Author Archives: Larry Janis

Why you should build a “Career Portfolio” (not a “Career Path”)

 

 

 

by April Rinne

 

Every four years, something inside me shifts. I get restless and want to learn something new or apply my skills in a new way. It’s as though I shed a professional skin and start over, fresh.

In my 20s, I got all kinds of flak for this. When I decided to guide hiking trips rather than join a consulting firm, my peers said that my resume made no sense. When I opted to defer graduate school to travel in India, my mentors questioned my seriousness and said my professional future could crash.

I felt like something was wrong with me because I was interested in so many things while my friends were laser-focused on climbing the corporate ladder. It’s not that I wasn’t disciplined or willing to work hard. There was just too much worth learning and doing. To settle on one pursuit seemed like a mistake.

Today, the world has changed in some amazing and profound ways. Broadening your career focus and professional identity is no longer seen as abnormal. It’s celebrated. The macro forces driving the future of work demand independent and adaptable thinkers. When we add in the potential for automation to transform jobs en masse, the Great Resignation, and the growing number of hybrid offices around the world, it’s clear that the time is ripe to rethink what a successful career path looks like.

Up until this point, we have lacked the language necessary to design our careers in ways that veer from the traditional script. But now there is hope. A new vocabulary is emerging. At the heart of it is a shift from pursuing a “career path” to creating your “career portfolio.” This term was originally coined by philosopher and organizational behavior expert Charles Handy in the 1990s, and is poised to finally enter its prime today.

What is a career portfolio?
The term portfolio comes from the Italian words portare (to carry) + folio (sheet of paper). People often think of a portfolio in terms of finance, business, or art. For example:

  • Investors build investment portfolios to diversify their holdings and mitigate risk.
  • Financial advisors recommend a portfolio that includes equities, bonds, and cash.
  • Executives often use portfolio theory (pioneered by BCG’s product-portfolio matrix in the 1970s) to analyze their business units, strategy, and foresight. The purpose of their portfolio is to manage risk and return into the future.
  • Office managers and HR leaders use portfolios to stay organized.
  • Artists throw open their portfolio to show works they’re really proud of — the canvas of their lives.

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A New Approach to Writing Job Descriptions

 

 

 

by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez

 

 

Jobs today are changing fast, and traditional job descriptions can’t keep up. As new technologies disrupt processes and require new skills, and as companies are moving toward more and more project-based work, we are beginning to see the evolution of job descriptions away from static, holistic prescriptions that follow an employee for years to dynamic guidance that changes based on needs.

For example, a company that hired an employee for a certain set of tasks might find that four months later, a different set of tasks takes strategic priority. Even though that employee has the right skills for the new tasks, the employee can point to their job description to decline to do the new task by saying that it wasn’t what they were hired to do — or, if they take on the new tasks, their job description becomes quickly out of date.

This article is one in a series on “Creative Resilience: Leading in an Age of Discontinuity,” the theme of the 15th annual Global Peter Drucker Forum. See the conference program here.

Because most job descriptions are firmly embedded in the employee’s core area of work, they also tend to encourage silos in the organization by discouraging cross-functional collaboration. Rigid job descriptions also discourage experimentation with new technologies that may have been unimaginable at the time the description was written. And finally, narrow job descriptions can mean that an employee isn’t able to fulfill the full range of their talents at work, leaving them dissatisfied.

In response, companies are starting to approach job descriptions in new, more flexible ways based on outcomes, skills, and teams. I’ll describe each of these in turn, but first let’s look at how job descriptions came to be what we know them as today, and what they do.

Why Job Descriptions? (more…)

Solving the Problem of Remote Work

 

 

 

by Mark Mortensen

A framework to help leaders approach the topic more holistically and effectively.

 

The discussion around remote work — which has dominated news headlines, Slack conversations and water-cooler chats since countries relaxed their Covid-19 guidelines — is only getting more contentious. Many workers wish to continue working remotely in some capacity, while insisting that leaders’ productivity concerns are unfounded.

However, some high-profile executives have been vocal about their opposition. Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman declared that working remotely “is not an employee choice”. And Elon Musk denounced remote work as “morally wrong”. He further suggested that those working from home are merely “phoning it in” and mandated a return-to-office (RTO) at Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter).

