Even a small connection to the people who benefit from your work not only will improve productivity, it makes everyone happier. The single strongest predictor of meaningfulness is the belief that the job has a positive impact on others. That may be a terrific way to rethink your talent strategy.
Talented people are like magnets. They attract other talented people. These talented people have their own hangouts. The Coffee House in Kolkata was a hangout for the poets, artistes, literati and people from the world of art and culture. Film makers like Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Aparna Sen used to hang out there. The writers and poets like Sunil Gangopadhyay and Shakti Chattopadhyay used the coffee and cigarette smoke filled atmosphere to fire up their imagination through debates. The cafes of Paris have served to inspire many philosopher and intellectuals from Sartre to Simone de Beauvoire. The Coffee House is still not a talent community.
Imagine writing the biography of a sixteen year old. Could it be interesting to someone who is a stranger? Would the life lessons be useful to someone who is much older? What if the sixteen year old happens to be Google? If Eric Schmidt's book How Google Works told us about the hardware and architecture of Google, then this one is about the source code.
It’s not just in the workplace that we judge ourselves generously. When the weighing scale tells us that our weight is more than what it ought to be, we blame the scale. When a psychometric instrument tells us something about ourselves that we are uncomfortable with, a person will question the design of the instrument. Performance Management is hard ... very hard.
The world will open up for the new learner who does not depend on being nominated to a corporate training program to beef up their skills. They are curious learners, who learn by trying out ideas. Those will be the most sought after in the job markets of the future.
Collaboration and the ability to work with a group of specialists is making today’s businesses look more and more like what goes into producing a great film or a winning cricket team. Every business needs to be viable, feasible and desirable. Here is my list of 11 skills that makes a team achieve all three objectives.
The digital workforce uses technology to buy, sell, rate a product or service and share their ideas with the world. They are opinionated and are unafraid of rating anything from their managers to their increments and HR policies on the net for all to see. They create content for the social media by constantly uploading pictures of their activities, their selfies and whatever is on their mind – everything is just a tap away on the smartphone. No process has a defined beginning and end. Everything is ongoing and continuous and this speed of continuous and open communication leaves the analog colleagues dizzy.
Apple and Samsung trade charges of intellectual property infringement. But you have never heard of anyone stealing the culture of another company. Culture is a proprietary secret that is hard to hide because every employee knows what it is. Yet, even after you know everything about a company's culture, it is impossible to replicate.
