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A New HR

Thought Leadership for The Future of Work

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FUTURE FRIDAY DISPATCH NO. 9

April 24, 2020 by Karen Jaw-Madson Leave a Comment

aNewHR curates the most thought-provoking recent articles about the Future of Work 

As this global pandemic continues, it’s clear there are and will continue to be massive implications everywhere–including with the Future of Work. Now more than ever we need to be more intentional about shaping our collective future for the better. As human behavior tends to be, much of the narrative is driven by negativity and fear. Both are necessary for survival albeit in healthier doses. They can, however, run rampant and repetitive. aNewHR will endeavor to curate what only provokes new thinking when it comes to the Future of Work. Here are this week’s picks: 

  1. The Future of Work: The importance of leadership (video)
  2. How the Passion Economy Is Redefining Work (a1z podcast)
  3. How futurists think we will be working after the coronavirus pandemic is over (Australia’s ABC News)
  4. Covid-19 crisis will alter the future of work forever, say experts (Free Press Journal)
  5. Breaking Rules And Changing Mindsets: Future Of Work Leaders Discuss How Positive Changes Made Today Can Lead To Lasting Change Tomorrow (via Forbes)
  6. How the Coronavirus Crisis Is Redefining Jobs (Harvard Business Review)
  7. The Future Of Work Starts Now (Forrester)

Filed Under: Future Friday, Future of Work, Karen Jaw-Madson, Uncategorized

FUTURE FRIDAY DISPATCH NO. 8

April 17, 2020 by Karen Jaw-Madson

aNewHR curates the most thought-provoking recent articles about the Future of Work 

As this global pandemic continues, it’s clear there are and will continue to be massive implications everywhere–including with the Future of Work. Now more than ever we need to be more intentional about shaping our collective future for the better. As human behavior tends to be, much of the narrative is driven by negativity and fear. Both are necessary for survival albeit in healthier doses. They can, however, run rampant and repetitive. aNewHR will endeavor to curate what only provokes new thinking when it comes to the Future of Work. Here are this week’s picks: 

  1. On Enterprise Irregulars: How Do Future of Work Companies Perform in a Crisis
  2. Face the Future of Work by Examining Your Culture First via Gallup 
  3. The retail & hospitality industry and COVID-19: Prepare for the future of work, from Retail Dive 
  4. The Coronavirus Is Creating An Inflection Point In The Future Of Work via Forbes
  5. Mapping “The Future of Work” Startup & Investor Ecosystem, on Medium

Filed Under: Future Friday, Future of Work, Karen Jaw-Madson

FUTURE FRIDAY DISPATCH NO. 7

April 10, 2020 by Karen Jaw-Madson Leave a Comment

aNewHR curates the most thought-provoking recent articles about the Future of Work 

As this global pandemic continues, it’s clear there are and will continue to be massive implications everywhere–including with the Future of Work. Now more than ever we need to be more intentional about shaping our collective future for the better. As human behavior tends to be, much of the narrative is driven by negativity and fear. Both are necessary for survival albeit in healthier doses. They can, however, run rampant and repetitive. aNewHR will endeavor to curate what only provokes new thinking when it comes to the Future of Work. Here are this week’s picks:

  1. What practice mandated by remote-work setups is most likely to stick around after work returns to offices? (Protocol article with contribution from Karen Jaw-Madson)
  2. Five (Positive) Predictions About How Coronavirus Will Change The Future Of Work, from Forbes
  3. Use the COVID-19 crisis to train the workforce of the future via The Hill

Filed Under: Future Friday, Future of Work, Karen Jaw-Madson

FUTURE FRIDAY DISPATCH NO. 6

April 3, 2020 by Karen Jaw-Madson

aNewHR curates the most thought-provoking recent articles about the Future of Work

  1. Mercer Global Talent Trends 2020: Win With Empathy
  2. Reevaluating the Conversation on Automation and the Future of Work via Georgetown Public Policy Review
  3. There’s never been a better time to build a “protean career” on Quartz at Work
  4. Redesigning, Redefining Work Videobook by Stanford’s Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab
  5. 4 Accelerated Changes to The Future Of Work Post COVID-19

