Don’t be a frog: how to take the best from the Future of Work
The famous metaphor of the Chomsky’s frog is very simple: if you put a frog into boiling water, the frog will jump away before dying. But if you put a frog in warm water the frog will swim in it enjoying the warm temperature. The temperature increases, the water gets warmer, and the frog starts to think “I don’t like it, it’s too warm, but I can stand it”, and it gets a little tired.
You increase the temperature again; the water now is too hot for the frog. In the beginning, the frog tries to accept the temperature, and then it starts thinking “this is really too much for me, I’ll jump out”, but soon, it will realize it is too weak to react, and the frog will be boiled alive.
This metaphor describes exactly what happens when you work disconnected by your purpose, passions and “your-future-self”. At the beginning we have to take jobs we don’t like to pay our bills, that’s acceptable. But if we go on accepting the toxic environment, what will happen?
For us it’s not a matter of being boiled alive, it’s about burnout and depression.
The World Health Organization reported that in 2018 300 million people suffered from depression, and it causes around 800,000 deaths from suicide every year. And the number of people stressed and unsatisfied about their job is impressively high and it can reach 85% of the worldwide population, based on the Gallup Report.
Human Resources is actually Human Transformation!
When we think of traditional HR, we typically think about hiring, firing, policies, training and rules or regulations. But in the future of work, we need HR not being, thinking, or acting like HR.
Top HR executives spend around 20% of their time on traditional HR “stuff” and around 80% of their time focusing on transformation. This is what the future of HR is all about.
It should be called Human Transformation instead of Human Resources. Why? Because HR’s role should be centered on helping the organization grow, evolve, and shape the future of work. HR should be a part of the company not because it has to be legally there, but because the organization wants and needs transformational growth and the very best people to help achieve that transformation. HR is one of the coolest roles in the corporate world today! And one of the most important tasks of Human Resources is to search for Talents.
How can we define a Talent?
If you look at online job platform you will see a lot of complicated and wow-effect job titles like “Galactic Viceroy of Research Excellence” (At Microsoft) or “Master Clay Modeler” (Ford) or “Dean of Pizza”.
This is not a new trend: in 1980 there was a very famous manual called “DOT” — Dictionary of Occupation Titles. The book explained the very complicated and precise rules to define an employee and contained more than 12.000 titles.
But the most important thing was the structure of these titles, for the book the correct way to describe an employee was “Data-People-Thing”, as Head of Dish-washer department.
Today, on the one side we are very creative about titles adding a kind of spirituality (for example, “guru”, “evangelist”, “ninja”, “rockstar”, “wizard”). On the other side, we are going on using a similar ‘skill-based’ generalization putting together technology and expertise, for sure you spoke with a lot of PHP developers, Java architect, etc.
Despite the 40 years of evolution we are going on defining our employees as the sum of their skills, not as a human being but as a human doing.
But recently companies have started to take into consideration not only the hard skills but even soft skills.
So, is expressing hard skills and soft skills (even if companies are still learning how to search for them) enough? For more complete definition we have to include these main elements: Drivers and Passions.
This new definition explores a new way to understand a person as a Talent including Drivers, which represents what motivates and gives you energy at work, and Passions, which represent your bridge to learning new skills. We are moving from a human doing representation to a human being one, able to describe a person and his/her personal behavior, needs, and passions in a more dynamic way.
From ego-system to eco-system: understanding the role of a Talent in companies’ environment
What is an ecosystem? When you think about an ecosystem, you, for sure, think about our planet and how it is trying to keep things in balance. If you think about your company you’ll think about teams, relationship inside and among teams, you and the management, and so on.
To explain the shift from ego-system to eco-system, we will go back, once again to 80ies when the amazing English dictionary presented us a new term (or acronym): Young Urban Professional or Yuppie. It described young or less young professionals, focused only on themselves, having as goals career, money, a big beautiful car, and clothes to impress other people. We can still see managers showing their expensive cars, clocks, and dresses. But things are changing, and this transformation has three dimensions, as perfectly explained by Otto Sharmer and his U-theory:
· The Ecological Divide. We are depleting and degrading our natural resources on a massive scale, using up more nonrenewable precious resources every year. Although we have only one planet Earth, we leave an ecological footprint of 1.5 planets; we are currently using 50% more resources than our planet can regenerate to meet our current consumption needs.
· The Social Divide. Two and a half billion people on our planet subsist on less than $2 per day. Although there have been many successful attempts to lift people out of poverty, this number, 2.5 billion, has not changed much over the past several decades. In addition, we see an increasing polarization in society in which the top 1 percent has greater collective worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
· The Spiritual-cultural Divide. While the ecological divide is based on a disconnect between self and nature, and the social divide on a disconnect between self and other, the spiritual divide reflects a disconnect between self and Self — that is, between your current “self” and the emerging future “Self” that represents your greatest potential. This divide is manifested in rapidly growing figures on burnout and depression, as we have already mentioned, which represent the growing gap between our actions and who we really are.
How companies recognize our talents and changing, and how can we build our “self” in the emerging future?
Previously we have redefined our talent in the job market as human-being and not as human-doing, and we have discovered that we or our employees wake up every day and go to work to produce a result we don’t want, increasing the three divides pollution, poverty, and lack of purpose.
People need strong motivation and a clear purpose of self-development. What can we do, in terms of Employers and Employees, to make the first step for changing the situation?
The revolution has already started, and some innovative companies are evolving from the old-good-fashion pyramidal structure to a more opened and connected one: in a phenomenon called social-structuring.
Companies like Google, Amazon, Alibaba, etc. are including in their internal decision-making processes external team members, as freelancers, temporary workers, etc.
These innovative companies are embracing a new culture built around one main point: the ability to listen! Some companies have made even a greater step, for example, including into the listening process their customers, like Starbucks (and as a result, they created a ‘silence café’), or Tesco who created a relaxed paying lane.
The first step for listening can be creating an open place where everyone has the possibility to contribute to the whole process. It’s not only about feedback, but we are also talking about talents, passions, and drivers. Learn to listen to the passions and drivers of people. Use the three divides to examine which your employee’s health and happiness level are.
Co-creating and crystallizing can also be useful. Don’t dream to change the whole world in a day, start from a small team in your company.
What will the future of a Talent be?
We cannot know the exact number of new working places we will create in the next 5–10 years, for example, the World Economic Forum (WEF) predicted 58 million net new jobs, McKinsey estimated that “that 250 million to 280 million new jobs could be created from the impact of rising incomes on consumer goods alone, with up to an additional 50 million to 85 million jobs generated from higher health and education spending.”
We can predict going together on connecting the dots and imagine a diverse model of work which will be de-localized, de-centralized, democratized and less disconnected from your purposes.
Even if we don’t know the name of the next big wow-title, we can already say that you will work in a more elastic way, combining your passions with company’s needs, and combining your private and working time.
Many of us will work as “temporary” workers for different companies, in a more social structured way. Your role will be more active not only in producing a deliverable (the standard freelancer today) but being a part of the whole decision-making process.
Probably, you will work less.
How can you prepare yourself or your child for the incoming wave? There is not only one possible answer, but there is a clear starting point: connect with your unique talents and purpose and then make as many experiences as you can, to learn and realize your potential.