“I haven’t used a resume to get a job in at least a decade,” a mid-career executive told me last week. He wasn’t bragging, but noting a fact. At his level, those seeking to recruit him weren’t interested in a stapled piece of paper listing bullet points with action verbs. They wanted to hear him talk about how he’s managed teams, they wanted contact info of people who could vouch for his abilities and they wanted to be wowed with the big name brands he’d helped to elevate. A resume wasn’t the most efficient way to assess his fit. And it isn’t the most effective way to communicate yours. You don’t have to be C-suite bound to understand that relying on your resume as your job hunting tool of choice is profoundly flawed .
Popular wisdom suggests that with a resume, you’re pinning your hopes on making a winning impression in six seconds or less. You’ve been agonizing over this document for days and all you can hope for is that someone with power will spend less time than it takes to cross a busy intersection evaluating your competency and determining the trajectory of your career. Does that seem reasonable? Of course, this assumes you even get to the stage where an actual human is looking at your credentials. If the company you applied to is using an applicant tracking system, you may well have wasted all that energy customizing your resume only to be rejected by a computer program.
At first glance, structuring the hiring process around a call for resumes makes sense. Resumes function as a gate keeping mechanism for hiring managers. Personally vetting each applicant doesn’t scale when you have hundreds of resumes pouring in for a single job ad, so the best they can do is ask job seekers to submit a standardized document, get a computer to disqualify the majority of those candidates and then manually review the remaining batch in six seconds or less for each. They know they likely aren’t getting objectively the “best” fit for the role (that might be someone who forgot a crucial keyword on their resume and never made it past the computer round), but they are getting a group from which they can choose the most suitable applicant and be reasonably confident that the person will do well. This is how the process works without disruptions or interventions. It’s not ideal for the hiring manager and it’s certainly not ideal for the candidate, but it does eventually deliver the desired result — a new hire.
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The catch is that the recruitment process described above is actually a last resort. If there is a way for hiring managers and internal recruiters to avoid it, they happily will, but job hunters who follow the rules never figure that out because they’re too busy stuffing their resumes with keywords to trick a computer into validating them. Referrals from current and past employees, recommendations from their own professional networks, connections on LinkedIn, conversations with Twitter followers and cold-call introductions from savvy job hunters are all alternate methods that don’t rely on resumes by which hiring managers staff open positions.
I know the head of editorial content for a startup who has an open call for applications from freelance writers on one of the company’s sites, but acknowledged the bulk of his recruits come from connecting with people who have written interesting pieces on their personal Medium accounts that he happened to stumble across. A friend of mine went to a workshop on how part-time instructors of a particular college could maximize their professional development. Instead of following the party line he heard there and all the red tape it involved, he reached out to a faculty member he admired and invited him for coffee. That led to a meeting with another faculty member and then, a couple of weeks later, a meeting with the dean and an offer from her for him to teach three more classes.
At no point did he offer anyone his resume, nor was he asked for it. Instead of having to run a competition for these jobs or sort through resumes from an on-call pool, the dean could just look across her desk at someone who had the confidence of her well-regarded employees, had performed well in a similar role in the past and showed enthusiasm and tenacity by coming directly to her to ask for what he wanted. Her decision was easy.
If you’re betting on a resume to get you hired, you’re hobbling your job search efforts.A piece of paper can’t convey enthusiasm, energy, leadership, or problem-solving in a compelling way and even if it could, your piece of paper is being compared to a hundred other almost identical pieces of paper. If you win this fight, it’s much more about luck or happenstance than a recognition of your talents shining forth in Times New Roman 12-point type.
Today’s jobs don’t go to the person with the best resume (an award on par with having the best mullet), they go to the people who understand the limitations of a paper-based presentation of self and are bold and ingenious enough to work around it to their advantage.
Learn more about my work and connect with me on Twitter.
Forbes.com | May 27, 2015 | J. Maureen Henderson
https://www.firstsun.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/logo-min-300x123.jpg00First Sun Teamhttps://www.firstsun.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/logo-min-300x123.jpgFirst Sun Team2015-05-27 15:19:582020-09-30 20:57:07Your #Career: Why A #Resume Should Be A Job Seeker’s Last Resort…If You’re Betting on a Resume to Get you #Hired, You’re Hobbling your #Job #Search Efforts
The “War Room” – where once battle strategies, and today business strategies, are formed, tactics devised, and actions monitored. By designating a War Room, a company recognizes that from time to time, it’s necessary to take a step back from the flurry of everyday activity and survey the scene from ten thousand feet. From a holistic standpoint, the company can determine the right direction, pursue the correct strategies and enact appropriate tactics.
In the war for top talent, workforce planning is the War Room of HR. As the cornerstone of strategic human resources, the workforce plan certifies that human capital and talent management strategies run parallel to the business goals. As workforce plans hinge on effective forecasting, analysis and preparation, the failure to craft and implement an effective one will almost certainly deliver an adverse impact to a company’s ability to acquire, inspire and retain talent.
Planning Matters
For multinational corporations hoping to stay relevant and competitive, especially in the vibrant Southeast Asian market, now is the time to build workforce planning capabilities. It takes time to master this strategic function – and the fact is that few organizations are currently proficient planners. In fact, of nearly 700 respondents to our Philippines survey, 95% admit that workforce planning is either business-critical or of high importance, but only 31% claim to be able to execute it effectively. For many, short-term staffing needs due to headcount growth and high turnover rates overwhelm even the best intentions for forward planning and workforce analysis.
Now with the impending integration of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the launch of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), organizations in the region need to step up fast to become strategic workforce planners.
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If high paced and high growth describe your work environment, your ability to readily access and analyze data is not only essential to assessing the status quo, but it is critical to forecasting future needs. For workforce planning to hit the mark, companies must have access to robust quantitative and qualitative data.
Sourced most often from HR information and payroll systems, quantitative data includes workforce demographics (age, gender, location), salaries and benefits, employment tenure, and history of roles and experience.
