When ‘Work’ is no longer work

Enablers and Inhibitors: Role of the Manager

Enabler / Inhibitor — Role of the Manager

Definition

The role of the manager in a talent marketplace will evolve to accommodate and to leverage greater complexity. The manager will be an attractor, an enabler and a connector of just-in-time, on-demand talent. The manager’s work will become significantly more dynamic when accessing workers who bring precisely what is needed to meet business needs rather than relying on the known capabilities of individuals in a fixed team or department.

To meet the objective to provide the right talent at the right time to support dynamically changing business needs, managers will contribute in a “breathing organization” where internal and external talent are continuously on-boarded and released from projects. The most effective managers will guide, nourish, and engage individuals from the external talent market, as well as their own employees.

This continuous assembling of workers possessing as-needed capabilities will require managers to excel at rapidly forming teams and continuously aligning and validating deliverables, while negotiating the wildly different personal requirements of autonomous workers.

Dimensions

Current definitions of “manage” still reflect the needs of the Industrial Age: “to direct or be in charge of; to handle or control.” Control was essential to achieve economies of scale and predictable processes, so managers were put in control of others to direct their efforts and punish or reward them based on the outcomes of their efforts. As demands on organizations have grown more complex — and no single manager can know as much or more than an assembly of capable professionals — expectations of managers have evolved from “direct and control” to “align and empower” workers. These more recent behavior expectations will be essential as managers give up ownership and control of their human resources in exchange for wider access to optimal talent on digital platforms and extreme flexibility in deploying them.

Managers who try to apply traditional skills to “plan, command, and control” will not be successful when they try to navigate dynamic environments in a stable-linear way. However, managers, who have migrated to leveraging the wisdom of teams will effectively engage the collective expertise and knowledge of diverse workers. They will create conditions that foster collaboration among individuals striving to get their personal needs met while desiring to make a greater impact by working well with others.

Workforce planning will shift from projecting hiring requirements to creating flexible talent scenarios that can meet requirements of frequently changing business goals and priorities.

Organizations will shift to just-enough centrally-steered talent processes to ensure consistency and quality across the organization, with most talent decisions made at the most local level possible.

Managers in agile organizations will evolve into enablers and connectors. They will balance providing task clarity and enough emotional security for individuals with meeting requirements of timing and quality of deliverables for the organization. They will foster self-management of individuals by providing coaching and continuous feedback, while attending to costs, milestones, and outputs for the organization.

They will maintain a holistic view of what the organization requires, while inspiring and guiding flexible teams composed of internal and external members to achieve mutual goals.

The best agile managers will engage fluently with the organization’s external networks to seamlessly engage internal and external talent to respond to changing needs.

An agile manager in the talent marketplace will be one who flexibly assembles, aligns, and rewards the most capable individuals to achieve the outcomes of an organization.

The role of the Agile Manager leveraging a talent marketplace will be known for:

• Attracting the best talent based on a personal reputation for achieving results by helping workers learn, collaborate, deliver, and build their own reputations
• Ensuring the work of a continuous flow of autonomous workers to achieve the organization’s objectives by providing context, clarity, and continuous feedback
• Matching the needs and value propositions of the organization with the strengths and preferences of individuals willing to bring their unique capabilities
• Helping individuals meet their personal growth goals and development plans while delivering valuable work
• Leading and shaping the work with a light touch by providing context, aligning effort, and protecting the organization’s interests, while getting the most value from optimal talent
• Creating an environment for individuals to do their best work and for the organization to capitalize on the innovation this enables

Role of the Manager in an Agile Environment

Agile environments require managers to organize work in a more flexible manner. They will move from directing work from individuals in stable roles and departments towards leading in a dynamic network and assembling the outputs of internal and external talent to complete needed assignments. New requirements for managerial roles will include focusing on three areas: breaking down strategic goals into assignments; assembling and forming high-performing teams on short notice, and coaching teams to their strengths.

