-tenured employees. Employees with tenure usually have more expertise in their positions than others. But often, this expertise isn’t what we think it is. Does someone have 20 years of experience or one year of experience repeated 20 times?
There are many times when no experience may be better than 20 years. An employee with 20 years of tenure can help or hurt a team. If that person is doing the job the same way they did it 20 years ago, they are tied to the status quo. They aren’t growing, and they often will squash new ideas and perspectives because they’ve developed “the best way”. But organizations change. Competitors change. Markets change. Customers change. If they haven’t changed along with that, their experience doesn’t hold the weight it used to.
We frequently value tenure because that employee understands how the “sausage is made” in an organization and understands historically what works and what doesn’t. Yet this experience is tied most strongly to technology (shortcuts, limitations), processes (how to get something through internal barriers), politics (who will kill ideas and who will get things done), and dead-on-arrival ideas (things that didn’t work in the past which now have a negative cultural stigma).
Don’t get me wrong, all this experience is valuable. Organizations couldn’t effectively operate without these folks, as new employees are blind to these challenges. But this type of experience – experience inside the organization – isn’t usually experience that will transform the organization. Some tenured folks continually push for change. Some continually push for themselves and their teams to grow and advance their skills. Many have succumbed to company gravity, getting pulled back into the status quo.
In short, tenured employees often don’t have the experience to catapult an organization to a new level because their experience is limited to only to that company. Sure, they may have worked for other companies in the past, but those with 10+ years in one company lack the breadth of exposure to other industries, technologies, processes, strategies, and ideas – all of which are key to growth.
We push our teams to come up with new ideas all the time – through brainstorming sessions, cross-functional teams, and innovation exercises – all the while believing these mechanisms will draw out some revolutionary insight. Because they have so much experience, insight must be in there – we just need to uncover it! However, we’ve kept these employees in a bubble for years. Is it reasonable to expect something amazingly new from tenured employees who have been mostly insulated from anything outside the company (aside from the periodic competitor assessments)?
A tenured employee may be very experienced in their area of responsibility – they might be a great salesperson. They might be very adept at project management. Or they may be very technically savvy. That’s great, but this experience gets convoluted with broader, more diverse business experience. Technical skills are one thing. Experience across different industries, different businesses, and different roles are another. Experience can be defined in a variety of ways – depending on what your organization wants to achieve determines the type of experience you need on board.
Don’t get me wrong – tenured employees can gain new experiences and grow. But many organizations don’t provide the resources and opportunities for them to flourish in this way. Just because you have a team of tenured employees with experience, doesn’t mean they have the right experience to create the transformational outcomes you’re seeking. Either help them gain the exposure they need to new ideas and insights or bring in resources with a different type of experience more suited to the challenge. And in many cases, those can be one and the same.
About the Author
Andrea Belk Olson is a keynote speaker, author, differentiation strategist, behavioral scientist, and customer-centricity expert. As the CEO of Pragmadik, she helps organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to Fortune 500, and has served as an outside consultant for EY and McKinsey. Andrea is the author of three books, including her most recent, What To Ask: How To Learn What Customers Need but Don’t Tell You, released in June 2022.
She is a 4-time ADDY® award winner and host of the popular Customer Mission podcast. Her thoughts have been continually featured in news sources such as Chief Executive Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, Harvard Business Review, Rotman Magazine, World Economic Forum, and more. Andrea is a sought-after speaker at conferences and corporate events throughout the world. She is a visiting lecturer and startup coach at the University of Iowa, a TEDx presenter, and TEDx speaker coach. She is also an instructor at the University of Iowa Venture School.
More information is also available on www.pragmadik.com and www.andreabelkolson.com.
