Becoming a Catalyst for Strategic Career Development

Marlowe C. Embree, Ph.D.

Kaleidoscope Consulting Services, LLC

July 28, 2004

A talk for the Central Wisconsin Society for Human Resource Management

Introduction:  A world of change

Depending on how you look at it, we live in either the most exciting or the most frightening time in all of human history.  The social and economic landscape in which we all live and work today is so astonishingly different from what it was only one generation ago that there are hardly words to express the transformation.

Just to give you one example, consider the explosion in the amount of information that is available in the world today¹.  As an analogy, imagine that every human being ever born since the dawn of time had been observed by a celestial stenographer who had written down every syllable uttered by each person from the cradle to the grave.  Try to imagine how many pages would be required to publish that transcript.  In fact, if it were divided into 300-page volumes, approximately 12 trillion books would be required to summarize it all.  That’s about one million times the size of the Harvard University library.  To type out a copy of those volumes, you’d have to strike your computer keyboard 5 quintillion times (that’s a 5 followed by 18 zeros). 

Got that huge figure in your mind?  According to information specialists, that’s the amount of new information that is humanly generated from all sources combined EVERY YEAR in the world today.  No wonder they call this the Information Age – and no wonder it’s so hard to stay current in your field of expertise!

Just as one example, consider the meteoric rise of the Internet.  Just fifteen years ago, the very first public Web site was uploaded to the World Wide Web.  Five years later, there were only 3000 Web sites in existence in the entire world.  Today there are over 8 million -- which means, on average, that over 2000 new Web sites had to be created every day over the past decade!  (In fact, well over half of those have been created in the past few years.)

These and related technological, economic, and social changes have crashed like a tidal wave on the beach of the average individual's career plans.  Suddenly, perceptions about the nature of the world of work that made sense for the past 100-plus years are entirely outmoded and irrelevant.  If you're playing tomorrow's game by yesterday's rules, it shouldn't come as a surprise to you if today ends up being a bit confusing.

The past as prologue

Let's take a look at the new world of work.  But first, hop on your time machine for a quick trip back to the last time the world of work was as much in flux as it is today.  We'll be setting our dial for a time 17 decades in the past -- the year 1834.

Unless you were paying very close attention in the last history class you took, you may be a bit fuzzy about what life in America was like in 1834, so let me help you with a bit of context².  The nation was barely 50 years old -- compared to the Great Powers of Europe, just a baby.   There were only 24 states in the Union.  Abraham Lincoln was only in his mid-twenties and had just been elected to his first political post, the Illinois state assembly.  The first ever American Anti-Slavery Society had just been founded in Philadelphia a few months ago.  Texas was still part of Mexico.

More significantly for our purposes, only about 9% of Americans lived in an urban environment.  (Today, incidentally, the figure is about 76%.)  The vast majority of working Americans were self-employed small farmers (today that figure is between 2 and 3 percent). 

If you'd asked a randomly selected working American of 1834, "What is your job?" you would probably have gotten nothing more than a blank stare.  The question wouldn't have meant anything to them.  Let's see why not.

We think of the word "job" as meaning a position within an organization:  "I'm the human resource director for Ineffable Industries."  But to a person of 1834, the word "job" meant "a task" or "a piece of work", like mucking out the stable or threshing the wheat crop.  People didn't have jobs;  they did jobs.  Mostly they did jobs for themselves.  Usually when they worked for someone else, it was in the spirit of returning a favor.  Working for a fee was the exception, not the rule.

What that meant in terms of lifestyle, of course, was that people worked when there was work to be done.  When there wasn't, they didn't.  It was a feast-or-famine existence in more ways than one.  At busy times (like seedtime or harvest) they worked from dawn to dusk;  at slack times (like midwinter) they hardly worked at all.  Time was a fluid resource, measured by activity, not by the clock. 

Within two generations at most -- from 1834 to 1884 -- this picture had entirely changed.  The urban population tripled during that time, but far more significantly, the percentage of working Americans who now earned wages from someone else -- who had a job at a company -- grew more rapidly than that.  What was a strange, curious idea in the decades prior to the Civil War became most people's "new normal" within the span of one person's career.

The point is that what we take for granted today was strenuously resisted by an entire generation, who fought to hold on to what they had always known and taken for granted.  But the social and technological changes that ushered in the new way of life -- the Industrial Revolution -- was too powerful for them.  By 1884, almost everyone's work was packaged into a "job".  The world we take for granted today had been born.

The new world of work

Now fast forward to today.  The changes we're going through today -- globalization, the Information Superhighway, interlocked financial markets, and more -- are as profound and extreme as the changes that led to the Industrial Revolution.  Just as the "job" was born in the throes of the first Work Revolution, it is dying in the fires of the second.  And just as people resisted being "jobbed" in 1834, they are resisting being "dejobbed" in 2004.  