Filed Under: Future Friday, Future of Work, Karen Jaw-Madson

FUTURE FRIDAY DISPATCH NO. 5

March 27, 2020 by Karen Jaw-Madson Leave a Comment

aNewHR curates the most thought-provoking recent articles about the Future of Work

1. Is the Coronavirus Shaping the Future of How We Work? via NY Times

2. A Real Estate Perspective: When It Comes to the Future of Work, Private and Public Sectors Aren’t as Different as You Might Think (Propmodo)

3. The Best Tech Companies For Remote Jobs In 2020 According To Glassdoor, summarized on Forbes

4. Remote Work isn’t About the Future of Work — It’s about the Future of Living, from Thrive Global

Filed Under: Future Friday, Future of Work, Karen Jaw-Madson

THE MUST-HAVE SKILLS YOU NEED TO COMPETE WITH A.I. & AUTOMATION

March 26, 2020 by Linda Naiman

Will the rise of A.I. and automation put your company at risk or make you more competitive?

According to the World Economic Forum’s report on the future of jobs, developments in A.I., machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3-D printing, and biotechnology will transform the way we live and work, and cause widespread disruption to the workplace over the next five years.

This will have a huge impact on media, advertising, retail, finance, and healthcare industries. While some jobs will disappear, others will grow, and new jobs that don’t even exist today will become commonplace. Consequently, business will need to align its skillsets (especially to keep pace with this transformation).

So-Young Kang, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Gnowbe, notes:

By 2022, businesses will require a proactive and inventive workplace strategy to help the 54% of the workforce  who will require upskilling or reskilling. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will allow for better forecasting, and employers will be quick to anticipate and map out emerging job categories, redundancies and inefficiencies in processes – as well as the changing skills requirements – in response to the continuous disruption of the modern workforce.

I’ve discovered through my clients that the future is already here. As they embrace A.I., blockchain and machine learning, they still need to master creativity, complex human-centered problem-solving and strategic thinking skills.

Robert Falzon, vice chairman of Prudential Financial, says his company is actively taking stock of the talent it has and the skills it will need to create the next wave of products and services.

This “fourth industrial revolution” that we’re going through is so pervasive both in terms of the breadth of industries that it affects and the breadth of functions. It’s not isolated to any particular manufacturing sector or service sector. It affects all industries, and it affects every aspect of a company. There’s no place where you can’t be thinking about the application of technology and artificial intelligence as a way to enhance the operations. There’s no hiding from it. And as a result of that, the concern is that it could be highly disruptive, and it will be—but how you manage that disruption can result in very, very different outcomes.

How will you and your clients face disruption and flourish in this brave new world?

Falzon warns that if you’re relying on the idea that you can displace your talent through technology, outsourcing and process automation, and then think that you’re going to hire entirely externally for [whatever new needs you have] and not take advantage of that pool of labor that you just freaked out, then you’re kidding yourself. “Big employers that want to evolve are going to have to get comfortable putting people in roles they haven’t tried before,” says Falzone. “Some jobs may not have even existed before. Bridging the skills gap is a major priority at Prudential.”

Richard Baldwin, one of the world’s leading globalization experts, argues that the inhuman speed of this transformation threatens to overwhelm our capacity to adapt. He offers three-part advice in his book The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work (Oxford 2019):  (1) avoid competing with A.I. and R.I. (remote intelligence) in the sense that you can’t compete in terms of what they do best, e.g. processing information; (2) build skills in things that only humans can do, in person; and (3) “realize that humanity is an edge not a handicap.”

We will always need heart and soul human connections in the workplace. Dov Seidman, C.E.O. of LRN in a New York Times article  says, “Our highest self-conception needs to be redefined from “I think, therefore I am” to “I care, therefore I am; I hope, therefore I am; I imagine, therefore I am. I am ethical, therefore I am. I have a purpose, therefore I am. I pause and reflect, therefore I am.”