Usually sourced from talent management systems, qualitative data includes competency and performance ratings, training and development history, successional status, mobility preferences, flight-risk ratings and career plans.
This data combination affords insights that cast light on the strengths and weaknesses of a company’s current workforce. It also highlights capability gaps and future leadership bench strength. The challenge for most organizations is that a growing workforce comes with increasingly disparate and complex data that requires a dedicated focus to maintain its integrity and reliability. Even with state-of-the-art HR technology in place to capture, track and mine the data, very few organizations possess the analytical and interpretive skills necessary to transform this into meaningful outputs. Without meaningful outputs, business managers cannot hope to use the information to make strategic workforce decisions.
Practice Makes Perfect
The painful reality is that the evolution of HR has outstripped the expertise of many who are implementing it. Global best practices in workforce planning have advanced considerably, in no small part due to the increased functionality of HR technologies.
Take a look. Workforce dashboards translate thousands of data points into a meaningful picture of the organization’s human capital strengths and weaknesses. Talent Scientists, a new breed of numerically gifted quantitative analysts, can use the detailed information available through their workforce plans to gain full visibility into their workforces around the world.
Whether you are in the Philippines, elsewhere in Southeast Asia or in countries around the world, multinational corporations should follow several workforce planning best practices:
Make workforce planning and strategic business planning parallel processes
Ensure your leadership values data-driven decision-making and promotes a culture of objective transparency
Invest in a sophisticated data engine with analytical tools to generate meaningful workforce information
Combine internal, external, structured and social data to produce deep insights into talent availability and shortfalls
Hire HR specialists who are adept at data modelling, interpretation and forecasting
What’s going on in your War Room? Workforce planning is the most strategic people management activity to take place within an organization. In an electric business environment, the battle for talent will be won and lost even before the players take to the field. What’s your plan?
Forbes.com | May 25, 2015 | Sylvia Vorhauser-Smith
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Tucked away in the pages of a new report by the U.S. General Accounting Office is a startling statistic: 40.4% of the U.S. workforce is now made up of contingent workers—that is, people who don’t have what we traditionally consider secure jobs.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY (Photo credit: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
There is currently a lot of debate about how contingent workers should be defined. To arrive at the 40.4 %, which the workforce reached in 2010, the report counts the following types of workers as having the alternative work arrangements considered contingent. (The government did some rounding to arrive at its final number, so the numbers below add up to 40.2%).
Agency temps: (1.3%)
On-call workers (people called to work when needed): (3.5%)
Contract company workers (3.0%)
Independent contractors who provide a product or service and find their own customers (12.9%)
Self-employed workers such as shop and restaurant owners, etc. (3.3%)
Standard part-time workers (16.2%).
In contrast, in 2005, 30.6% of workers were contingent. The biggest growth has been among people with part time jobs. They made up just 11.9% of the labor force in 2005. That means there was a 36% increase in just five years.
The report uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It begs an important question: Are traditional jobs—the foundation of our consumer economy–running their course and going the way of the typewriter and eight-track tape? And if so, what do we do about it?
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This report is important because it’s the first time since the Great Recession that the U.S. government has taken stock of how many people are working without the protections that come with traditional, full-time W-2 jobs. It reinforces estimates of the independent workforce that have come from observers ranging from the Freelancers Union to Faith Popcorn and are in a similar ballpark.
Many people in this workforce are struggling economically. In a note issued with the report, Senators Patty Murray (D-WA) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) write, “Because contingent work can be unstable, or may afford fewer protections depending on a worker’s particular employment arrangement, it tends to lead to lower earnings, fewer benefits, and a greater reliance on public assistance than standard work.”
And, as the reports point out, contingent workers often lack employer-provided benefits such as health insurance—and access to the government safety net traditional W-2 workers have when their work dries up. It notes, “[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][K]ey worker protection laws generally apply to employees and therefore do not apply to independent contractors, self-employed workers, and contingent workers who are not classified as employees.”
Certainly, some experts believe the contingent workforce should be defined more narrowly. If the definition of these workers only includes agency temps, on-call workers and contract company workers—which the government calls “core” contingent workers–this percentage of the working population in contingent jobs makes up 7.8%. Compared to the general working population, this group is younger, more likely to be Hispanic and to have no high school diploma or GED. But this group is still pretty varied demographically. The median age is 40.7, compared to 41.9. And 16.8% of contingent workers have some college education.
Meanwhile, the findings about contingent workers are pretty startling when you look at them as a whole. Consider some of the challenges they face.
Higher poverty rates: While only 10.8% of standard full time workers have a family income of less than $20,000, 33.1% of core contingent workers—meaning agency temps, on-call workers and contract company workers—report family incomes this low. (In comparison, 18.8% of independent contractors are in this income range).
Low pay: Contingent workers had median hourly earnings in 2012 of $11.95, compared to $17 for workers with standard full-time jobs. They earned about 10.6% less per hour on average. Reflecting the fact that many contingent workers are involuntary part-timers and can’t always get work when they want it, their median annual earnings were $14,963 vs. $35,000 for full-time workers.
Greater job instability: Among core contingent workers, 28.5% said they were laid off in the past year, compared to 18.4% of independent contractors, 8.2% of standard full time workers and 5.9% of standard part time workers.
Less access to to private health insurance: Among contingent workers, 61% were covered by any private insurance plan, compared to 77.9% of workers in standard jobs. Some may be receiving government heath benefits, but I didn’t see a statistic for how many in the report.
Higher reliance on public assistance: Among contingent workers, 11.1 percent were part of a family in which someone received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits—which used to be called food stamps–vs. 5.6% of workers in standard jobs. Contingent workers also had a higher rate of using other public benefits. Among these workers, 1.8% received cash benefits from a state or country welfare program, compared to .4% of workers in standard jobs. And 1% received Supplemental Security Income (SSI), compared to .3 percent of workers in standard jobs.
