The Shift: Take the Reins of Your Career

The companies are fighting an uphill battle at getting employees in when they are most needed (Just-In-Time Hiring) and keeping them motivated and engaged:

A global Gallup survey found that at the average big firm only 33% of employees describe themselves as fully engaged in their work, 49% say they are not engaged and 18% say they are “actively disengaged”.

Yet, I am not totally convinced that it is solely the organization that should bear the burden of fostering engagement. The employees are just as responsible for making their jobs exciting and meaningful.

Last month The Economist published a special report My Big Fat Career where the key ideas are

• The workplace is changing; information on employers and employees is balancing off; and you need to learn how to play the information battles

• Invest in your own development

• Stick with the right people

No question about this: workers have to take responsibility for their own future. For many the mantra will be "continuous learning, continuous learning, continuous learning". However, educational institutions from nursery schools up to universities are doing a poor job at instilling the idea of life-long learning. Most educational systems are built on two theories:

• The Pickle Theory: a cucumber put in marinade has no other choice but to pickle, and
• The Squirrel Theory: you should get your mushrooms and nuts now (get the knowledge!), maybe you will need in later in winter (when the crisis comes).

 So how do we prepare ourselves? If nobody really cares about our long-term career success either because of ignorance, powerlessness or lack of interest, it is you personally against the dragons. Fortunately, there are many who would help - help is often given to those who seek and those who deserve.

There is one thinker, author, professor and inspirational speaker that I would like to mention in this regard. In her book “The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here”  Lynda Gratton of the London Business School talks about the changes that we need to make in ourselves to create value-add jobs that we will enjoy.

According to Ms Gratton, people will also have to invest more in their personal “social capital”, which will involve three elements:

1. First, build yourself a “posse”, a small group of up to 15 people they can turn to when the going gets rough. They should have some expertise in common, have built up trust in each other and be able to work effectively together.

2. Second, you need a “big-ideas crowd” who can keep you mentally fresh. This echoes the discussion of “managed serendipity” in last year’s business bestseller, “The Power of Pull”, in which John Hagel and John Seely Brown argued that the successful worker of the future will live in clusters of talented, open-minded people and spend a lot of time going to thought-provoking conferences.

3. Third, you need a “regenerative community” to maintain your emotional capital, meaning family and friends in the real world “with whom you laugh, share a meal, tell stories and relax”.

Listen to Lynda talking about her new book and get inspired. Stop whining a-la "they don't appreciate me" and start paving your own road to happiness.

Managing Yourself: HBR on Breeding Engagement

The featured article in September's Harvard Business Review is about managing yourself. Empowered team = improved performance, hence personal greatness is key to engaged team around you. HBR claims one can reach that in 6 steps:

1.  Be modest
2. Listen Seriously and Show It
3. Invite Disagreement
4. Focus the Agenda
5. Don't Try To Have All the Answers
6. Don't Insist That A Decision Must Be Made

While it feels just like another "10 easy steps and you'll have a flat stomach" silver-bullet management mantra, I always appreciate the personal stories and real-life examples shared  by the authors. What always frustrates me about these "how-to" life lessons is that it is common sense, logical and understandable, and tantalizingly difficult to implement :(

Read the full story here:

ManagingYourself: How to Cultivate Engaged Employees

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Commencement Speeches and Why We Need Inspirational Stories

I don´t think there is a single business school student who has not listened to Steve Job´s commencement address at Stanford in 2005:



Steve Jobs did three things that made his address so memorable to an extent that the speech is now used in classrooms to teach rhetoric and composition:

• relating personal experiences: who knows your personal stories better than you and, more importantly, who is going to retell them with same conviction and confidence? It's easy to talk about others, about things in general and something very speculative. It takes courage to talk about yourself, but then it's how you change the world and you change yourself at the same time.
• clear structure and the power of three: it is a magic number - it has to be the three wise men, the three little pigs, the three tasks and surely, the three life stories from Steve Jobs (well, the Snowwhite is ruining the party with her dwarfs but let's ignore that for the time being, and really - seven is also a cool number). The transparency of Job's speech is amazing: a few introductory words, telling the audience what he is going to talk about, three clear and concise stories and finishing off with repeating what he has just been talking about. Textbook precision!
• appealing emotionally and talking directly to the audience: engage not only the mind but also the hearts of people, know whom you are talking to: university students and not the same crowd as NASA engineers but they might equally relate to topics of death, love, failure and friendship. At the same time, each and everyone is a homogeneous group will respond differently to the emotional stimuli you are using in your speech simply because all of us have lived through different life experiences and one can never know for sure what strings in people's hearts and minds you'll be strumming when you are up there on the stage holding the mike with your sweaty fingers. Sweaty and at times shaking - you are talking about yourself there as well, you are putting yourself out, and it is the greatest danger and the most powerful tool you can use: laying yourself bare at the mercy of the audience and being strong enough to take it no matter which way the situation turns out.

The month of May normally brings many celebrities to university campuses to share their personal experiences, to give a sense of direction, provide guidance, inspire, ignite, provoke, console - the power of speakers is in their ability to sense the needs of the audience and speak directly to the hearts and minds of people. Listen to these 11 celebrities talking at various graduation ceremonies around the USA: http://bit.ly/iegObB (Tom Hanks is mischievously provocative :)

Leadership, Power & Influence (Part 3): Brubaker

If you have not seen Brubaker, check out the trailer. Even a one minute account of the movie is sufficient to understand why it was chosen for our Leadership, Power and Influence course (also see Part I to learn how much stress I went through in that course and Part II for a music lesson in corporate management):


Robert Redford in the role of the new prison superintendent is trying to turn the place around doing virtually everything to destroy his personal power base and violating the most important rule, "Try not to make unnecessary enemies". Could Brubaker achieve more if he were more compromising? I don't know, but here are my key learnings from the movie:

• think what's right for all involved, not just for you or an abstract sense of justice;
• you can only change the system once you are in it;
• you can easily alienate your friends as well;
• if you keep doing same things, you'll continue getting same results (a variation of Eistein's take on insanity);
• respect is earned, not granted;
• change requires a lot of work and a high diversity of means: the process is painful and disagreeable;
• some SOBs will never respect you no matter what.

One thing that that does not sit well with me is that at Brubaker is portrayed as a hero, but what did he manage to achieve? How many people has he killed? What is going to happen now? He failed as a diplomat. He missed his chance to make others lives better. He will surely never be allowed near the prison management system again (only as a convict maybe). I don't buy this Hollywood interpretation.

I'm not sure if I have convinced you yet to (re-)watch Brubaker, but it's a great learning material to get your brain going on the matters of how you influence others to get the results you want.