Marty Neumeier, branding expert and author of Metaskills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age, says these five meta-skills—our highly human abilities—are the best bulwark against business or career obsolescence:

  1. Feeling: empathy & intuition
  2. Seeing: seeing how the parts fit the whole picture (a.k.a. systems thinking)
  3. Dreaming: applied imagination, to think of something new
  4. Making: creativity, design, prototyping and testing
  5. Learning: learning how to learn (the opposable thumb of all other Metaskills)

Interestingly these capabilities are at the heart of human-centered design thinking, and complement the five discovery skills of outperforming disruptive innovators identified in the Innovator’s DNA.

Where are you positioned on the robot curve, and how can you optimize your business or career?

Neumeier’s Robot Curve illustrated above, is a simple model of innovation that shows how new processes, businesses, and technologies continuously destroy old ones as they create new opportunities for wealth. Neumeier says there are two ways you can optimize: 1) By keeping your skills or products moving toward the top of the curve, or 2) by designing or managing skills or products at the bottom of the curve.

Make the shift from collecting dots to connecting dots

While the diagram above is aimed at educators, it applies to leadership and business as well. (The green column corresponds with artistic and design thinking capabilities.)

As the educators at Marzano Research beautifully illustrate, we need to shift from collecting dots, to connecting dots. While “collecting dots” is important, leaders must also learn to “connect dots.” Connecting dots has to do with seeing patterns before they are obvious and making connections between disparate data to generate new insights and novel ideas that lead to innovation. This capability requires a mind-shift and skill-shifts from industrial-age thinking to the creation of knowledgeable, creative and adaptable life-long learners.

What skills are most desired?

According to the World Economic Forum report on The Future of Jobs, skills and workplace strategy, complex problem-solving, critical thinking  and creativity  are the top three skills workers will need to benefit from these changes.

Top 10 skills

Revolutionizing the way we learn

It’s worth noting that the human-centered meta-skills required in the fourth industrial revolution are not easily learned online. It’s best to learn via hands-on actioned-based, face-to-face experiences. So-Young Kang says that to build the workforce of the future, we need to revolutionize how we learn:

Learning is no longer just about content and knowledge [Digital Learning 1.0].  Learning is about experience and application because the new currency is skills. Experts and practitioners recognize that learning overall is not just about formal training, but about learning with others and practical on-the-job experiences – as is described simply in the 70-20-10 model. This trend is based heavily on andragogy (the science of adult learning), transformative learning theory  and experiential learning (which says that adults learn through reflection, peer dialogue and application). Project-based work and hands-on experiences are all ways of bringing these principles to life. When adults practice what they have learned, retention and ownership of the content increase significantly. In a corporate environment, this is the holy grail of learning – encouraging people to own, retain and apply what they have learned.

Digital Learning 2.0 is about building skills through the application of knowledge. Digital Learning 2.0 is about what we call MPPG – which stands for mobile micro-learning in participatory, personalized  ways in groups. It’s about engaging the learner anytime, anywhere. Learners who experience Digital Learning 2.0 will need to rethink how they learn: from a passive experience of primarily reading, watching or listening to experts to a more active, participatory role in asking questions, reflecting on the answers and sharing points of view with other learners.

“Learnability” could save your job — and your company

“It’s time to take a fresh look at how we motivate, develop and retain employees. In this environment, learnability – the desire and capability to develop in-demand skills to be employable for the long-term – is the hot ticket to success for employers and individuals alike,” says Mara Swan, Executive Vice President, Global Strategy and Talent, Manpower Group in her World Economic Forum  article.

One of the messages Falzon gives to young people entering the workforce, is about gaining depth and breadth in knowledge and experience. “Yes, become an expert in an area because you build credentials and credibility as a result of that. But it doesn’t end once you’ve done that. Seek broad experience, because that broad experience is going to prepare you to do a whole bunch of more interesting things down the road.”

To ensure you and your kids are robot-proof, make it a habit to keep learning. Activate your curiosity by cultivating a wide range of interests. Don’t just read — try out new experiences outside your comfort zone. Nothing awakens your creative brain more than taking a leap into the unknown and making new discoveries.

References:

The Future of Jobs,  World Economic Forum 2017

Baldwin, Richard. The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work (Oxford 2019)

Kang, So-Young, “To build the workforce of the future, we need to revolutionize how we learn” WeForum, September 11, 2019

Landy, Heather. “How to talk to employees about the future of work.” Quartz at Work August 6, 2019

Neumeier, Marty. Metaskills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age.  (New Riders 2012)

Previously posted on Creativity At Work

Filed Under: Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Future of Work, Linda Naiman, Technology

SMART MACHINES: THE NEW “HUMAN” CAPITAL?