One consistent aspect of the arguments for and against remote work is how strong and entrenched these stances are. And although conflicting perspectives on the topic are nothing new, tensions seem to be escalating.

Amazon workers conducted a walkout to protest their company’s RTO policies, Google recently began tracking employees’ in-office attendance and Farmers Insurance workers have threatened to unionise or quit over the CEO’s reversal of the company’s remote work policy. What’s more, stories of employees being terminated for failing to comply with RTO mandates continue to proliferate.

Amid increasing polarisation, it becomes even more difficult for employers and employees to reach a consensus on the best way forward. As I wrote in a recent article for Harvard Business Review, leaders and employees should actively collaborate to devise a balanced approach to the issue and arrive at a mutually beneficial solution — one that recognises and validates the needs and concerns of both sides.        (more…)

3 ways to shift the perception of HR from administrative to strategic

 

 

 

 

by Jennie Yang

 

From recruitment and hiring to mediating issues among co-workers, HR’s work is often seen as an administrative function within an organization. Case in point: A recent study by Sapient Insights found that only 46% of business leaders see their organization’s HR function as strategic. That’s compared to 67% who view the finance role as strategic and 60% who consider the supply chain role as such.

It’s time to change this perception. To do so, HR leaders must demonstrate how critical it is to an organization’s success to align HR strategy and business strategy closely. That requires showing tangible impact, which starts with a diagnosis, or a baseline: What are the areas related to people that represent the most significant opportunities or challenges for the business?

Once you’ve pinpointed those, organize the work of HR in a deliberate direction against a handful of specific objectives. This very focused approach to what matters most to the business is what defines strategic HR.

From there, HR and people leaders can show the bottom-line business value the department creates by organizing its work around outcomes. There are three that matter the most to the C-suite: maximizing employee performance, improving employee engagement and decreasing regrettable turnover. By delivering against these three outcomes, HR leaders can show how investment in their operations contributes broadly to the success of the business. And it adds credibility to the claim that HR is a strategic profit center, not an administrative cost center.

Let’s take a closer look at each outcome. 

Maximizing employee performance

It’s straightforward: Employees impact a company’s bottom line. When they perform well, the company does well. When they don’t, output and morale take a hit—among other things. Because of this, HR leaders need to support managers to maximize employee performance and ensure employees are meeting or exceeding job expectations.

One way to maximize employee performance is by tracking goals. These goals bring employees clarity, focus and alignment, making them more likely to achieve them.

Once goals are established, they can give HR leaders a measure of how employees are either progressing or regressing over time. Goals also motivate employees to focus their attention and time on reaching a specific objective, allowing them to do their best work and help the organization thrive.  (more…)

Too Many Meetings, Too Little Time (to Work)

 

 

 

by Guillaume Roels

What if there was a better way to schedule meetings for team coordination?

In January, Shopify deleted 12,000 recurring meetings from its staff’s calendars. The e-commerce firm also reinstated a no-meeting Wednesday policy. The idea wasn’t to prevent meetings from happening, but for staff to be intentional about them. In addition, it sent a clear message that it was OK to protect one’s time.

When I ask managers what their biggest operational frustration in their job is, they typically say: “We have too many meetings.” Before the pandemic, I interviewed product managers to have a clearer sense of their roles. They described their days as running from one meeting to the next and being interrupted the rest of the time. It’s a familiar experience. You can probably relate.

Indeed, ethnographic studies on software developers, for instance, revealed how chaotic and distressing work can feel. In 1999, Harvard’s Leslie Perlow coined the term “time famine” to describe the feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it, largely because of constant interruptions at work.

There is a fundamental trade-off between the time that we could spend working – being productive and adding value – and the time that we spend in meetings. However, it’s not that meetings are completely useless. Teams do need them to resolve issues, coordinate work, convey information and even socialise workers. There’s a lot of research on these benefits.

However, as UCLA’s Charles J. Corbett and I found, little academic work has been done on the art and science of scheduling team meetings. We felt the subject was relevant to the field of operations management: With a long tradition of scheduling machine work, its principles could be applied to finding optimal rules for scheduling meetings. (more…)