We had this question posted on our Facebook group and figured this might be of value to you:
“My key employee is quite capable from a technical perspective but not fitting the leveraged production perspective. Any suggestions on what a practical next step would be to align with the desired structure? Does a person like this have any place in the structure?”
In this case, the Senior Production Manager (SPM) role is where they will most likely end up.
If they don’t want to manage and train others then they put tremendous pressure on their wages to go up because the business cannot charge them out at the level of their wages to do low-level work.
You will be constantly writing time off or they will feel pressure to get things done within budget or the clients will complain because you have to increase their fees to recover the costs of doing low-level tasks at high costs.
It’s a lose/lose situation.
If they don’t change, then Artificial Intelligence (AI) will reduce the number of grinders in the future so in order to protect their job they need to transition from a grinder to a minder.
You will need to help them transition or otherwise, like the typist who refused to learn how to use Word, there will no longer be a job for them.
I had this exact situation and took me 6 months to convince her to transition to a minder role and she is now happy training our staff in the Philippines.
It’s worth noting however that not everyone can transition from a grinder to a minder and I was lucky that despite her initial pushback (and through my persistence), she was one of the rare people who was able to transition.
Alternatively, she would have done herself out of a job because she could not adapt to a changing world. Don’t be a Kodak.