Another trend the report underlines is the fading of good, blue-collar jobs–traditionally a source of stable, middle class jobs for men. It is increasingly becoming contingent work, assigned through agencies.
In 2009, 41.2% of staffing agency jobs were for blue collar work, compared to 27.8 in 1990. At the same time, traditional office work is less commonly done through agencies. Only 23.4% of staffing agency workers now do this administrative work, compared to 41.8% in 1990.
Of course, not all contingent workers are hanging by a thread economically. The report shows there are really two worlds of contingent workers. Self-employed folks and independent contractors are pretty happy with their situation overall, compared to other continent workers. They’ve often chosen to run their own businesses because they love the freedom and independence, in my experience.
Asked if they would prefer a different type of employment, only 7.5% of self-employed people and 9.4% of independent contractors said yes. In stark contrast, 48.3% of on-call workers and day laborers and 59.3% of agency temps said yes.
But self-employed people and contractors are vulnerable, too. Whether they are plumbers, doctors or owners of local clothing boutiques, they generally are sole proprietors who don’t get paid unless they show up to work. And with the economic models of many industries changing in recent years—and making them less profitable—and taxes on upper-middle income Americans higher than ever, many of these folks, especially those in high-cost states, have less in emergency savings to protect their families than you might think. Many have put a big chunk of their savings into starting their businesses or practices and have substantial overhead to pay.
So what do we do with this new information? As the senators point out, “Information about contingent employment helps to determine whether the existing framework of labor market protections, predicated on employer-employee relationships, will continue to be appropriate and adequate in the future.”
Do we revamp our social safety net to reflect the fact that so many million of Americans are untethered from employers who once provided security? Should we crack down on businesses that try to avoid paying a living wage or benefits through new legislation–or amp up enforcement of existing labor laws, even though they were created long before our current digital economy existed? Should we revamp our education system so all Americans are prepared for the reality that they’re nearly as likely to become free agents as to have a traditional job–and provide more support and incentives for the self-employed?
There are no easy answers, but it’s clear from this report that it’s time to start asking these questions and looking for fresh–and realistic–answers.
https://www.firstsun.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/logo-min-300x123.jpg00First Sun Teamhttps://www.firstsun.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/logo-min-300x123.jpgFirst Sun Team2015-05-26 11:39:212020-09-30 20:57:09Leadership: Shocker: 40% of Workers Now Have ‘Contingent’ Jobs, Says U.S. Government…U.S. General Accounting Office is a Startling Statistic: 40.4% of the U.S. #Workforce is now made up of Contingent Workers—That is, People who Don’t Have what We Traditionally Consider Secure #Jobs.
Sorry, couldn’t help myself. After all, our generation loves to write in phrases, abbreviations and clever shorthand. The style works great for Gchat and Instagram, but in the job market formality still rules the day.
I recently spoke with Rachel Brown, who runs the Center for Career Services at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Brown said employers often feel recent grads have inadequate communication skills. That goes for writing and speaking.
“Employers tell me the writing is too casual and that young adults also struggle during Skype and phone interviews,” Brown said. “That’s why we stage mock interviews to prepare our students for the real thing.”
But what about phone interviews? How can we sound our best when we’re on the spot?
When I was a TV reporter, I learned a simple trick as I recorded my voice for news stories: stand up.
If you’re seated (and maybe slumped over), you can limit the strength of your voice.
By standing up, you breathe better and speak more confidently. It can even help to pace the room (be on your toes, literally and figuratively) rather than remain flat footed in one place.
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FYI … Stanger told me the IT industry needs to hire young adults to replace an aging workforce. Check out the different career paths you can take in IT and bear in mind one important point:
“Few professions allow you to be as creative as IT,” said Stanger. “We work with security, social media, virtualization, cloud-based software, marketing, sales and more. It’s an exciting field and a unique way to generate wealth for a company.”
As you prep for the next phone interview, spend time on the company’s website and “get” what they’re all about. Read the mission statement, learn about recent projects and look over company bios to understand the office vibe/ culture.
Why the heavy-duty research?
Brown said employers want to know you have the technical skills and soft skills (ex: coachable, team player) and that you’re the right fit (ex: personality, values) for the team. “Everything rolls up to those three things,” she said.
If you can prove all three on the phone (and remember to stand up straight), one thing’s for sure.
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We’ve picked our favorite recently released and upcoming books that will help enrich your professional life. From the first in-depth biography of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to a neurological explanation of “eureka” moments, these books will make you smarter about business while you’re waiting in the airport or lying on the beach.
‘Elon Musk’ by Ashlee Vance
Amazon
Musk is the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. He says his mission in life is to prevent the human race from destroying itself.
Vance, a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter, gained unprecedented access to Musk and those closest to him. He paints a picture of a man who has always felt a desire to change the world despite having difficulty finding his place in it, and a leader whose intensity can be difficult for the people he works with while simultaneously inspiring them.
Since joining Google as its senior vice president of People Operations in 2006, Bock has seen the company transform into a powerful global business, growing from 6,000 employees to nearly 60,000. In that same time, Google has regularly topped lists of the best places to work.
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We’ll give you the benefit of the doubt: You’re the smartest, most talented member of your team. But if your colleagues don’t work well with you, it is partially your fault.
Halvorson, a social psychologist at the Columbia Business School, breaks down decades of research into an enjoyable guide to understanding how people perceive each other, and how this knowledge can make you a better communicator.
Last year, Newsweek caused a stir when it ran a cover story claiming it had identified the creator of the online currency Bitcoin. Soon after the report, members of the Bitcoin community were convinced Newsweek found the wrong guy.
Popper, a New York Times reporter, seems to have discovered the actual man behind Bitcoin, and “Digital Gold” is the most complete look at the currency’s history, concluding that it has passed the point of being a mere fad.
‘The Misfit Economy’ by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips
Amazon
Authors Clay and Phillips take a look at the organizational models of outlaws like Somali pirates and Brazilian counterfeiters, arguing that “these innovators display remarkable ingenuity, pioneering original methods and practices that we can learn from and apply to move formal markets.”