March 26, 2020 by John Boudreau

© Can Stock Photo / abidal

As algorithms and robots get smarter, workforce planning systems need to strike the optimum balance between people and machines.

Stephen Hawking and colleagues warn that “success in creating artificial intelligence would be the biggest event in human history.… Unfortunately it might also be the last.”

From self-driving cars, to intelligent assistants on smart phones, to IBM’s Watson beating humans at Jeopardy, to potentially autonomous military weapons, the effects of increasingly sophisticated automation are undeniable. With leading companies like Google spending millions to acquire artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics startups, financial markets are also betting that AI will become a bigger part of our lives and society.

When it comes to your strategy for people and human capital, the age of smart machines is often framed in traditional terms of job losses and gains. Oxford researchers predict that 45% of American occupations will be automated within the next 20 years. The first stage will be using computational power to replace jobs that rely on such things as pattern recognition, data gathering and distillation, and computational algorithms. Jobs like transportation/logistics, production labor and administrative support will go after that.

However, if you think your job is safe, the researchers also predict that artificial intelligence will eventually put jobs in management, science, engineering and the arts at risk.

Can sophisticated jobs in finance and investing be automated? Consider computer traders, once epitomized by hundreds of humans shouting on a trading floor. An Economist article titled “Dutch Fleet” notes that with the advent of trading algorithms in ultra-fast computer systems, some Amsterdam-based trading firms that formerly relied on traders and saw large bid-ask spreads now occupy a “high-volume, low-margin industry in which market-makers take a sliver of revenue from lots of transactions.” One firm saw a peak of 3,000 trades in 60 seconds. Trading is now the province of algorithms, software and decisions made in milliseconds by automated systems.

The analogy between commodities trading and human capital recruiting is obvious. It seems likely that planning and managing your people will be done more and more by algorithms, not humans. Algorithms can increasingly predict things like employee turnover and future job performance better than typical supervisors or hiring managers. An analysis of 17 studies on applicant evaluations concluded that equations outperform human applicant-selection decisions by 25%. A recent HR-technology conference provided stunning examples of the power of automation to improve and replace human processes in managing people, and admonished HR and organization leaders to prepare for a future driven by predictive analytics.

For CFOs and CHROs, it is tempting to focus on the job displacement and economic cost savings that future technology will produce. Yes, it will mean massive shifts in the balance between the humans and machines doing the work, with a resulting impact on productivity and costs.

Yet, beneath the surface of this issue is something more nuanced. Your concept of work and human capital may need to change, not simply to think about machines versus humans, but about a more nuanced future as humans and machines collaborate.

For example, algorithms can digest thousands of scientific articles much more efficiently than biochemists, producing promising hypotheses for scientists to study. The U.S. Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center estimates that only 20% of the knowledge that human doctors use to diagnose patients is based on published scientific evidence, because it would take at least 160 hours of reading a week just to keep up with new publications. IBM’s Watson computer has been trained to read the medical literature on certain cancers, search up to 1.5 million patient records, interact with doctors in real time with natural language, and present verbal opinions about the best treatment.

I have written that “deconstructing” work will revolutionize talent management by revealing new opportunities to get work done, ones that today are obscured by typical job descriptions or organization charts. The job of “software engineer” includes software coding, project management and team leadership. Rather than hire software engineers to complete a computer coding job, why not deconstruct the job, take out the coding, and employ TopCoder or other talent platforms to post your coding tasks to thousands of freelance coders worldwide? Rather than maintain your own R&D function internally, why not form an alliance with other firms to pool your R&D, as Eli Lilly and Immunocore did?

Scientists working side by side with conversational algorithms show the power of combining the idea of deconstructing work with the idea of the smart machine. The trick is to get the balance right. Today’s human capital planning systems are still largely built on a platform of job descriptions and organization charts, which can lead to a traditional mindset of deciding whether to replace humans with machines. Learning to creatively deconstruct the work and your organization chart can reveal ways to optimize your talent and your work that strike a more creative balance of humans with machines — essentially, an alliance with the machines.

