View publication - Chartered Institute of Housing

PART TWO: LEADING TOMORROW
1. Becoming an employer of choice
In order to meet our vision we need to recruit, develop, support and liberate talented
people by becoming their employer of choice. This requires the right ‘psychological
contract’ with those who work with us or may consider working for us. There are three
elements to this psychological contract:
• Firstly, people who are interested and passionate about what they are trying to
achieve will put far more of their individual resource into their daily work and
engaging with customers. Dan Pink’s book, ‘Drive – the suprising truth about what
motivates us’ 59 shows that, apart from very simple, mechanistic work, giving people
the freedom to create and use all their qualities, is more important than money as
the principal motivator in the ‘contract’.
• Secondly, our people-based business has learning at its core. We believe in what
we call ‘the perfectibility of human kind’ by which we mean that every individual
has the potential to continuously develop and approach what Maslow calls
‘self actualisation’. 60 Learning becomes the key to entering the world of self
fulfilment once basic needs are met and confidence and self esteem are built. The
organisation’s part of the contract is to provide the culture and the ladder of learning
opportunities which enable individuals to achieve this.
• Thirdly, the closer our people can get to self-actualisation through our development
strategy (see point 3 below) the greater our capacity to be ‘agile’ as a business will
be. We describe the ‘agility’ of our people and our business in terms of having the
capacity to do things in, say, five years time that we haven’t even dreamt of yet.
Agility enables us to prosper in a world that is changing at an accelerating rate.
Building confidence and freedom from the fear of failure are vital ingredients of
this approach.
At Gentoo, our values are key to this two way psychological contract – everything we
do and, vitally, the way we do it. So when our staff give us all they’ve got (by which we
mean using all of their talents, personalities, interests and passions) as well as their
knowledge and skills, to work with customers, they can expect a lot from us in return.
We strive, therefore, to provide work experiences that are of value to individual staff,
our business and our customers. Aligning business needs and staff needs in leading and
managing our work is essential to our success. This requires us to not only know what
our customers need and want, to improve their ‘art of living’, but to know our staff
and Board members equally well. This is not some quaint or soft hearted construct.
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