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The Career Lattice

Lattice = Happy At Work

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American feel cruddy about their jobs.

And that’s not me talking: that’s from the latest Gallup Wellbeing Index, which reports that employees are in a continuing funk.

That’s not good for employers, because workers who don’t care about their jobs are a drag on productivity, not to mention morale.

Plenty of factors need to turn around to perk things up — big, big factors like economic growth. But there’s one thing that bosses can do right away: to get more things done, understand how important it is to workers to get things done.

Harvard business school prof Teresa Amabile operates in the world of everyday work dynamics. I’m a fan of her work because she unlocks big ideas from insights that resonate with all of us. Some of her recent research pivots on the point that productive people find satisfaction in the process of getting stuff done. Bosses who want greater productivity need to actively remove barriers to daily accomplishments. It’s not the flowery praise or the sugary doughnut that prompts top performers to buckle down and get stuff done: they are motivated by the satisfaction of actually seeing the stuff get done.

This insight can help managers who are looking for ways to ensure that lateral moves are meaningful and developmental. Lateral moves are still shaking off the outdated image that moving over is moving aside.

As you are framing a lateral move, consider: what will the person in this new position actually get done? How will this position fuel this person’s innate desire to be productive, and how will he measure his effectiveness? Lateral moves need to deliver their own rewards. Otherwise, your attempt to recast lateral  moves as growth will ring hollow.

3 Reasons Why Lattices are Here to Stay

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A good question popped up in yesterday’s Lattice webinar hosted by Monster.com, the online recruiting supersite: Are lattices mainly relevant for a slow-growth economy, or will they evaporate once economic recovery truly takes hold?

Lattices are here to stay. Here’s why.

The traditional ‘ladder’ rewards managing vertical relationship. Your boss manages you. You manage your boss. You manage your subordinates. Your subordinates manage you. But peer relationships are the currency of the connected economy. From social media to peer lending to peer services, such as Air BnB,  economic relationships are realigning over.  Career relationships must follow suit, tapping a whole new arena of peer power for networking and growth.

The next era of growth won’t be like the last one. Organizations will have to quickly muster teams, and the teams that can get products to market first and best will be comprised of multi-faceted individuals. Sure, you’ll still need some tech geniuses, but those tech  geniuses will be worth more if they also have a working knowledge of marketing and customer service.  Lateral rotations within teams will become a key career driver; that’s how individuals will plot and pursue their next positions — lateral or not.

Employers like Chubb Insurance, represented for the Monster webinar by AVP of diversity and inclusion Sabrina McCoy, have handed career direction to employees, asking them to find and win lateral developmental moves as well as traditional promotions. Once that power is delegated, companies can’t take it back.

The future is latticed. Lattice….or let go.

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How to Solve the Tech Skills Gap Today

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 Could the tech talent shortage be solved short-term through career latticing technique?

Maybe so, if employers were willing to think outside the box of their own four walls about how to employ scarce web engineers.

“Think global, hire local,” urges tech exec Matt Asay.  If tech-driven companies in Silicon Valley and New York can’t find enough developers, maybe they should consider hiring them wherever they find them and simply managing them virtually.  After all, argues Asay, if it makes business sense to outsource to another continent, doesn’t it make even more sense to create virtual teams who live in other states?

This is too logical to not happen, which means that the ability to manage virtual teams will soon be emerging as critical for tech project managers.  Leading people you can’t see is a completely different skill from managing those whom you can directly observe hammering away at their keyboards and scowling at their screens. 

But leading a virtual team builds such management skills as:

  • managing results
  • recognizing quality
  • streamlining communications
  • using organic advantages, such as having workers in different time zones, to meet goals

Employers will have to stretch their definitions of successful team management to include virtual leadership.  They will soon find that a roster of managers who can lead ‘anywhere’ teams will open up a new world of possibilities for recruiting and retaining tech talent.

We’re Trying to Keep People Who Don’t Know We’re Trying to Keep Them

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File this one under ‘what the what?’

In HR consultancy Towers Perrin’s 2011/2012  Talent Management and Rewards study, we discover a spectacular example of corporate self-unawareness:

  • 36% of employers are having a hard time retaining employees with ‘critical skills’
  • 44% of employers formally identify employees with critical skills

In other words, employers are trying to hold on to skills that are essential for their operation…though they aren’t sure which employees possess those skills. Which makes it rather difficult to actively retain them, no?

Guess what? Those employees know who they are. That’s why they are so hard to hold on to. They’re loading up their LinkedIn profiles with skill descriptions designed to lure search engines deployed by recruiters.  That guarantees calls.

And these employees know that their employors are clueless. They feel overlooked because they are overlooked. (They’re probably underpaid, too: the same study found that “only 36% of organizations with a competency model have linked it to their reward programs.”  Which begs the question: what ARE those reward programs rewarding, if not competency? Never mind. I’m not sure I have the stomach to hear the answer.)

Employers, listen up: if those skills are truly critical, somebody else wants them, too. And those employees will be on the lookout for strategic moves — up or over — to get to an organization that knows what it’s got, wants to keep it…and might even pay for it.  Give your ‘critical skills’ employees a reason to stay.