‘When to Rob a Bank’ by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Amazon
Economist Steven Levitt and author Stephen Dubner celebrate the tenth anniversary of their blockbuster book “Freakonomics” with a collection of 131 of their favorite blog posts from the past decade.
You’ll learn about the psychology of lying, the argument to abolish the penny, and why robbing a bank isn’t a bad idea because of the morality, but because it has a terrible return on investment.
Serial tech entrepreneur Peter H. Diamandis and author/entrepreneur Steven Kotler follow up their bestselling book “Abundance” with a look at the technologies and entrepreneurs redefining our world.
The book has valuable insight from the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson.
‘Design to Grow’ by David Butler and Linda Tischler
Amazon
That Coca-Cola has dominated the soft drink market for more than a century and is one of the world’s largest brands isn’t just because lots of people enjoy drinking Coke.
Jackley is the cofounder of Kiva, a microlending site that helps entrepreneurs from around the world develop their businesses as a way to lift themselves out of poverty.
“Clay Water Brick” is Jackley’s recounting of developing Kiva from a dying startup in 2005 to a global network that has raised $709 million in loans, with a repayment rate of 98.72%.
New York Times columnist David Brooks believes the increasing fixation on online personal branding and racking up achievements for a résumé has become toxic.
He explores the lives of a wide variety of historical figures like St. Augustine and Dorothy Day to illustrate his point: that true success should be associated more closely with forgetting one’s self and connecting with others.
‘The Eureka Factor’ by John Kounios and Mark Beeman
Amazon
Drexel’s John Kounios and Northwestern’s Mark Beeman are neuroscientists who have spent their careers studying the manifestation of creativity in the brain.
Their book is a collection of their research into “aha! moments” when the brain overcomes a confusion to have a spark of insight.
In “Better Than Before,” Rubin takes scientific findings on habit formation and turns them into practical and useful processes that can help you live a happier life.
Robots are increasingly intelligent and they’re coming to take your job, says Ford, a software developer and entrepreneur.
But rather than being a warning from a tech-fearing Luddite, Ford guides readers through the surprising evolution of artificial intelligence from simple task-based machines into quick-thinking programs that can replace service workers, journalists, and programmers.
The story of how the digital music industry crushed the CD industry has been old news for years now, but Witt takes a look at the personalities who accelerated the spread of piracy to profit off the death of the physical album.
Witt uncovers the largely untold stories of people like the German entrepreneurs who invented the mp3 file and Dell Glover, the compact disc factory worker who leaked some of the biggest albums of the aughts, leaving record label execs frustrated and scared.
While any successful entrepreneur has to experience failure, enjoy luck, and learn along the way, there are certain approaches that can make the journey a bit smoother, says Stanford Business School lecturer and corporate strategist Amy Wilkinson.
From more than 200 interviews with entrepreneurs like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Chipotle’s Steve Ells, and Gilt Groupe’s Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkins, Wilkinson has determined six essential skills that drive success across all industries and circumstances.
Holacracy is a difficult concept to understand, but its founder Brian Robertson breaks it down simply and thoroughly. Regardless of your conclusion about the system’s potential, it is undoubtedly the alternative management approach that will be getting the most attention over the next few years as we see how it affects thousands of employees around the world.
Goldsmith is an executive coach who has worked with the leadership of massive companies like Pfizer and Target.
His approach can help you determine what isn’t working with you and your team, and how to develop new habits and processes for maximizing efficiency and productivity.
This book is the perfect gift for a new college graduate, or for yourself if you happen to be just starting out in your own career.
Citrin leads executive recruitment firm Spencer Stuart’s North American CEO practice, and has spent decades determining what makes a job candidate stand out from a highly competitive pool of applicants. His book breaks down the basics of skills like networking, interviewing, and negotiating.
Mitenbuler is a journalist who tracks the history of American whiskey, from the frontier through Prohibition to the luxury brands of today.
He shows how bourbon is a product uniquely tied to the history of the US, and one that required ruthless business tactics and innovation to become an iconic product.
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But that doesn’t mean you can stop working. In fact, it’s more than likely that you’re reading this as you take a short break from your job. Maybe it’s 11 p.m.; maybe it’s Saturday. Your work is never done, even though work is.
While work as a time-bound, location-based means to earn money until you can retire with a pension is no more, most of us still need to earn a living. What you do and where you do it is likely so different from your parents’ or grandparents’ definition of work that they can barely be described using the same words.
Offices? Increasingly irrelevant according to a 2013 survey of 26,000 business managers in 90 countries conducted by Regus, a workspace provider, that found nearly half of workers do their jobs remotely. (This may explain the rise in co-working spaces.)
Forty-hour workweeks? Forget it: a report drawn from 9,700 workerssurveyed across eight countries this year by Ernst & Young revealed more and more of us are working longer hours at the office, at home, and on the go—as if you didn’t already know that.
Weekends? Might as well be another workday, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research survey that found Americans work far more weekends than Europeans. Retirement? Hardly an option for most people, and not even a thought for the 22% of middle-class Americanssurveyed by Wells Fargo who said they’d rather die early than not have enough savings to live on.
That’s the bad news.
Now the good news: There’s never been a better time for us to take our careers back. It’s time for each of us to make our careers work for us, to wrest this always-on, safety net-less nightmare into a new and different kind of dream.
If we acknowledge that the traditional contact between workers and companies has broken down, we can begin to free ourselves from the simultaneous demand for more (from us) and the promise of less (from them). Why are employees (if they’re even considered such in an increasingly freelance economy) still holding up their end?
Time to take work back.
I’ve had the opportunity to think a lot about this topic this year as I’ve been helping to develop a new publication called MONDAY, dedicated to the people rethinking their relationship to work and making their work work for them. This includes founders of companies like The Thing Quarterly, a San Francisco-based art subscription service whose cofounder Jonn Herschend told me: “I like to work, but I don’t want to be in a situation where people feel like they just have to work to show that they’re working . . . We’re running a business now. We get to make the rules.”
