The Future of Talent

Jay Cross - 2/10/12

Return to treating people like people instead of cogs in a machine, writes CLO columnist Jay Cross.

Once a year, my friend Kevin Wheeler hosts a retreat focused on the future of talent and major trends in human resources. I’m writing this column in a conference room overlooking the Pacific in Santa Cruz, Calif., sitting with a dozen senior talent managers. I’m going to share Kevin’s top five trends impacting HR leadership and snippets from our discussions about them.

1. Rise of social business. Connecting and sharing are how business is done. This requires trust, the sort of relationships you experience in a village where everyone knows one another. The challenge is how to scale. It’s time to revisit Marshall McLuhan’s global village. “We are not about a product. We are an ecosystem.”

2. Social leadership. The idea that the CEO is running the show is fiction. We’re the boss. Leadership is collective and concurrent. There is no center. Steve Jobs may have been the last solo leader we’ll ever see. As McLuhan states, “All the world’s a sage.”

3. Transparency, analytics and privacy. There are no secrets; “outing” is inevitable. Rather than wring our hands about invasions of privacy, we must rewrite the rules for IP, openness, differentiating our personal and professional lives and contextual ideation. Making sense of oceans of information takes a collaborative effort.

4. Redefining the concept of the employee. Corporations rely on many types of workers. Which ones should be employees? Focus on core and outsource the rest. IBM is downsizing by spinning out smaller, more manageable units. Expect to see fewer “regular employees” in future corporations.

5. Weaving together knowledge from data, people and life. Integrate learning into the workscape. Find new measures of accomplishment for selecting job candidates; grades and most credentials are spurious. The re-rise of apprenticeship is upon us.

We live in an age of unprecedented abundance. That changes just about everything. Instead of struggling to survive, we’re evolving together. People are driven by purpose, not payments. We face choices, not constraints.