How long should you work for a company or brew a cup of tea? "Not too long" is the right answer

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 113

This piece of science is shocking: if you keep the tea bag in a cup of hot water longer than 5 minutes, your tea will start getting weaker. "Steep Tea for a Short Time to Get More Caffeine" seems to be the scientific advice to tea drinkers who like their tea strong. If you keep infusing the tea bag, compounds called thearubigins start to seep out and bind to the caffeine, which weakens the tea.

Have you noticed that the same principle applies to employees who stay too long with the same company? When you start a new job, everything is novel, challenging and interesting. After a few years, you start working on "auto pilot": the enthusiasm fizzles out and boredom wades in.

What is the ideal duration then? Five minutes for a cup of tea, five years for a human employee, perhaps?

Tea bag (Source: Wikipedia)

Newborn animals and newly-hired employees share a one-sided world view

Newborn animals imprint on the parent that raises them. New employees imprint on the boss who hires them.

By George ILIEV

The photo of the ducklings could have featured a bucket instead of the mother duck if a moving bucket had been around for the first 16 hours after the ducklings had hatched. Newly-hatched birds are known to imprint on all kinds of moving objects around them: rubber boots, hang-gliders, sets of plastic balls and even humans.

Similarly, newly-hired company employees will imprint on the boss who hires them or supervises them directly in their first days at the company. They will acquire skills and behaviours from their manager that will turn them into a miniature copy of that person. As a result, they will be more understanding, more forgiving and less critical of their boss, compared with veteran employees who have a new boss put in place (helicoptered in). How could one be too critical if this means being critical of themselves?

What's good for the gander must be good enough for the goose.