The talent marketplace as a common platform will:

Enable an organization to

• Respond to changing market or customer requirements through rapid identification and deployment of capabilities from internal and external workers
• Match internal workers with replacement assignments as elements of their work are disrupted or eliminated by automation or other changes in demand for their capabilities

Enable an individual worker to

• Find and evaluate assignments that meet personal needs for income, time commitment, personal and professional growth, purpose, and reputation building
• Constantly evaluate the state of one’s profession, which skills are emerging or descending, price tags for different kinds of work, reputations of organizations and leaders worth working for, role models to emulate, and the range of benefits to seek from different organizations

Enable an agile manager to

• Locate and deploy optimal talent immediately to complete critical assignments
• Manage and leverage talent costs more effectively

The benefits for individual talent of working with an effective Agile Manager include

• Choose the organization and specific managers to work for based on their reputations for clarity, honesty, fair compensation, and mutual concern for reputation
• Choose managers who are known as career builders through effectively matching individuals to assignments and providing continuous coaching and feedback

The benefits for the organization of developing effective Agile Managers include

• Greater returns from talent expenditures
• Greater flexibility to reassign individuals whose jobs are being disrupted
• Increased ability to attract scarce talent and pay premium rates only as long as needed
• Rapid team formation and disbanding to address new or changing requirements quickly
• Continuously expanding a bench of agile talent to meet future needs

To enable a marketplace approach Agile Managers will have to:

• Excel at precisely defining assignments and applying appropriate price tags
• Quickly and effectively communicate requirements, expectations and context to agile workers
• Deliver task-based and career-development coaching and feedback to get the work done and to develop longer term capabilities and relationships with the best workers
• Create conditions for collaboration among diverse individuals connected by ephemeral objectives

What will it take to transition your organization?

To take full advantage of a Transparent and Adaptive Talent Marketplace an organization will need to evolve the expectations, selection, and development of its managers to establish new behaviors required in this environment. Below are a few areas to consider and our view on how they will need to evolve for an organization to cultivate these capabilities for a more agile future state.

The Intertwined Nature of Enablers and Inhibitors

Agile Managers cannot create an agile environment by themselves. Their contributions will be interdependent with other enablers and inhibitors. The following graphic illustrates external drivers, these interdependencies, and their relative impact.

The bottom of the illustration shows external developments, which have prompted the role of the manager to evolve so that the benefits of transparent and adaptive talent platforms can be realized.

For example, Agile Managers will use emerging technologies to connect to external talent bases where they will cultivate broad business and social networks. This broader access to talent will allow them to respond to dynamic market conditions and changing client expectations. Labor regulations, unions, and work councils will enable or inhibit these new relationships.

The Role of the Manager is one of eight intertwined Enabler/Inhibitors to achieving the benefits of the talent marketplace. Begin at 9 o’clock and travel clockwise to examine these factors.

• Traditionally managers have allotted rewards and recognition to individuals within the defined organization’s defined parameters. Flexible reward and recognition systems will drive a world where the assignment itself comes along with a price — which will vary based on urgency and importance of the assignment, as well as the availability of talent to work on the assignment. Providing individual and tailored reward and recognition will become more important to serve different needs of the workforce. In an environment where flexible and very diverse teams will be the norm, the ability to liaise quickly with different employees and to express care and appreciation will be key.
• In addition to paying the platform price tag for specific capabilities, managers will influence the reputation of workers based on how they fulfill assignments. Reliability, quality output, and collaborative capabilities will differentiate some workers. The platform will drive transparency of the professional reputation of the market players empowering reputation to become the “admission ticket” to an engagement. Managers will also build their own brand in addition to contributing to the organization’s brand. The behavior of the managers and how they role model the brand vision and the employee value proposition will become essential for attracting and retaining key talent. Effectively dealing with social networks will be crucial for creating a strong reputation and brand.
• Managers will become skilled in defining assignment attributes required to produce organizational outcomes. They will achieve these assignments by assembling agile, mission-based teams to meet client needs rather than through applying stable corporate processes. As a connector and enabler, the manager needs to help the teams focus on what matters most to the organization and how to shift resources according to priorities.
• As an enabler, the manager will be much more active as a coach and advisor on-the-job to ensure that employees can keep up with the fast changing work requirements. Training and learning will need to shift from a heavy focus on classroom training to an approach that focuses more on managers providing just-in-time resources that support the self-development of the employee. Some managers will occasionally provide access to training in new skills to enhance their own reputation and attract better talent.
• The manager will be the dominant force in shaping each worker’s experience of the organizational culture and climate. More entrepreneurship will be required from managers as well as capabilities to shape the organization and its culture. The manager will be pivotal in creating an organizational culture that fosters and supports an entrepreneurial mindset, while at the same time ensuring alignment with its overarching intent, shared priorities, and regulatory requirements.
• Managers will need to engage effectively with employees inside and outside the organization at different stages of their individual careers instead of operating within a uniformly defined employee lifecycle. These capabilities will be crucial for managing a diverse and multigenerational workforce operating with different working agreements, including flexible working and varied contracting models to meet individual needs. Manager attention will shift from career management to supporting individual growth.
• Managers will require significantly more agility in leveraging people attributes. They will focus more on how to orchestrate and leverage diversity and different working styles. They will ensure that leadership capability is developed and reinforced at every level of the organization, so that there is leadership from every seat to meet client expectations. With this pervasive leadership, strong but simple common principles will be necessary to ensure a shared strategic intent and a joint approach how to drive the business.

