Do job-seekers
want a job for Life… or a job with Life?

As a young person there was a time where you could take on an apprenticeship or work for a public sector company or corporation and expect a job for life. Times and culture have changed. Now young people move from job to job and employers cannot guarantee job security.

Now the trend is that young people are no longer after a job for Life but a job with Life and employers are looking for employee’s with Life. Is it possible for a technique or technology to help people find life within them and between them and others, especially in education or as part of looking for a job or finding someone to fulfil a role in a business?

Qualifications are no longer enough to get into University or Employment. People are looking for something that provides deep resonance with what they do; they are looking for something that makes them feel more alive, something that will contribute Life. The Inner Culture of a prospective employee must help sustain, if not evolve, a business’s operations and nurture the Inner Culture of the company. Also an employer must provide more than just money, there must be more than something to Like, there must be something to Learn. People no longer just want a bonus but something to improve job security like a chance of becoming skilled in personal development and the development of others. Unlike money this can never be spent. It can be used over and over again.

Three things are needed for sustaining Life and Learning in an employee and also for the Employer: Support, Challenge and Reflection. It is important the employee gets the Support they need, is Challenged and stretched where they need to for their own motivations as well as for their job role and lastly can Reflect and take time out to take stock of their situation before committing to further action. The Employer and Employee must be able to provide Support, Challenge and Reflection for one another in the right proportions for the right needs and intelligence. Life and Learning can suffer if the proportions given are not optimal or worse are mixed up.

Giving Support when Challenge was needed is Collusion. Giving Challenge when Support was needed is undermining. Not allowing someone to Reflect or take stock can lead to them rushing into hasty ill thought out decisions and choices. Always having Support but never having Challenge can lead to people being spoilt or unable to handle crisis. Always being Challenged but never getting Support can lead to people finding it difficult to receive help. Always jumping from one action to another without taking time out to Reflect on the journey so far can lead to people getting to a place in their lives that doesn't serve them and may well disenchant and disengage them as a result of feeling out of alignment to what they truly feel.

Support, Challenge and Reflection are like vitamins. When your digested food lacks key vitamins for health you can become physically ill and lack clarity in your feelings or thoughts. As soon as you start getting your recommended daily amount of the necessary vitamins, if no permanent damage has been done, your health will be restored. Some vitamins can only be found in one food and some foods, like ‘ super-foods’, can contain many vitamins all in one source. Some can have vitamins in a more readily absorbed form while with others they are difficult to release.

Support, Challenge and Reflection form the key components of a diet that sustains an employees character and job function or an employers culture and operations. When a person misses out on one or more of them for a short while there may be no lasting damage to character or function and they will quickly become of sound mind and body when they get what they need. Support, Challenge and Reflection then are ‘Social Vitamins’ and we each need to get our ‘3-a-day’ in the right doses to feel alive. This goes for employees, employers, customers, suppliers, communities as well as industries and nations.

When someone gets a healthy diet of Social Vitamins they are able to avoid getting in their own way and can ‘self-collaborate’. When people such as this come together they can Support, Challenge and Reflect together in a way that sustains their roles, functions and character such that creativity is fostered and adaptation to necessary change and resilience to unnecessary change are primed. When individuals get out of their own way they find their way. When such people get together they find new ways to learn and be alive together resulting in them being creative together in handling emerging challenges and opportunities. Those that are competent at this will have developed ‘Collaboration Literacy’. Those that are not will show signs of ‘Collaboration illiteracy’. For more on Collaboration Literacy read the manifesto for it at http://www.energydiamond.com/docs/care.pdf .

So how do people identify what has resonance within them that leads them to self-collaborate? How do they find the resonance between them and others to develop and practice Collaboration Literacy in a mutual way? Can graduates be matched to employers so both get more life from the working relationship that results? Can Collaboration Literacy be developed by an Employer for themselves as well as within all their business relationships? With increased vitality in the workplace can creativity as well as the usual sales figures be improved?

I designed an on-line software ‘engine’ to identify what needs, when fulfilled, make a person feel alive in what they do. When these needs are matched to those of a prospective employer, recruited employees can show more engagement and it is inevitable there will be higher productivity and creativity. An Employer can be profiled as a person or be profiled by combining all their employee profiles as well as profiles of other key business relationships such as those of suppliers and customers.

The Resonance Engine uses an on-line questionnaire to identify key Intentions, Priorities and ways of Being that drive a person’s motivation for growth and learning. The engine is built on algorithms that recognise the principle that Energy gathers around Learning. If an employee or employer can learn from one another then the energy or vitality in the way they serve each other is lifted.

Energy gathers around learning, when people learn together, energy gathers faster and inertia of problems is more rapidly overcome. Learning is typically based on values, practice and ability. Appreciating and honouring Values fosters Respect. Appreciating and responding to the right practices and abilities fosters Response-ability. With mounting Respect and Responsibility, Trust emerges. With increasing Trust, Momentum develops. With enough Momentum an Impact is made. With the right kind of Impact a rising Inspiration is experienced. With Inspiration, people come alive.

A profile is built around five key needs a person has to learn to meet in Life, three aspects of Emotional Intelligence and three of Social intelligence. This picture of learning is in effect a picture of their current spread of energy -a map of where they are doing things with life. By looking at the different weights of energy a person is investing in meeting their needs, while helping others with theirs, it is possible to identify the ‘centre of gravity’ of their needs on that day. By focusing the highest proportion of energy, time, resources and abilities in getting the priority need met they will get the most life out of their day.

When a glider, dancer or Tai Chi master moves through their centre of gravity they move with grace. When they move through any other part of themselves they move in an ungraceful way that wastes energy. So by moving through the centre of gravity of their needs a person appears graceful in how they handle life and work, they conserve energy which leads them to experience and radiate more life.

A person rates how self-aware they are of a need, how well they are managing to meet it as well as how well they are developing new ways of meeting it when old ways aren't working any more. They are also asked how well they are able to help others with their needs using their Awareness, Management and Development intelligences. The scores from the questionnaire are placed on a grid and, in a ‘paint by numbers’ way are turned into colours to create a ‘heatmap’ or inner ‘weather map’ of their state of life as shown below ( I recently described this as a ‘mental selfie’ ).

With candidates for jobs more likely to find work that fulfils them and employers more likely to find employees that will be fully engaged for productivity and creativity, the time has come to no longer just rely on CV’s, interviews and traditional personality tests to select a candidate. One factor will be chosen to determine whether graduates and employers end up working with one another, for Life and with life. Graduates and Employers will always choose Life that emerges from practising Collaboration Literacy.

To guarantee Life from Collaboration Literacy the Resonance Engine can be used to discover what Life and wisdom there is within a person or company and bring the right ones together to make them both come alive in what they do and what they achieve. Employees and Employers can be matched for similarity and support, oppositeness and challenge as well as matching for a mix of similar and opposite qualities to serve mutual reflection. The pair of images on the left in the example below shows an ‘unfolded’ image revealing Left and Right brain views of how needs are being met for an employer and employee. In this example there is a similarity of learning in 91% of need and intelligence areas. The employee and employer would reinforce one another's strengths but because weaknesses are the same too they will be compounded. The pair of images on the right show employer and employee having opposing strengths and weaknesses. If they support one another they may learn a lot from one another although they may not like the experience.

If you are wise you’ll understand no job will last forever but you can feel alive with the job you are in and if you are fortunate maybe you’ll help the world come alive while you are working. You simply have to work with the truth and practices that give you more Life. You must simply practice Collaboration Literacy.