What does a dejobbed world look like?  How does the world of 2004 differ from the world of 1979?  In five important ways.

First, conventional job security is dead.  There are only two forms of job security in existence today.  One is customer satisfaction.  Since jobs are defined as formal opportunities to solve problems⁴, a person's job is only secure to the extent that she continues to succeed at providing solutions to the kinds of problems her customers want solved.  Unfortunately, customers have never been more fickle, because they have never had so many options from which to choose.  The other form of job security is ongoing marketability.  But that's only job security in the strategic sense of always having somewhere else to sell one's skills.  It isn't job security in the old traditional sense of being able to ensure that you can stay where you are right now.

Second, the half-life of a career has appreciably shortened.  Statistics indicate that the average twentysomething entering the world of work today can expect, on average, 9 to 13 job changes in a working lifetime.  (Put another way, the average job in America now lasts something less than four years.)  That includes 3 to 5 radical career shifts in a working lifetime, which means that roughly once a decade on average, people have to completely reshuffle the puzzle pieces of their life and reassemble them into an entirely different way of making a living.  As one author puts it, change is the new normal, interrupted by occasional periods of stability and sanity.

Third, the role of lifelong learning has been "contextualized".  The paradox here is that continuous learning has never been more important than it is today, because of the explosion of knowledge.  (If you're a cutting-edge expert today and you stop learning, you'll be a fossil in three years... or less if you're in a highly technical field.)  Yet, the center of gravity has moved increasingly away from the traditional classroom and into the "trenches".  Learning needs to occur in real-time, needs to be focused on short-term practical needs, and needs to have an immediate payoff.  (If there are any educators in the audience, I hope you are paying attention.)

Fourth, the world has become everyone's backyard.  As Dan Rather put it a few years ago, "The American dream is alive and well.  It's just been relocated to North India."  National borders don't have a lot of economic significance these days.  Here's what was actually printed on the back of one common consumer item⁵:  "Made in one or more of the following countries:  Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Mauritius, Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines."  In other words, "we don't know, and we don't care."  Even if you happen to like John Edwards as a vice-presidential candidate, old-style protectionism is dead.  The Internet -- and the stock market -- know no boundaries.

Fifth, the walls between conventional employment and entrepreneurship have become paper-thin.   Only two generations ago, fewer than 10% of Americans stated, as a career goal, that they wanted to start their own business.  When the same question was asked five years ago, over two-thirds of young people claimed that as a goal.  There has been an explosion of interest in entrepreneurship in recent decades⁶.  That's in part because of the perception that corporate America has broken its side of the psychological employment contract.  "If I'm being asked to take all the risks," many of today's workers would say, "it's only fair that I should be able to reap all the rewards."  As a result, people move back and forth between working for others and working for self in a way that would have been unthinkable even one generation ago. 

In a world like that, what can you do to help the employees at your organization (maybe even including yourself?) to adapt to these changes and begin to self-manage their own careers in a way that benefits both them and you?  In other words, how can you become a catalyst for strategic career development at your organization?

Being a catalyst

What is a catalyst?  Simply put⁷, it is a chemical agent that can change the speed or outcome of a chemical reaction without itself being changed.  That's a fair definition of your role as a human resource professional, except that you shouldn't expect your work to leave you unchanged.  In fact, if you're doing it right, it won't.  But just as there has to be enough of a physical catalyst present to change a chemical reaction, there has to be enough of you present to change a workplace reaction.  That means, among other things, that you have to guard against burnout, and remember to take care of yourself in the midst of taking care of everyone else.  You can only pour out of a glass that's full, not one that's empty.

There's no simple cookbook formula for inducing positive change in an organization.  But here are six ideas that can help you to evaluate what you're doing now -- so you can continue doing what works, and change what doesn't.  Consider them "checkpoints for change catalysts".

Checkpoint #1:  Provide incentives for change

In the classic Alfred Hitchcock movie Dial M for Murder, the main character, played by Ray Milland, is trying to convince an acquaintance to commit a felony.  (I have good news for you:  if you know who Ray Milland is, you are in a protected employment class.)  The friend asks him, skeptically, "How do you know I'm going to follow through?"  Milland replies, "For the same reason that a donkey with a carrot ahead of him and a stick behind him always moves forward."  You may not want to tell an employee that you think of him as a jackass, but there's a point to this advice.

The point, as memorably phrased by National Business Employment Weekly writer Arlene Hirsch⁸, is that most people's mental radio is tuned in to station WITC-FM.   The letters stand for "What's In This Change -- For Me?"  You have to appeal to motives that people really do have (not to those you think they should have) if you want to get anywhere.  You have to appeal to the enlightened, rational self-interest of employees.  To do that, you have to know who they are (because their motives may differ from yours).  You also have to be honest (because you can only get away with lying a maximum of once).