The authors of “The Second Machine Age,” Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, point out that machines are unlikely to take over all jobs. “I don’t think this means that everything those leaders do right now becomes irrelevant,” McAfee told McKinsey Quarterly. “I’ve still never seen a piece of technology that could negotiate effectively or motivate and lead a team.” He suggested that an increasingly important skill for senior managers will be to figure out, “Where do I actually add value and where should I get out of the way and go where the data take me?”

Leaders not only should ask that question about their own jobs, they should partner with their HR leaders to answer it with respect to the full spectrum of current and future work. Deconstruct, automate and reconstruct.

Might the future bring a conversational computer with a seat at the strategic workforce planning table? Let’s just not name it after Toby on the television show “The Office.”

Previously posted on CFO.com

Filed Under: Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Future of Work, John Boudreau, Talent Acquisition, Technology Tagged With: recruiting, workforce planning

FUTURE FRIDAY DISPATCH NO. 4

March 20, 2020 by Karen Jaw-Madson Leave a Comment

aNewHR curates the most thought-provoking recent articles about the Future of Work

  1. The Long-Term Future of Work and Education: Three Potential Scenarios via Wall Street Journal
  2. The future of work: opportunities for a gender new deal (London School of Economics’ Centre for US Politics and Policy)
  3. Remote work: A nationwide survey challenges WFH perceptions from ZDNet
  4. Why ‘Gig Economy’ Is Out And ‘Open Talent’ Is In via Forbes
  5. The Rise Of Television, Economic Inequality And The Future Of Work, also from Forbes

Filed Under: Future Friday, Future of Work, Karen Jaw-Madson

DEVELOPING THE NEXT GENERATION OF LEADERS: TRENDS & TRUTHS ABOUT THE FUTURE OF LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

March 20, 2020 by Ian Ziskin

© Can Stock Photo / jirsak

The ancient Roman dramatist, philosopher, and politician Seneca said, “Luck is when
preparation meets opportunity.” His point was that while luck is terrific, it typically has very little to do with success, especially that which is sustained over time. Instead, success is more often associated with great preparation and the ability to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. Leadership development is all about living at the intersection of preparation and opportunity. It is our job to ensure leaders are well-prepared, and to find or create the right opportunities that will further reinforce their development and readiness for even bigger or more challenging roles.

As leaders, we must develop other leaders to be ready and relevant for what organizations will confront over the next five to ten years and beyond. This responsibility will be significantly shaped by the following ten trends and truths about the future of leadership development:

1. The “Chief Organizational Capability Officer” Emerges

While the chief organizational capability officer (COCO) may or may not become a real job title, the concept is indicative of the direction that many leadership roles will be heading. Increasingly, operating and HR leaders alike will be responsible for integrating and driving agility, business context and environment, change, culture, innovation, leadership, networked organizations and communities, talent, and/or transformation. The power of leadership will be derived from connecting the dots and turbo-charging the in-between points, not by mastering the hierarchy or formal organization. Leadership development will focus on these intersections as leaders become chief organizational capability officers.

2. Outside In Is More Important than Inside Out

External environmental context and understanding will likely trump deep mastery of internal organizational issues as the leadership currency of choice. It will simply not be enough to know the business and how to get things done in a particular company. Rather, breadth of perspective about what is happening around and outside organizational walls, the ability to see around corners, and the willingness to appreciate and learn from others will become highly valued. Leadership development must address the outside in perspective.

3. Hero Leadership Gives Way to Collective Leadership

Highly charismatic and visible individual leaders can symbolize an organization’s brand and culture—in positive or negative ways. Over-reliance on singular iconic leaders can make leadership succession difficult at best, and undermine the employment value proposition because employees have every right to expect to work for multiple leaders who embody the values and behaviors espoused by their companies. Therefore, companies must increasingly invest in leadership not only as an individual capability but as a collective organizational capability as well, whereby leaders are taught, developed, and held accountable for the appropriate leadership attributes and behaviors. Leadership development will emphasize collective leadership mindset and skillset rather individual heroics.