Potential Hazards to Guard Against

It is important to anticipate potential hazards to evolving the role of managers working with a talent marketplace. Here are some key areas for consideration:

• Managers are expected to operate within labor laws that vary widely geographically. Platforms will present talent from different locales long before these laws are harmonized presenting potential compliance risks and individual liability for these managers.
• Traditional leadership training and development will be inadequate and possibly misleading for new conditions and requirements.
• Organizations will most likely maintain a mixed state of stable, traditional employment arrangements while migrating to more agile engagements, and managers who migrate early could be penalized for diminished output while the rules change and until the benefits are apparent
• Managers will have to navigate the tension between workers’ privacy rights and the market’s requirements for accurate and transparent individual reputation
• Managers will need adequate support to transition their roles from directing and controlling to consulting, coaching and counseling
• Potential blame could be placed on managers for incomplete outcomes until systems are in place for coordinating the integration, alignment, and contributions of numerous, agile work units
• Managers will need mechanisms to address talent with low capabilities or reputations without hurting their own reputation for delivery
• Funding will need to be adjusted to attract workers that command higher price tags than previously allocated for internal, captive talent

Transformational Trajectory

How could the manager’s journey evolve from a stable world into an agile one?

The key states and the related activities are:

Environment

• Volatile and potentially disruptive business environment
• Rise of external agile talent eager for different working arrangements
• Rapid changes in requirements for new capabilities and levels of agility in internal workers
• External driving forces — demographics, generational, social, technological, geopolitical, economical …

Diagnosis

Assess maturity level of current managers to become more agile:

• Inspirational /engaging leadership
• Social network management skills
• Agile project/work management capabilities
• Broad range of people development skills
• Entrepreneurial mindset
• Ability to deal with agility and ambiguity
• Ability to inject and handle change
• Experience and ability for rapid team formation and collaboration across boundaries
• Strategy impact on organizational design requirements
• Two horizon technology / digitalization / automation assessment (architectures/infrastructures)
• Cultural maturity / savviness
• Experimentation / testing / validation of hypotheses

Incubation

• Identify areas of the organization that will be better served by more agile staffing
• Identify current managers who have demonstrated some agile talent skills
• Create experiments by inserting these agile managers into dynamic settings with the resources, guidance, and sponsorship to recruit and lead mixed teams of internal and external agile talent to achieve specific objectives
• Monitor progress, capture issues, facilitate learning and documentation of practices
• Enlist effective agile managers to influence management training design and mentor next candidates

Transformation

• Determine optimal locations and degrees of agile practices
• Develop metrics and success criteria
• Evolve hiring and development practices for expanding agile management talent
• Communicate benefits realized by the business and agile workers
• Join other organizations to address regulatory and legal barriers
• Identify remaining barriers and create plans to transform them to enablers

2020+

• Pervasive talent platforms across all geographies, industries, and capabilities
• Support for developing leadership skills in all players in the marketplace throughout their lifetime
• Evolved labor laws and workforce rules that generate opportunities for organizations and all workers

Questions to Get Started

Here are a few questions to guide an organization’s transition toward engaging in a Talent Marketplace:

Organization

How quickly and effectively could you shift your organization to address a significant disruption to your organization? What would be the greatest barriers to changing the composition of your workforce to survive or compete? How well is your organization currently adapting to market requirements and environmental changes?

Business Strategy

To what degree is your strategy focused on explore or exploit, and how does your current workforce and management team need to shift to reflect these priorities?

Organizational Culture

Is your employee value proposition a source of competitive advantage, and how effectively are you delivering on it? How do your organization’s cultural values match the hopes of talent entering the workforce?

There are 7 other fundamental factors that will enable or inhibit the transformation…View the entire article here