Faced with Walt Kelly's classic choice between "the certainty of misery and the misery of uncertainty"⁹, what tips the balance in favor of change?  One of two things.  One is a present situation that's so bleak that anything would look better.  (Or as Janis Joplin put it, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.")  The other... your better choice... is a picture of a future so glorious that it's worth any sacrifice to attain.  One is the stick, the other the carrot.

Ask yourself:  From the vantage point of this particular employee or group of employees, what's the payoff for buying into change?  (Emphasize the carrot, not the stick.)  Don't forget that many employees have been through so many cycles of the "management fad of the month club" that they are pretty much jaded and faded.  They've learned that the best way to survive is to wait out the new change until it goes away.  

Checkpoint #2:  Let people grieve their losses

In the thirty years since Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote her groundbreaking work on the five stages of grief¹⁰, we've learned a great deal about the nature of human responses to loss.  For one thing, it's become increasingly clear that people need, above all else, time to assimilate the loss of the old before they can be ready in any meaningful sense to embrace the new.  There's a famous counseling saying to that effect:  "You don't push the river;  the river carries you."  Life has its own rhythms, inconvenient as they may be from the standpoint of organizational efficiency and this quarter's earnings.  But there are things you can to facilitate the natural grieving process.

One is to provide legitimate outlets for talking through feelings about loss.  (People will talk whether you permit that or not;  the question is, who will they talk to and when?)  Another is to "ritualize" losses (that's what funerals do for people who are mourning a physical death) to allow people to say goodbye in concrete, memorable ways.  Still another is to help people to see that, in leaving an old structure behind, they aren't abandoning its value entirely.  You can help people to identify the "take-withs" that they bring with them out of the ashes of an old way of life, lessons and skills and values that can be repackaged to use again in the new.

Checkpoint #3:  Identify the innovators

Because any change always involves both risk and opportunity, it's no surprise that some people focus more on one side, others more on the other.  There's a grain of truth in both perspectives, and both are needed.  But to move an organization forward, you need to identify those who are most naturally oriented to seeing the positives inherent in any change.

Change expert Richard Florida¹¹ estimates that, in any normal workforce, one out of every 3 employees is part of the "creative class" that naturally gravitates to change.  These are individuals who, by virtue of their work role and/or their natural temperament, define themselves as innovators.  About one of every three of these makes up the "super-creative core" that is responsible for most of the positive changes that come to pass within organizations.  Get these people on board, and everyone else may naturally follow sooner or later.

In the words of Thomas Patterson¹², each of us has a natural "thinking wavelength" that determines, among other things, our first instinctive response to change.  In his system, there are five types, which he calls Grinders, Minders, Keepers, Finders, and Thinkers [or Theorists].  Most change is generated by Finders and Thinkers, then implemented by other types who bring it to fruition.  All types are needed, but if you want a cheerleader for change, start with a Finder or a Thinker -- someone who likes to think outside the box.  You'll recognize her by the fact that, more often than not, she refuses to color within the lines.  Rebellion -- or genius?  They're probably flip sides of the same thing. 

Checkpoint #4:  Mind the Venturi tube

If you're a professional engineer, you already know what a Venturi tube is.  If not, it's something like a slot canyon.  Even a gentle breeze, as it approaches the canyon, is compressed into the narrow space between the canyon walls and approaches hurricane force until it pushes through to the other side.  Change is like a Venturi tube:  it's an automatic stress generator.  Worse, no matter how well advised the change, and how positive an effect it is likely to have on productivity in the long run, it will always erode productivity and efficiency in the short run.  Why?   Because people are finite beings with limited amounts of energy at their disposal.  Change forces people to divert energy to issues of survival and adaptation, which means less energy left for productive work.  It causes a temporary flip-flop in what Scott Adams calls the "work-antiwork ratio"¹³.  In addition,  workers are busy learning the new system while attempting to fulfill day-to-day duties using the only knowledge at their disposal -- namely, the old.  

That means that you have to -- once again -- build in time for this process to run its course.  There's no way you can circumvent the logic of the Venturi tube.  Even in a world where "doing more with less" is a way of life, the Law of Diminishing Returns has not been repealed.  You can't squeeze blood from a turnip.  You can't penalize people for being human unless you have a labor pool of another species at hand.

Checkpoint #5:  Provide a new paradigm

A paradigm, as defined by philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn¹⁴, is a way of thinking about reality, a mental mindset.  It's because of paradigms that change follows two fundamental laws.  First, change always begins on the inside.  If  your circumstances change but your thinking doesn't, your behavior will stay the same.  If your thinking changes, your behavior will transform either you or your circumstances (or both).  Second, most changes are sudden because when a person finally overcomes her resistance to a paradigm shift, all the dominoes fall at once.  Change, for most of us, is like an earthquake:  months or years of hidden pressure at a fault line, followed by seconds of cataclysmic transformation.

