Team Tomorrow
According to the World Economic Forum’s most recent Future of Jobs Report (Oct. 2020), a large swath of today’s jobs will be obsolete by 2025.
2025 folks!
If someone told you today that the stock market was going to crash in three years, or that your car was going to breakdown and require thousands of dollars in repairs in three years – would you do something about the situation today, or would you just wait to see if it happens, with the hope that you’ll “figure it out then.”
Too many organizations are operating with the latter strategy (although it can hardly be called a strategy).
If you’re ready to be proactive - here’s one way to be prepared.
Team Tomorrow
Team Tomorrow is made up of a “special” group of individuals in your organization who can help to define the future and what it will take to get there.
The first group to include are your boomers. Boomers are just on the cusp of retiring and right now they hold the most knowledge in your organization. They are good prognosticators because they’ve seen and weathered many ups and downs and have an historical perspective on the organization.
It’s important to capture what they know and the wisdom of their years.
Note: None of the individuals necessarily need to be leaders in the company. In fact, it might be more useful if they are not. People who are not currently leading and strategizing don’t have preconceived notions of the direction of the company.
Team Tomorrow
The rest of your selected group should be made up of individuals of all types
· Different departments/ specialties
· Different age ranges
· Different experiences and exposures to other industries in their prior employment
A great idea is to ask people to apply to Team Tomorrow, with a short application and interview process. They should identify what unique perspective they bring to the discussion and provide at least one “vision” for the future.
You don’t want more than 12 individuals on the team so that team process doesn’t get bogged down, BUT consider swapping out team members every six months or so to keep new ideas flowing. (Suggestion, every six months 3 people rotate off the team and three new people join.)
The Process
The Team Tomorrow process includes three distinct conversations/brainstorming sessions:
1. What is happening in the world / in our industry that may affect us? How can we capitalize on that so that it’s an asset? For instance, the use of robotics and artificial intelligence is a conversation that every organization should be having right now. Computers changed the way most work was done 30 years ago and digitization/robotics/AI is in the midst of doing that again. You don’t want to be playing catch-up. (You need to come at this “what is happening” conversation from many angles: personnel, productivity, government regulations, etc.)
2. The second conversation to have is, What are our competitors doing? You cannot stay in your own bubble and think that you will survive the future. Your organization should constantly be taking the pulse of its competitors to learn from their successes as well as missteps.
3. The final conversation is Who (or what) is complementary to us? In business we’ve been taught to be wary of the competition, but we haven’t been taught to look for alliances with complementary companies. Complementary industries or organizations create synergy and greater outcomes. Why did Microsoft recently buy Activision Blizzard? They are vaguely in the same industry in that people have their hands on a keyboard/device but there must be a greater synergy that hasn’t been revealed yet. This conversation is aided by the team members who have other-industry experience.
Action
The final course of action is to create a vision for the organization 5, 10, and 15 years down the road.
An activity that is often used in coaching is: Picture that you / your organization has won an award ten years from now. What is it for? What does the headline of the WSJ article about you herald? This headline is something tangible that gives the vision substance and helps your employees to know what you are working toward.
Planning for the future is not a one-time event.
You’ll want the Team Tomorrow meetings to continue monthly and to be constantly scanning the horizon for opportunities for excellence both internally and in terms of serving the ever-evolving desires of customers. This is one of the reasons that iPhones have such loyal fans – the folks at Apple keep re-envisioning the future and presenting it to us.
As you are constantly cycling new members and new ideas through Team Tomorrow, you’ll find your organization becomes resilient and forward thinking… making it future-proof.
Future-Proofing Your Organization - Now is the Time to Strike
Companies have downsized dramatically in the last few months. As the economy turns around (as it will) and companies begin to rebuild, the smart-move is to methodically and purposefully build for the future by maximizing the productivity each employee is capable of. To do so, you’ll need a development plan in place before a hiring plan.
Step 1
Don’t think about the skills and positions you need to fill today – think about the ones you need to meet tomorrow. The World Economic Forum just published their 2020 Jobs Report (which looks ahead to the skills that will be needed in the next five years), and of the 15 skills listed, 11 are soft skills like creativity, negotiation, and self management. (Note to job-seekers: these are the key words you’ll want to weave into your resume as well.)
While the skills they list may not align directly with your organization’s needs, you should spend some time identifying not just the skills, but the capabilities of your future workers. This is not an exercise that can be done in ten-minutes nor one that should be considered a “brainstorming activity.” The compilation should be something you let your subconscious work on as you observe present-work and consider where you want your business to be in the future. One idea is to set up a whiteboard or post-it note area and as ideas occur to you, add them to “the wall.” After a month or so, review the wall and see if you can bring the capabilities together into themes. For instance, “emphasis on the customer” and “collaborative teamwork” might both fall under a communication theme. With increased verbal communication skills your employees will be able to both form better relationships with the customer as well as work with their colleagues more effectively.
Step 2
Create a purposeful, long-term plan for developing the skills that your organization will need. Every organization is unique in terms of the soft skills they need to embrace. For instance a hospital system may need to weave ethics and critical thinking into every development opportunity, while a manufacturing organization might need more emphasis on creativity and stakeholder management.
From the moment your newly-hired employees walk in the door, they should have a development plan, a career path, and an understanding of the five or 10 key skills needed by the organization (such as ethics or stakeholder management, as stated above).
What is most critical in this approach, however, is that the skill development is done consistently and that it is woven into the fabric of work responsibilities. What training and professional development has done to its own detriment, in the past few decades, is deliver skills training in isolation from on-the-job application. Training classes have been reduced to mere hours instead of meted out slowly and methodically as the knowledge and concepts are needed (think of an apprenticeship model as the ideal), so employees are barely acquainted with the knowledge and skills they need to do their work and advance their careers.
In my 2017 book, Future-Proofing Your Organization, I provide an example of teaching risk management which isn’t focused on the concept of risk management so much as the command of risk management. Ensuring employees have a command of risk management requires teaching it from different angles and in different scenarios over time, not just in one short training class.
Step 3
Weave mentoring and coaching into all management and employee development activities. One of the most critical linchpins to developing capability is the use of mentoring and coaching as an on-going development process. Too often companies see these methods as “programs” that take time away from “the business.” With just a few tweaks it is possible to integrate mentoring and coaching into the normal course of business and accomplish outsized ROI in comparison to the time, effort, and logistics required of training programs.
Going forward into 2021 and beyond, companies will do themselves the most good by re-thinking what professional development looks like and how it is delivered, so that they can create a fully-capable, maximum-output workforce that will future-proof their organization.
Don't be a Know-it-All
Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) has said: "being alearn-it-all is better than being a know-it-all."
Unfortunately, a lot of people truly do NOT know how tolearn.
In the 21st century, people are more reactionary than thoughtful, reasoned, and contemplative. This is a "tide" that will damage business' future viability, very, very soon.
