What If You Wouldn’t Need To Quit Your Corporate World?
The unlived potential of corporations & why it’s not yet too late
A good few years back, I was sitting in a white conference room with my manager. It was my usual “Year-End Review”, where performance is assessed and career trajectory fine-tuned.
Towards the end came the usual suspect question: “So, what position do you see yourself in 5 years”.
I hesitated but replied: “I don’t think the role exists yet. I will need to create it myself”. I remember his puzzled face, not knowing how to guide the conversation back on the safe tracks. To tick the box and to move on. “Maybe something more concrete. Manager at X, Y, Z — there’s a catalog of opportunities.” I saw his struggle to resolve this uncertainty as quickly as possible, yet I was not able to articulate the precise position with an honest enthusiasm — heck, it didn’t yet exist.
I had started to notice a paradox with my own workplace & also companies around the world: there was a mismatch between these three interlinked parts:
- Changing consumer behavior & more hostile market environment: While the market has gotten increasingly more saturated with the new-comers due to low economies of scale, traditional organizations have not built their operations teams towards facing customer needs, but have stayed stuck in the Hub-and-Spoke business model. This is the opposite of being agile.
- Company structures & processes: While technological disruptions have changed consumer behavior, companies have not fully realigned their value creation models towards market-sensing & adaptability. Precious time is lost to redundancies and “looking-busy syndrome”.
- Job positions & titles: Built around functional departmentalization, they are combined by teams with the same or similar job functions, rather than situational cross-functional & hybrid roles.
Here are a few questions to guide us onwards:
- What could be achieved by matching these three elements better to each other?
- What type of company model is needed so that it’s overtaken by role-growth mentality, not titles?
- What can an individual do?
Let’s investigate.
5-year plans for roles, not titles
To me, the meaning of a “role” has very little to do with “a job title or a position”, and oftentimes we tend to mix these two words up as it happened at my Year-End-Review. How come? Because the role needs constant evolution and space to grow — it’s emergent and not with an “end-goal”; it’s not a title waiting for you up at the corporate ladder. It’s a total sum of experiences, expertise, collaboration and learning mindset for new skills and knowledge. Consequently, the leadership style is then also more situational & emergent — resulting in fewer power politics, less show.
My own role in The Company required me to bring in innovation, ideas; sense the changing market needs, strategize; capitalize on new opportunities & bring them to life by pulling together collaboration across different departments and countries — yet like with the majority of my colleagues within a typical matrix organization, the enthusiasm & focus oftentimes crumbled under bureaucratic walls, information silos, fixed reporting structures, ever-growing targets, ambiguous incentive systems, and endless chicken & egg situations.
Indeed, there were plenty of instances with exhilarating new side-projects where emergent teams across all departments were joined together based on situative needs, and as a result, our roles & experiences expanded ten-fold. We celebrated wins and were proud of our cross-everything teamwork efforts making the impossible happen. Yet, they were “special initiatives”, not interwoven into the company design as a whole.
Having tasted the autonomy and the freedom of achieving with the team these impossible new heights, going back to the regular ways of working at the end of the workday felt like swimming against the current with heavy scuba gear on the back.
Why? Because the old organizational structures stayed put, the corporate immune system kicked in, eventually leaving us all defeated.
The role of the Anonymous Corporate Revolutionists
Let’s paint a vivid picture: You love your job, your industry, your team — but the corporate walls do not expand while your desire plus an actual need for role-growth does. For example, you might face challenges that change their nature every day, requiring skills and experience that sometimes no one has. Yet, latching-on to the safety of our “titles” gives us the assumption that we must handle everything within our own circle of influence and breeding validation. You notice more and more that in this volatile market environment, it’s now near impossible. The list goes on and on.
The other downside of this is, that in those high-speed market conditions, working in corporates can oftentimes feel like working in closed systems — systems where the external world has been cut off, information is recycled internally only and decisions are constantly reaffirmed and validated by the peers — but not by the end-consumers. Does this sound familiar?
Recently I stumbled upon an article on Harvard Business Review, called “The 3 Things Employees Really Want: Career, Community, Cause”. My colleague Human saw the statement flawed:
“I hold against it: people don’t want careers. They want progression. Career is the construct that management practice created as a tool for progression. The problem with current career models is that they tend to work against the idea of community and in some companies are the cause why people work there. If they find themselves at the end of their career, they tend to change companies.”
Coming back to my Year-End-Review meeting, I realized: I had a Cause. I had a Community. But I had a problem with the meaning behind “The Career” and the need to “define a desired title” — to me, it was an outdated outlook and caused a strong internal dissonance. “The Career” needs to be a progression not in the title but in a role: a role that is emerging and oftentimes indeed, not yet created.
At our 1789 Community events, which we call “Anonymous Corporate Revolutionists” Meetups, we see an ever-increasing number of these same “dissonance” stories. People are torn between two emotions: they love their jobs but are tired of the “old system” that incentivizes them with titles, not roles.
Nonetheless, I am rooting for corporates. Because companies are people. They are formed by people — the same Anonymous Corporate Revolutionists. And even if the majority of the employees might feel (and be) powerless in creating new systems and organizational structures — they still can start a movement formed around the group of “early adopters”, even if from the grassroots level. Here’s a more in-detail article for leading change exponentially.
The real talk: what needs to happen
Even though the corporate structures might have molded us into tamed species (or do so sooner or later if nothing changes) and we keep running in circles saying: “We are not able to change the system!” — nothing will happen! Even if the traditional structures one day are turned into an envied “Google Land” — by an old habit, you will (relievedly) let yourself be tamed there, too!
You, dear Anonymous Corporate Revolutionist, don’t need to leave your corporate job as I did: you need to start asking to expand your roles & make a case for change (no matter what the rank) and guide your colleagues to do the same. Then, you are able to adapt faster and be far ahead of understanding these three interlinked parts I mentioned in the first chapter, and where is the gap lying in front of you: the changing consumer behaviors, company structures & the problem with job positions & titles. You’ll be better prepared.
For the leaders who want to keep your rebel workforce: it’s in your hands to commit the whole company to transform from hierarchical to radically new structures. To interwove the “short term innovation initiatives” into the holistic company design. It’s time to go fully in and do it properly! And by doing so, start from the governance level. Then, involve the early adopters from across all hierarchical levels. With your leverage (budgetary, strategic, long term vision) can be a tipping point, leading everyone past the threshold.
Below are a few questions that help to guide the thought-process.
Should you:
- … design every aspect of the company and establish an innovation DNA and a learning culture like Google?
- … envision the company as a platform organization such as Haier with over 4.000 micro-entities that can sense and adapt to the market & removing layers of management?
- … or rather understand the company’s own individual context and create its unique model?
Laying out all the cards above, I choose to stay optimistic and keep the focus on the goal: that one day (soon) these radically new company designs are a norm and the emergent roles are an integral part of the organization. But to get there, it takes all of us to make it happen.
I am Liisi from 1789 — Beyond Revolution. We are a group of experts who are fundamentally rethinking the ways future organizations are designed and led in the digital age. Do you agree or disagree with my thoughts? Do you have some new insights into the article?