It also includes people working within large, traditional companies like the ad agency Team One that redesigned its 70,000-square-foot Los Angeles office space to encourage interactions and spark ideas. “Before, we were across four floors and there wasn’t a lot of bumping into people,” explained Allison Citino, the company’s communications director told me. “Now things are much more spontaneous and collaborations happen easier.”
Everyone we’ve spoken to has shown us that the future of work looks different for each of us. For some, it’s no office; for others, it’s a more humane one. For everyone who strikes out on their own, there are others figuring out how to cultivate autonomy within even the most top-down companies. In an era when people are encouraged to customize every experience, it’s time we stop seeing work as an off-the-rack experience one must either accept, even if it doesn’t fit or feels wrong, or opt out entirely.
For some, this customized approach involves entrepreneurship. These brave souls are starting their own businesses and running them their own ways.According to the Small Business Administration, there were 28 million small businesses in the U.S. in 2011. In the U.K., the Centre for Entrepreneurs released a study at the start of 2015 showing that 581,173 new businesses were created in 2014, beating the previous all-time high of 526,446 in 2013.
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One such entrepreneur is Jessica Almeleh, a New York-based fashion designer who recently left a job at a large company to start her own line called Pincus NY. Having spent years creating lines for well-known brands such as Danskin, Champion, and Walmart, and learning about production, pricing, and scale, Almeleh decided to apply the knowledge she developed on the job to something she was more personally invested in. “It’s the kind of thing a lot of people daydream about from their cubicle,” she told me. “I’ve chosen to work in the same industry, but it’s different.”
Jessica Almeleh
Whereas before, Almeleh’s employers made decisions based on large-scale projections and market trends, as the head of her own company, she’s having to pay much closer attention to her customers and be responsive. “I’m aware that my customer will decide things for me,” she said. “You can’t just make it because you want to make it. At the end of the day, it’s not a craft project. It has to make money; it has to sell.”
“Definitely it’s an adjustment,” she said. It’s also been an education. “I have to learn new things. I’m a designer. I’ve never been in sales or PR. Being a new company, you don’t have past information to guide you.”
As Almeleh explained, independence brings with it new risks, ones that workers in large companies tend to be insulated from. “I have to be careful in what I decide to do because everything is coming out of my pocket,” she said. “It’s liberating in ways, because I don’t have to answer to anyone else, but there’s no one to blame but me if it doesn’t work out.”
Technology also contributes to people reimagining how—and where—they do their jobs. The long digital leash of smartphones can been seen as a way for you to be “on” all the time, but it can also be a way to work from anywhere in the world. As Sara Sutton Fell, CEO of FlexJobs, told Fast Company last year: “In most white-collar jobs, I’d say 99% of people are already working remotely, in that they take work home. It creeps into our work style already. I think it’s just not formalized by either the employer or employee.”
A recent piece by Erin Reid in Harvard Business Review illustrated some of the ways that technology has freed some knowledge workers. “I skied five days last week. I took calls in the morning and in the evening, but I was able to be there for my son when he needed me to be,” one pseudonymous senior manager boasted to Reid. Sure, this involved a bit of subterfuge (and a whole lot of privilege) on that guy’s part, but others are making the “work-anywhere” approach work for them in more places than their home office.
THE WORLD TRAVELING BOY GENIUS
Take Keith Kurson, the founder and CEO of Subeta, a social game platform. Kurson isn’t your usual startup founder: He developed his site as a teenager growing up, as he puts it, “super, super poor in North Carolina.” He dropped out of high school and emancipated himself so that he could fully run his own company.
Keith Kurson
“I spent all of elementary school being told how gifted I was, and found middle school and high school incredibly boring, so I skipped classes a lot,” Kurson said in an email. “I think my ambition and hope for a better life than North Carolina was providing pushed me to keep working every day to make what I could see in the future happen.”
Kurson is currently in Paris, where he FaceTimed with me from a coworking space. He was in France after leaving the Bay Area for a six-month trip that crossed Iceland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Austria, and Hungary. All along the way, he kept working remotely.
“I think I’m well suited for this . . . I get a lot of changes of scenery, I get to go to a lot of places, but I’m still working.”
Of course, it helps that Kurson has trusted employees—including his sister—who keep his operation going as he travels, but he still manages to find ways to plug in as he’s unplugging.
The energy of the coworking space excites him, Kurson said. “People would frequently sit at the same table and ask what my skills were, and then start asking about Javascript, etc.” he said. “If I had design questions, I could easily turn to the person next to me and ask if they’d look over what I was doing, and if they had any suggestions.
“It made it feel a lot like working with people, without us all working on the same things,” he said.
Interestingly, Kurson said that, as he plans to move to San Francisco this summer, he’s considering doing something he’s never done in his entire working life: handing over the reins of his company and getting an office job. “I’m going to be turning 26, I’ve been my boss the whole time, and never had the structure of a real job,” he said. “I love the freedom and I imagine I’ll miss that, but I want the structure.”
“I’m interested to see how it impacts me to have a boss,” he said. “I’m fortunate that I’ve built this awesome company, and it means that I get to be really picky about what I do next.”
Choosing to work for someone else can also be seen as an expression of work customization: Someone like Kurson can decide to take his resources—his talent, his experience, and above all, his time—and lease them to a company. Whatever he decides, it’s his decision.
THE MASTER OF THE SHARING ECONOMY
Another person who fully customized his career is Lucas Bronte, who lives in San Francisco and works as a full-time Airbnb host, housecleaner, and key concierge for other hosts, a trainer, and works part-time at a YMCA. He used to used to pick up gigs on TaskRabbit, but found that the network had changed in ways that didn’t suit him.
