Suzanne Mercier - Sunday, July 11, 2010
Yesterday, I blogged about the implications for organisations in the higher demand for tacit skills and knowledge in the 2020 workplace, according to authors Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd. Today, I continue looking at organisations and the predictions for what a 2020 workplace will look like.
The authors put forward a crystal ball prediction for the 2020 workplace including 5 principles that will resonate strongly in the workplace (tomorrow's blog) and 20 predictions of what the workplace will look like. As I went through the 20 predictions, I recognised all of them as qualities that define the way a solopreneur or small business owner already operates. Here are just 3 of them:
1. You will be hired and promoted based upon your reputation capital.
That is certainly a major part of any small business securing work. Firstly, "can you do the work?" and secondly, "do I respect you and want to work with you?"
2. Job requirements for CEO's will include blogging.
Those of us who recognise that offering value, sharing information and positioning our expertise is a critical success factor in business are already doing that.
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3. Lifelong learning will be a business requirement.
As solopreneurs or owners of small business, we know that if we aren't at the leading edge of knowledge in our area of expertise, we are diminishing our own value; Plus we also know that we need to grow as human beings, because we are our product or service.
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Working on your own, or in a small business is not the same experience as working in the corporate environment. Solopreneurs and small-business owners have greater freedom about the way we operate, the hours we work, how we structure what we do; we set our fees and we decide what we're going to offer the world. However, there is a price to pay for that freedom. We experience fear and uncertainty because the buck stops with us. We are the Visionary, the strategist, the business development person, the person who creates or sources our products and services, the person who delivers them, the customer service person, the financial controller and the accounts clerk. If we lose traction for any reason, we can go under. Working for yourself without the structure, resources and protection of a corporation around you, is the greatest personal development programme you will ever participate in.
Any environment that creates uncertainty has the potential to trigger peoples' feelings of imposterhood. Solopreneurship and small business ownership does that for many of us already. If the original research by Clance & Imes holds true, 70% of people on the line inside the corporate environment will have experienced the imposter syndrome too. With the prediction of a 2020 workplace, it's going to create uncertainty across the board and dealing with the imposter syndrome may become an even more obvious Critical Success Factor.
The opportunity for organisations to prepare for this brave new corporate environment is to recognise that personal development is the key to business performance.
What do you think? I'd love to hear.
All the very best
Suzanne
Suzanne Mercier - Saturday, July 10, 2010
As a result of reading "The 2020 Workplace" (Jeanne C. Meister & Karie Willyerd, 2010), I have been thinking about workplaces today and in the future. According to the authors, the 2020 workplace will be a whole new game driven by 5 generations in the workplace together, mobile technology, individuation of work conditions and incentives, acceptance of lifetime learning and corporate social responsibility. The concept of the knowledge economy will shift and the more technical work will demand what the authors call "conceptual tacit skills".
Tacit knowledge and skills are personal skills that are hard to transfer to others. The individual may not naturally recognise and appreciate these skills as valuable or unique. Examples of tacit skills and knowledge include habits and culture that form the backbone of the way we interact with the world around us, or riding a bicycle, or a child learning a language. The authors define the key tacit skills in an organisational context as problem solving, judgement, listening, data analysis, relationship
building, collaborating and communicating with
co-workers.
Where the tacit knowledge and skills are considered valuable by an organisation, there is considerable motivation to transform those tacit skills into explicit skills which can then be transferred to others. And this is where the Imposter Syndrome comes in.
The Imposter Syndrome hits talented and successful people. However, people who are in the grip of feeling like a fake or fraud do not value their strengths or accomplishments. At a core level, they don't think they're good enough; that don't measure up. They often believe that if they can do something, it's not exactly rocket science. And the less tangible something is, the more likely they are to be uncertain about whether it is of value and whether they measure up.
If organisations are going to successfully tap into the tacit knowledge and skills of their talented employees, they need to help people understand the value of who they are as well as what they know. That means they will need to help us value ourselves as human beings so we can actively contribute to organisational performance. While many are doing this already with concepts like "talent management", most organisations are not and may get left behind well before 2020!
What do you think? I'd love to know.
All the very best
Suzanne
Comments
A great blog piece building on the book's predictions. There is much more material coming out now about what we need to be doing across a range of spheres for 2020 - and the Australian Human Resources Institute recently published a paper covering global factors of which HR practitioners need to be aware.
I like your solopreneur analogy - and the challenge is to get individuals in a corporate environment to think like this whilst also being part of a collaborative corporate team.
Well done.
PB