4. Multi-Disciplinary and Cross-Functional Solutions are the Norm

Most challenges that organizations will face in the future are large, complex, multidisciplinary, and cross-functional in nature. Leaders must therefore learn to orchestrate highly collaborative and broad-based approaches to driving solutions. They will be called upon to reach out well beyond the traditional boundaries of their own organizations and functional disciplines to deliver an integrated set of solutions and to engineer answers to complex organizational issues. CEOs and other senior leaders don’t care where these integrated solutions come from or who leads them. Leadership development must focus on integrated, multi-disciplinary, cross-functional perspectives and solutions.

5. Collaboration Across Boundaries has a Multiplier Effect

Most organizations tend to prefer developing leaders by focusing on internal company specific issues and challenges, because they believe their company culture and business issues are so unique and special. In reality, while every company is unique, they also share many common issues, problems, solutions, and leadership learning opportunities. Cross company leadership development programs that help leaders better appreciate broader strategic context and business solutions will be essential. Development opportunities that allow companies to move leaders from one company to another for short-term assignments that would not otherwise be available in the leader’s own company will become much more prevalent. Leadership development will feature experiences outside the arbitrary boundaries of specific companies, industries, and roles that will have a multiplier effect on leadership
capabilities.

6. Coaching Builds Muscle Memory

Leadership coaching has become an increasingly popular and well-accepted tool for
developing leaders, and has evolved from “fixing the broken leader” to investing in the development of highly regarded and successful leaders, by building on their strengths and closing development gaps. Helping leaders reach for broader and more complex leadership roles will often require preparation for unfamiliar and uncomfortable responsibilities. This process necessitates understanding and then practicing to handle scenarios and situations that leaders are likely to face on the job—much like an athlete or musician would practice to prepare for a game or performance. Preparing leaders to address key decisions and situations they might face, before they actually have to face them, helps them develop the “leadership muscle memory” they will need under real life conditions. Leadership development will include a growing reliance on coaching to prepare leaders for situations before they encounter them, rather than only learning from experiences and fixing mistakes
after they occur.

7. Mass Customization Capitalizes on Diverse Needs and Interests

Leadership development used to be about putting in place large-scale organization-wide practices and programs that covered as many people as possible so as to maintain both the perception and reality of fairness and inclusiveness. While fairness and inclusiveness are certainly important and legitimate goals, they are not necessarily achieved by treating all leaders the same. The most common leadership development trends will be higher transparency of feedback, increased segmentation of pivotal roles and people, and greater frequency of talent reviews and action plan follow-up. Ownership for successful leadership and talent development efforts must rest with line leaders and be supported by HR leaders. But, these roles will have to go well beyond making sure meetings happen and that forms are filled out and submitted on time. Leaders must actually know the talent, and will be called upon to selectively differentiate leadership development experiences based on each leader’s unique capabilities and role. Leadership development must allow for mass customization of solutions to capitalize on the diverse needs and interests of leaders.

8. Purpose Complements Performance

Historically, leaders have wanted to work for high performing winning organizations, and while that aspiration is still fashionable, it is no longer sufficient. It is becoming even more attractive to work for organizations that strike a healthy balance between performance and purpose. Increasingly, many people—especially Millennials —want to affiliate with institutions that value the importance of economic and social contributions. People want to be where the organization’s values and purpose align with and reinforce their own. Leadership development is therefore quickly evolving to include more of a “whole person” construct that promotes the importance of becoming a healthy, balanced, well-rounded, purpose-driven leader. Leadership development will become as much about creating and fulfilling purpose as it has been about planning for and driving performance.

9. Bite-Sized/On-Demand Solutions Reflect Changing Workforce Expectations

The workforce is becoming more mobile, virtual, and globally distributed. Work will
increasingly be done when, where, and how the workforce prefers. The traditional
employment model is steadily giving way to more bite-sized, freelanced, project-based, and shorter-term gigs. So too must leadership development practices reflect this revolution. Developmental assignments and leadership development programs need to accommodate for more agile, quick-turnaround, quick-hit, on-demand, and technology-enabled design and delivery models. Six week in-residence programs at prestigious universities are not going away completely or anytime soon, but they are also not the prevalent model for the future. Leadership development must be more virtual and in the moment, and delivered in smaller more digestible bites to better reflect changing workforce expectations and technological realities.