Lucas Bronte
“It is Tetris sometimes,” he admits. “It takes a certain kind of person to be okay with not having a regular paycheck,” Bronte said. “I feel like I’m in control, whatever that means.”
Bronte used to work as a theatrical stagehand, so he’s used to piecemeal and seasonal work. His various gigs allow him time to go to the gym, see friends, attend matinees, and take time off, although he does call it “a day off-ish.”
“Hell yeah, I can take a week off,” he said. “That’s another thing about this work: When I get home, that’s pretty much it.”
Having a high energy level, flexibility, and good boundaries are important to this mode of work, but time management is the most essential thing for Bronte. He shares a Google calendar with his clients and keeps a whiteboard calendar beside his computer, blocking out time and tasks. “It was out of necessity,” he said. “I thought, alright, I gotta get a better system. I need to be better at this.”
“It’s the lifestyle I’ve chosen, and I need to do it right. I need to be successful.”
It’s this kind of customization and self-direction that Sara Horowitz, founder and executive director of the Freelancers Union, says will define work in the next decade. “I think it’s going to be like a portfolio, a range of different kinds of gigs. That will become more organic, and there’ll be business infrastructure and, hopefully, social infrastructure that addresses that change.”
“I think that people with skills have had the best opportunities to take advantage of it,” she said. “It’s not like this is just happening to high-tech workers. This is how nannies have worked, and security guards, and a lot of people across the economic spectrum.”
While the promises of work have changed and the traditional paths to success have been altered beyond recognition, hardworking people are still figuring out ways that they can, well, make it work. It’s true that fewer of us will experience a single career that spans from our twenties to our twilight years, capped with retirement. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s hardly an aspiration for many of us anymore. The opportunity to reimagine ourselves, repave our paths through the world, and rewrite the rules of work is something previous generations couldn’t dream of. The way things are now may not be perfect, but, if you’re lucky, it works.
RELATED: THIS IS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE TO BREAK THE RULES AT WORK
Fastcompany.com | May 18, 2015 | Matt Baber
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We work in an ever-changing, hyperconnected, world-scattered workplace. As the way we work changes, so too will the boss’s role need to shift to meet those demands.
Take, for example, the very makeup of the U.S. workforce. One in every three Americans is a freelancer of some sort, according to a 2014 survey by Freelancers Union and Elance. This includes independent contractors, moonlighters, people working temporary or multiple jobs, and freelance business owners. Many expect this figure will increase to up to 50% by 2020, filling half the workforce with free agents.
What does this mean for the boss of the future?
A lot. “In the past, people acted like the only way to be in business was to make money,” says Ken Blanchard, co-author of the book, The New One-Minute Manager. “Now everybody is working for their people, rather than their people working for them.”
FOLLOWING THE HOLLYWOOD MODEL
For a sense of how the workplace might look five years from now, says Jeanne Meister, co-author of the book The 2020 Workplace and cofounder of the consulting firm Future Workplace, think for a moment of the way a Hollywood movie is made. Rather than hiring a permanent staff, a team of independent workers is pulled together, each of them filling a specific project need for the film. “These teams form and then disband when the movie is over,” says Meister, who sees this “Hollywood model” as one more companies across industries will adapt.
Businesses have the ability to grow insanely fast these days, going from relative obscurity to viral status sometimes overnight. That means managers need the ability to act quickly when it comes to putting together the perfect team needed to tackle whatever new challenge is at hand. “A leader is going to identify a new project—maybe it’s entering a new line of business or a new part of the world—and this is going to require a team with a new skillset,” says Meister. Cobbling together the leanest, most experienced team of people will require not just hiring, but overseeing a mixture of full-time and freelance people.
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Five years from now, managers will need to be far savvier about how they connect and communicate with their teams. Collaboration platforms like Yammer, Chatter, and Slack are starting to make their way into workplaces as the main form of communication, replacing email. “A whole population of employees think email is dead,” says Meister. “It’s not just a new way of communicating and collaborating. This is basically a new way of working.”
Introducing and making sure this new way of working goes smoothly falls largely into the hands of managers. That means the boss of the future must prioritize and be hypersensitive to how they adapt the technology themselves. With employees scattered around the world and often working remotely, making sure everyone is on the same page will become increasingly tricky and important.
A WHOLE NEW WAY OF HIRING
Managers are starting to be held more publicly accountable for their hiring practice and the need to be more sensitive to diversity in the workplace. A growing body of training, software, and services is being developed to help companies up their hiring game. Google, for example, recently started offering training in unconscious bias to make employees and managers more self-aware of their behavior and biases.
New hiring practices like blind interviewing are also being considered to help equalize the hiring process. All this points to the growing responsibility and accountability managers will have to their employees in the future.
“We are beginning to see leaders looking at their employees with the same lens you might look at a customer,” says Meister. “That requires leaders to have an empathy in how they view their team.”
THE BOSS ANSWERS TO EVERYONE
The culture of oversharing and immediacy that social media has bred into our daily lives is leaking into the workplace, which means employees will come to expect the same kind of transparency from their bosses. In five years, no one will be able to escape the immediacy and accountability that social media and online reviews have created for businesses. “How transparent you are is increasingly important,” says Meister. “Employees are going to seek you out because you’re a transparent leader.”
That means the boss of the future must be well adept at leading under a microscope, taking people’s feedback—harsh as it may be—and responding to it in their stride. Sites like Glassdoor.com, for example, where people can anonymously review their managers, are already making accountability far more important in the workplace. Say or do something that might piss your team off, and you better be prepared to handle the blowback.
Transparency will also require bosses to include their team in big decisions rather than just taking a top-down approach to leadership. “People look at leadership as a side-by-side relationship or a partnership relationship,” says Blanchard. “[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][Managers] need to be much better listeners rather than talkers. They need to be much better servant leaders.”
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Many job candidates I see believe finding their next step on the #career ladder is a numbers game. They apply for as many appropriate, next-level-up positions as possible and figure the odds are they’ll wind up with something good—and if not good, at least acceptable. Although this strategy can work early in one’s career as you become more experienced, a different strategy is required.