You can't force people to change their minds, but you can provide them with alternative paradigms.  David Wilkerson¹⁵ uses the analogy of a dog with a bone in its mouth.  If you try to take the bone away, the dog, threatened with the loss of the only thing it knows, will probably fight you for it.  You end up in the intensive care ward, and the dog ends up with bone splinters in its throat.  But if you throw a juicy steak in front of the dog, he'll immediately give up the bone in favor of something better.  In the case of organizational change, "something better" is a new paradigm that provides as much as the old... and more.  (The only way to fight an idea is with another idea.)

Checkpoint #6:  Help people find their circle of influence

Most people in the world of business have read at least one book by Stephen Covey¹⁶, although not so many appear to actually live his advice.  (In the past five years, I've asked numerous professional audiences to raise their hands if they have written a personal mission statement;  usually fewer than 5% lift their arms.  I'm proud to say that, not only have I written mine, but I've laminated it and taped it to my refrigerator;  I don't always live it out, but at least my inconsistencies are encased in plastic.)  Covey's advice about personal proactivity is still unequalled, and is especially important during times of change.

Many of you probably know the words of the famous Serenity Prayer, though most people don't know who first wrote it.  (It was Reinhold Neibuhr;  and very, very few people have even a tiny clue about who he was.)  "God, grant me the courage to change what I can;  the serenity to accept what I can't;  and" [this is the hardest part] "the wisdom to know the difference."  Proactivity means focusing on the things you can change, and letting go of those you can't.  Covey calls the first your "circle of influence" and the second your "circle of concern".  If you consistently focus on your circle of influence, it gets bigger and bigger.  But if you focus on the circle of concern, the inner circle gets smaller and smaller until it finally shrinks to a point.  You start out thinking you're a victim and end up actually being one.

Help employees faced with change to ask themselves, "Which parts of this situation can I do something about?"  Action is the best antidote to despair.  Any counselor will tell you that the biggest step of all is the step between doing nothing and doing anything.  Help employees who feel helpless and disempowered to find and focus on what they can do, and you may be as surprised as they are to discover that they can do a lot more than either of you thought they could.

Concluding unscientific postscript

Even armed with these six strategic checkpoints, you can't make change pleasant or palatable for everyone.  "The only one who loves change is a wet baby."  But you can minimize the fallout of change and maximize the follow-through.  Why not put these six strategies on trial at your company for the next six months and see what happens?

References

¹ Much of this material is based on the following sources:

Haub, Carl.  How many people have ever lived on Earth?  Population Today (2002).

How much information?  University of California-Berkeley (2003).

O'Neill, Edward;  Lavoie, Brian F.;  and Bennett, Rick.  Trends in the evolution of the public Web.  D-Lib Magazine (2003).

² As summarized primarily in the 2004 World Almanac.  Supplemented by:

Ellis, Joseph J.  Founding brothers:  The revolutionary generation.  (2000)

Strauss, William, and Howe, Neil.  The fourth turning:  An American prophecy.  (1997)

Perry, Marvin, et al.  Western civilization:  Ideas, politics, and society.  (1992)

³ Much of this material is based on the following sources:

Bridges, William. Job shift:  How to prosper in a world without jobs.  (1994)

Dent, Harry S., Jr.  Job shock.  (1995)

Friedman, Thomas L.  The Lexus and the olive tree:  Understanding globalization.  (2000)

⁴ Jackson, Tom.  Not just another job:  How to invent a career that works for you now and in the future.  (1992)

⁵ Barber, Benjamin R.  Jihad vs. McWorld:  Terrorism's challenge to democracy.  (1995)

⁶ Strauss, William, and Howe, Neil.  Generations:  The history of America's future, 1584 to 2069.  (1991)

⁷ Saunders, Bernard C.  Understanding atoms and molecules.  (1964)

⁸ Hirsch, Arlene S.  Love your work and success will follow.  (1996)

⁹ Finzel, Hans.  Change is like a Slinky.  (2004)

¹⁰ Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth. Death:  The final stage of growth.  (1975)

¹¹ Florida, Richard.  The rise of the creative class.  (2002)

¹² Paterson, Tom.  Living the life you were meant to live.  (1998)

¹³ Adams, Scott.  The Dilbert future:  Thriving on stupidity in the 21st century.  (1997)

¹⁴ Kuhn, Thomas S.  The structure of scientific revolutions.  (1962)

¹⁵ Wilkerson, David.  The cross and the switchblade.  (1963)

¹⁶ Covey, Stephen R.  The seven habits of highly effective people:  Restoring the character ethic.  (1989)

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Copyright (c) 2004 -- Marlowe C. Embree, Ph.D.