10. Ready Now Gives Way to Ready Able

Leadership development experts used to say, “Past track record predicts future success.” In the future, we will likely say, “Past track record is only a valid predictor of future success if the past looks anything like the future.” The connection between past and future conditions is tenuous at best. At worst, we could make determinations about leadership development, readiness, and succession based on all the wrong factors and criteria because the future may look nothing like the past. The conditions, challenges, and pace of change may be completely different. So, all our emphasis on developing ready now leaders must give way to developing ready able leaders. We no longer really know if leaders are ready now. At best, we can prepare them to be ready able—to have the situational awareness, flexibility, savvy, and leadership capabilities required to quickly understand and adapt to changing conditions. Leadership development in the future will be about identifying and developing potential,
which in turn translates into being ready and able to handle whatever the future throws at us.

Filed Under: Ian Ziskin, Talent, Talent & Leadership Development

A TALENT OPERATING MODEL FOR THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

March 14, 2020 by Edie Goldberg

co-written with Kelley Steven-Waiss

Image by Brian Merrill from Pixabay

Given the changing nature of work and business models, there is an urgent need for companies to become more efficient and effective in their use of human capital.  The old models for work, where we slot people into prescribed roles and expect them to execute against their job description, is partially to blame for the high rates of turnover in organizations today.  Employees want continuous learning and growth opportunities, yet we place them in jobs and expect them to work with the same people to execute the same tasks day after day, week after week.

In today’s competitive landscape, companies need to develop fresh approaches to managing talent by more dynamically assigning talent to projects and responding to changing business models that democratize work relationships. Work relationships are democratized when they put into balance the needs and control of individuals and companies.  The rise of machine automation and the Internet of Things (IoT) has fundamentally transformed not only the nature of work, but the speed at which it’s necessary to learn and deploy new skills that are often in higher demand than supply. This remains true no matter how an organization plans to source talent; whether it be with full-time employees or “talent on demand.” We must challenge what we thought was novel in talent management as recently as two to three years ago. Now it’s a race to acquire skills. And just when everything seems under control, another emerging skill domain becomes both critical and scarce. Without a crystal ball, today’s CEOs and CHROs are managing their most valuable competitive resource – blind.

Given resource constraints, companies cannot afford to be wasteful or leave any asset untapped. Furthermore, losing strong employees who leave for development opportunities is wasteful.  We have developed a new talent operating model that is based on 6 Core Principles to help companies better leverage and develop their existing talent.  These 6 principles will enable your company to create a gig economy for talent on the inside.

Principle No. 1: You Get What You Give

Most members of the Generation X and baby boomer cohorts have grown up with a management style that focuses on owning and controlling employees on their teams or in their functions. For them, talent sharing across departments or functions is an uncomfortable concept. However, encouraging greater sharing of talent across organizational boundaries (talent mobility) can create abundance rather than scarcity of resources in an organization. The idea is simple; managers give away some of the hours employees work to other departments, and in return they can get help from employees from different departments. Over time, this swapping of talent should be equal whether “give” or “get”. The talent that managers are able to access this way might have a critical skill set not available from their current team members.  This enables managers to temporarily borrow talent, saving the time and expense of hiring an external contractor or consultant or opening a position requisition to hire a new employee for a skill that is not regularly needed. “You get what you give” is one of the most challenging mindset shifts necessary to embrace the new talent operating model, but the one that pays the biggest dividends.

Principle No. 2: Know What You Have

It’s a common problem for companies not to be aware of the skills their employees bring to their organizations. At best, they know all their employees’ job titles. And companies don’t take advantage of existing technology to monitor skill gaps and encourage employees to acquire new skills that are important to the company. Human capital management systems have traditionally been matched to an old infrastructure that emphasizes jobs and doesn’t easily illustrate an inventory of skills. An ability to clearly identify the full range of skills within an organization allows talent acquisition and deployment to be optimized by focusing on filling strategic gaps for work that must be performed today while planning effectively for skills that will be needed in the future.