At the senior levels jobs become fewer and competition increases, so adopting a process that is focused on quality over quantity can make a big difference in the outcome. A targeted and focused approach to your job search requires mastery of these five behaviors. Take the time to learn how to do these correctly–and with confidence–and you can’t help but be propelled forward.
Create a target list.
Research tells us that what differentiates a leader from a manager is knowing your goals and having the ability to recruit stakeholders, allies and sympathizers to help you achieve them. At more senior levels the same is required for a successful job search.
Start by creating a specific list of the positions you are interested in (you could have 3-5 target positions) and the companies that offer those positions (the company list can include anywhere from 20 to 100 companies). You will most likely end up with a list of companies for each of the target positions. It’s OK to have between 20 (for very specific and rare positions) to 200 items on your list.
Network with purpose.
Job seekers are always advised to network, but networking isn’t useful to you if you don’t do it strategically. This is where your target list comes in—it’s your roadmap. Start digging into each company on the list and track down people that can get you one step closer to others at the company who might want to hire you. Those are the folks you want to reach. Network at industry events but be selective, only attend events where you are likely to find connections to your target companies. Create a weekly goal for networking. Make sure you can realistically achieve your goal given your existing schedule (especially if you are currently working).
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Next, look to schedule as many interviews with people at your target companies as possible (this is one step in the process where it’s okay to focus on quantity and quality at the same time). Although you are interviewing for available jobs, but don’t forget to schedule informational interviews as well. These interviews aren’t for a specific job but to gain insight and information. Meet the person with whom you’re interviewing in their office, over coffee or on the phone and limit those meetings to 45 minutes, unless they want to talk longer. One of your main goals here is to gather intelligence about the market, the industry and the company. Just as important, you’re trying to get this person to take action, to open a door to someone outside your network you need to reach.
Be curious.
That may sound obvious but many people don’t realize how much time they spend talking about themselves during interviews, rather than seeing the interview as an opportunity to learn about the company. Whether you are there for a specific job or your meeting is purely informational, make sure there is an equal focus on presenting yourself and learning about the company. That means asking a lot of questions, but with an eye toward gaining a deeper understanding, not just because you’re supposed to be asking questions. Inquire about business drivers, business goals and challenges the company –or specific department–faces. The more open-ended the questions, the more valuable the answers are likely to be.
Connect the dots.
If you did a good job with #4 you now have a solid understanding of your target companies goals, needs, challenges and plans. Armed with this information you can connect the dots between the company’s needs and your experience. Whether it’s done in a handwritten thank-you note, an email or during a second interview, this is your chance to show you understand what the company is looking for and to demonstrate how you can help them achieve their goals. Take this opportunity to make a direct connection between your expertise and experience and what the company wants to achieve.
Do these five steps effectively and you will be on your way to locking in your next senior level job!
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Leadership is the art of persuasion—the act of motivating people to do more than they ever thought possible in pursuit of a greater good. It has nothing to do with your title. It has nothing to do with authority or seniority.
You’re not a leader just because you have people reporting to you. And you don’t suddenly become a leader once you reach a certain pay grade.
A true leader influences others to be their best. Leadership is about social influence, not positional power.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. —John Quincy Adams
You don’t even need to have people reporting to you to be a leader. A janitor can influence people and lead just as a CEO can.
Likewise, anyone can become a follower, even while holding a leadership position.
If you’re a slave to the status quo, lack vision, or don’t motivate everyone around you to be their absolute best, then you’re a follower. Even if you happen to have a leadership title, people won’t follow you when they see those behaviors present.
A senior executive who creates unnecessary bureaucracy, locks himself in his office, and fails to interact with others in any meaningful way is no more a leader than an antisocial software engineer who refuses to do anything but write code.
Of course, the real question is—are you a leader or a follower?
To find out, you need to ask yourself some very important questions. Think carefully as you respond to each one, and you’ll soon know for certain.
1. Do you go above and beyond?
Followers do their jobs, and that’s it. No matter how good they may be at those jobs, it rarely occurs to them to go beyond their basic functions. Leaders, on the other hand, see their job descriptions as the bare minimum—the foundation upon which they build greatness. Leaders see their real role as adding value, and they add it whenever and wherever they see an opportunity.
2. Are you confident?
Followers see the talents and accomplishments of other people as a threat. Leaders see those same talents and accomplishments as an asset. Leaders want to make things better, and they’ll take help anywhere they can find it. Leaders are true team players. They aren’t afraid to admit that they need other people to be strong where they’re weak.
3. Are you optimistic?
Followers see the limitations inherent in any given situation; leaders see the possibilities. When things go wrong, leaders don’t dwell on how bad things are. They’re too busy trying to make things better.
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Followers are content to stick with the safety of the status quo. They see change as frightening and troublesome. Leaders are maximizers who see opportunity in change. Because leaders want constant improvement, they’re never afraid to ask, “What’s next?”
5. Are you decisive?
Followers often hesitate to act, out of fear that they’ll do the wrong thing. Leaders aren’t afraid to make a call, even when they’re not sure if it’s the right one. They’d rather make a decision and be wrong than suffer from the paralysis of indecision.
6. Are you accountable?
When mistakes are made, followers are quick to blame circumstances and other people. Leaders, on the other hand, are quick to accept accountability for their actions. They don’t worry that admitting fault might make them look bad, because they know that shifting the blame would just make them look worse.
7. Are you unflappable?
Followers often let obstacles and mishaps throw them off course. When something goes wrong, they assume the whole project is doomed. Leaders expect obstacles and love being challenged. They know that even the best-laid plans can run into unexpected problems, so they take problems in stride and stay the course.
8. Are you humble?
Followers are always chasing glory. Leaders are humble. They don’t allow any authority they may have to make them feel that they are better than anyone else. As such, they don’t hesitate to jump in and do the dirty work when needed, and they won’t ask anyone to do anything they wouldn’t be willing to do themselves.