The talent supply chain is an application of traditional inventory supply-chain management to talent. Supply-chain management is the optimization of product inventory and supplies so that those items can arrive on time and to the right destination. Similarly, a talent supply chain is based on skills inventories and knowing how much to have “in stock” to ensure that supply matches demand. Organizations that deploy those right skills at the right time will be well positioned when emerging skill domains (such as artificial intelligence) reach higher demand than supply. Failure to manage supply of skills efficiently could lead to loss of market share and profits, and ultimately, if a company doesn’t have the skills that are crucial to pursue their strategic goals, failure to thrive.

Principle No. 3: Create a Learning Organization

Given that the half-life of skills is now only five years, employees must constantly update their learning. Millennials have a reputation for wanting continual career advancement. However, when we dig deeper to understand what that means, it is really a desire for nonstop learning and career growth. Being able to further their learning is an important incentive for employees in today’s relentlessly evolving business environment because, without continuous learning, skills easily become irrelevant. However, organizations have a difficult time keeping up with employee demands for personalized, dynamic, ongoing learning and development opportunities, which require exposure to different experiences that build new skills. Gaining access to micro-learning opportunities through short-term projects facilitates skill acquisition and career growth more quickly than yesterday’s approaches. Bite-size on-the-job learning and online learning have become the new normal for rapid skill development.

Principle No. 4: Democratize the Work

Millennials bring to the workforce a new set of values and expectations along with an inclination to be more entrepreneurial in nature and more in control of how, when and where they work. This drives a need for a more consumer-like experience, not unlike the ways employees experience their personal lives. They get to choose, for example, which airline to fly and when they want to go to fit their individual needs. When employees are allowed more freedom and choice in how they contribute in the workplace, they can select work that suits them. This flexibility helps employees get unstuck from narrowly defined roles and the boredom that comes with doing the same set of tasks day after day. They can use the full breadth of skills they can contribute to their organizations. Using technology and artificial intelligence, companies can automatically match employees to potential opportunities, which opens up possibilities beyond the old boys’ network, which only gives access to new projects to those who are politically connected within the company.

Principle No. 5: Create an Agile Organization

A move away from a traditional hierarchy toward more project-based teams can increase a company’s responsiveness to changing business dynamics. Historically, organizations have been built to be efficient and effective, which was appropriate in a time of predictability. Organizational hierarchy was a natural outgrowth of this desire to be efficient. But the resulting business models created strong silos that discourage cross-boundary collaboration (e.g., sharing information across marketing and engineering). In today’s era of unpredictability and constant business model disruption, organizations must be designed for speed, agility and adaptability to respond to evolving business priorities and customer demands. Part of designing for adaptability is a shift away from hierarchical structures toward models where work is accomplished in teams. Using self-managed work teams and providing appropriate support structures, the management and the workforce become more fluid and responsive to business needs while remaining focused on the goals the teams are designed to achieve.

Principle No. 6: Bust the Functional Silos

Breaking down organizational silos allows for cross-functional collaboration within the company to foster innovation. The resulting cross-pollination of ideas ensures that the product or service is representative of customers in a diverse marketplace. Individuals from different disciplines look at business challenges in different ways. When teams that represent a variety of disciplines focus on the same problem, diverse ideas can be generated and then combined to achieve novel solutions. One of the greatest benefits of cross-functional collaboration is that employees are exposed to a different part of the business and thus gain greater insight into how the company operates.

Now is the time to disrupt the existing 20th-century operating models and create a new talent operating model that helps companies optimize their internal resources. With the advances made in artificial intelligence and machine learning, there are new and effective tools to deploy talent within organizations and create an internal gig-economy. But the technology only enables the process.

We believe the new talent operating model is the most critical component of creating an internal gig-economy. It is about changing the way a company operates to best use and reskill the talent it currently has. To employ talent in a different and more dynamic way, modifications are needed in all areas of the talent operating model: culture, leadership, ways of working, HR programs and processes, team development processes and so on. 

We believe the future of work will look very different than it does today. Organizations must adapt to become more agile as they shift and change based on new technologies, new skills, and new business competitors. You can follow this path to create companies that are more productive and more innovative, while offering employee experiences that drive high levels of engagement and organizational performance.

Filed Under: Edie Goldberg, Talent

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