9. Are you passionate?
Followers are trapped in the daily grind. They go to work and complete their tasks so that they can go home at the end of the day and resume their real lives. Leaders love what they do and see their work as an important part of—not a weak substitute for—real life. Their job isn’t just what they do; it’s an important part of who they are.
10. Are you motivated from within?
Followers are only motivated by external factors: the next title, the next raise, the next gain in status. Leaders are internally motivated. They don’t work for status or possessions. They are motivated to excel because it’s who they are. True leaders keep pushing forward even when there’s no carrot dangling in front of them.
11. Do you focus on titles?
Followers care a lot about titles, both their own and those of the people they work with. They’re very conscious of who outranks whom, because they lack the skill and motivation to create leadership from within. Leaders, on the other hand, focus on what each individual brings to the table, regardless of what’s printed on a business card.
12. Are you focused on people? Followers focus on what they can achieve individually. Leaders are team players, because they know that greatness is a collective feat. A leader is only as good as what he or she can achieve through other people.
13. Are you willing to learn? Leaders, while confident, know that they’re neither superhuman nor infallible. They’re not afraid to admit when they don’t know something, and they’re willing to learn from anyone who can teach them, whether that person is a subordinate, a peer, or a superior. Followers are too busy trying to prove they’re competent to learn anything from anyone else.
Bringing It All Together
Take another quick look at the questions above. There’s not a single one about title, position, or place on the org chart. That’s because you can have the title and position without being a leader.
You may have worked for someone who fits that description. And you probably have colleagues who serve in leadership roles without a title.
Leadership and followership are mindsets. They’re completely different ways of looking at the world. One is reactive, and the other is proactive. One is pessimistic; the other is optimistic. Where one sees a to-do list, the other sees possibilities.
So don’t wait for the title. Leadership isn’t something that anyone can give you—you have to earn it and claim it for yourself.
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Since joining #Google as its senior vice president of People Operations in 2006, Laszlo Bock has seen the company transform into a powerful global company, growing from 6,000 employees to nearly 60,000.
Here are Bock’s top 10 management tips, which he’s used at Google and recommends you bring to your workplace:
1. Give meaning to your employees’ work.
Your company cannot achieve constant growth if your employees work simply for a paycheck or if your company wants only to become a market leader. The work needs to be connected to a higher purpose.
It’s why Google proudly has a mission statement that is impossible to achieve, Bock writes. By finding employees who want to passionately “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google is committing itself to a moral rather than a business goal, and one that must constantly be pursued.
2. Trust your team.
As a manager, you should help guide your employees’ progress and evaluate their performance; you should not micromanage, excessively monitoring employees to the point of trying to do their work for them.
This level of trust should work both ways, Bock says. Google has semiannual performance surveys for employees to anonymously rate their managers, and managers are strongly encouraged to discuss the results with their team.
“A bad hire is toxic, not only destroying their own performance, but also dragging down the performance, morale, and energy of those around them,” Bock writes. “If being down a person means everyone else has to work harder in the short term, just remind them of the last jerk they had to work with.”
Justin Sullivan/GettyA Google employee rides a bicycle through its Mountain View campus.
4. Keep conversations about development separate from performance reviews.
If the only time your employees hear feedback on their work is annual or semiannual performance reviews, they’ll begin to associate criticism with failure, which can hold them back.
Bock suggests regularly speaking with your employees about their work, and keep performance reviews strictly relegated to annual goals and whether or not they were met. “If you’re doing this well, the performance discussions will never be a surprise because you’ll have had conversations all along the way, and the employees will have felt your support at each step,” he says.
5. Pay attention to your best and worst performers.
If you had to put your employees on a bell curve, pay close attention to the outliers on either side, Bock recommends.
Determine what makes your best performers excel and have them teach their skills to the rest of the team.
And look at your worst performers. Remember why you hired them, and then determine if the role they’re in simply isn’t tapping their talent or if they turned out to be a bad fit for the company. If it’s the former, give them a chance to excel with new responsibilities; if it’s the latter, let them go for not only your team’s benefit, but theirs as well.
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Bock says that many of Google’s famous perks are either free or relatively inexpensive. For example, there’s no need to invest in expensive training programs that aren’t guaranteed to be effective to scale. Instead, use your best employees as teachers, as mentioned above, and invite other guest speakers that are friends of the company.
Save your heavy expenses for the perks that really matter, like health benefits and retirement plan matching contributions. To Google, this also means paying a high price for free lunches and shuttle services, which they have found to be significant enough to employee well-being that they are worth the money.
HachetteBock explores his management approach in his book “Work Rules!”
To understand the logic, think of it like a professional baseball team. The Detroit Tigers, for example, pay Justin Verlander $28 million because he’s a Cy Young Award-winning pitcher that they don’t want to see on the roster of another team.
Google has the luxury of a massive war chest to recruit the best employees away from rivals, but Bock says that the same logic should apply to smaller companies.
8. Nudge your employees in the right direction.
The best managers don’t help their employees develop desirable behaviors by making demands or forcing change. Lead the way with subtle gestures, he says.
If, for instance, you’d like to encourage more collaboration among your employees, you could begin sending team-wide emails pointing out individuals’ successes and ask for ideas on how to build off them.
9. Ease into change.
You will make mistakes as you try to improve your team’s performance. If you’re going to try an experiment, be transparent about your approach with your employees.
“That will help transform them from critics to supporters, and they’ll extend you more benefit of the doubt if things go awry,” Bock writes.
10. Keep things fun and innovative.
It’s important to realize that there is no such thing as a perfect team workflow or office culture, and that you will continually need to experiment and innovate. This doesn’t need to feel like a chore, Bock says.
“What’s beautiful about this approach is that a great environment is a self-reinforcing one: All of these efforts support one another, and together create an organization that is creative, fun, hardworking, and highly productive,” he writes.
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