In the post-job organisation, managers must find ways to integrate corporate requirements with the personal needs of workers
Management Today June 2000 pp. 20 - 22.
By Tim Baker, BEd BA AIMM AITD
Organisational Development Consultant
WINNERS-AT-WORK
Managers who wish to increase and sustain the productivity of their work force will find that a career development model serves well to merge workers’ needs with organisational interests.
But, there is a need for a new approach to career development. The difficulty management faces of attracting and keeping motivated and talented staff is hardly new. Balancing individual and organisational needs has been an issue for as long as organisations have existed. More than a quarter of a century ago, D. Katz made the point: “We need to cope with such organisational realities as the attracting of people into organisations, holding them within the system, insuring reliable performance and, in addition, stimulating actions which are generally facultative of organisational accomplishment.”
Phrases such as “holding them”, “ensuring reliable performance” and ‘,stimulating actions” illustrate the problem of maximising productivity. They focus on organisational outcomes at the expense of workers’ needs. The balance has been in favor of the organisation. Has much changed in the 35 years?
The dilemma has come into sharper focus in recent times as employees seek a deeper sense of meaning in their working lives. This search, coupled to economic pressures, has forced a new relationship between workers and organisations. People increasingly want to define their lives and their work on their own terms. In general, the evidence indicates that employees want to enjoy work, to feel they can make a contribution, to feel respected as people, and to learn and grow.
Seldom, however, has the workplace been a worker-friendly, flexible structure that could accommodate any type of sociological change. The need for rapid responses to an increasingly competitive and customer-driven global marketplace has forced managers and organisational consultants to reinvent the organisation. Yet, workers, living with the natural resistance and the feelings of upheaval and insecurity that change brings, have not responded as managers have planned.
Organisational transformation how- ever, deals with the deeper issues of personal growth, vision, trust, creativity, purpose, leadership, mastery, and cultivating organisational spirit. These transformation issues have a direct influence on the notion of career paths.
S.J. Adamson, writing in Career Development International, acknowledges that, for at least the last thirty years, theoretical and practical definitions of career have emphasised structure, succession and status. Career has been viewed as the sequence of attempts to move onward and upward through organisational hierarchies. He argues that we now need to accommodate a new perspective about career development that goes beyond this narrow view. The career, in other words, should he seen as a vehicle for the continuous realisation of self.
From the worker’s perspective, P. Simonsen points out that: “People whose only career development planning involves the expectation of promotions to management or to higher levels of management may find themselves on an indefinite plateau or even downsized.”
So, the old systems of hierarchy, titles, putting oneself in line for the next higher position, career paths, and so on sit in opposition to the realities of today’s organisations. And the opposition will only become more pronounced in tomorrow’s.
Little wonder that employees need help refraining their thinking about careers in this chaotic environment. With the old paradigm no longer viable, new ones must be developed and communicated by managers. As careers change, so must career planning and development resources both within and outside the organisation.
Work itself is changing so rapidly that job descriptions are obsolete almost as quickly as they are written. However, it is not only job descriptions but the nature of the jobs themselves that are becoming antiquated. W. Bridges points out in Fortune, that work is not going away, but jobs are. The environment in which an individual can be hired to do a specific job and nothing else is long gone.
The new entrepreneurial model can be qualified as “people doing whatever needs to be done to make the business a success”. Many companies are asking employees to “act like an owner”. So, managers want workers to take more responsibility for their work. Yet, managers have traditionally focused almost exclusively on organisational output, which is what they have always measured the employees against, at the expense of nurturing personal growth.
Since jobs are no longer socially adaptable, the answer must be to create the “post-job” organisation.
It is ironic that most managers need employees to stop acting like jobholders, yet they know only how to hire, pay, communicate with, and manage job- holders. Most organisations also maintain policies, strategies, training programs, and structures meant only to enable employees to be more successful in their job activities.
The irony is intensified when it is taken into consideration that a wave of job-free workers intent on doing what needs to be done rather than doing their jobs would wreck most traditional organisations. just as individuals need to rethink their assumptions and strategies, organisations too need to rethink almost everything they do.
Career development can be positioned as a change agent to bridge old and new realities, to reinforce the messages of change needed, and to educate employees about what’s in it for them. To be successful in this regard, P. Pritchert and R. Pound claim in High-Velocity Culture Change that you must hit with enough shock effect to immobilise the old culture at least temporarily.
An integrated and comprehensive career development system can affect the organisation’s culture in several positive ways. The table below contrasts old elements of a typical culture with a new paradigm for individuals to consider in their career development.
The significant changes in work and the workplace we are experiencing today have created a need to think differently about “human capital” in organisations. The main influence for this change has unquestionably been the rise in competition that in rum has stimulated employers and their managers to review, perhaps on an ongoing basis, their organisational structures and employment arrangements.
The organisations that emerge successfully from the turmoil of the 1990s will have to reinvent themselves; the paternalism and dependency that evolved with the industrial, age are no longer viable. Everywhere we hear that the old employment contract has changed or disappeared. Most workers have heard that they need to change. But most companies have not yet recognised that organisational culture needs to change as well. And even of those companies that are aware that the reformations to be made must be so pervasive as to require a change of culture in the organisation, many have not yet been able to define the new culture that must emerge.
A possible solution is the implementation of a comprehensive, integrated career development system that win act as a catalyst for bringing individual expectations into line with organisation- al realities. It could provide a framework for updating or creating systems that support new behavior to achieve the results an organisation needs to survive and thrive in the new economy.
The approach to career development must be aligned with and support the organisation’s new or desired culture if it is to have the greatest effect. Many companies have tried, without understanding the forces driving the culture or without having a goal, to create a development culture, to implement career development or other programs that soon came to be derided as “flavor of the month”.
Although well-meaning, they could not be sustained because the components did not fit the new culture or because they lacked enough elements of change to contribute to the development of the desired new culture.
The model outlined here offers a way out of that cul-de-sac of reactive change for change’s sake. it warrants further investigation as a way of serving the collective interests of workers, management, owners, the organisation and the state.
The changing individual paradigm
| Old Paradigm | New Paradigm |
| Job security | Employability |
| Credentials/degree | Continuous learning |
| Entitlement | Adding value |
| Job description and title | Portfolio of skills and roles |
| Success equals promotion | Success driven by individual values and needs |
| Next job focus | Broad career, non-job focus |
| Dependence on the organization | Commitment to work in one’s field and to make a contribution |
References
Adamson, S.J. “Career as a vehicle for the realisation of self.” Career Development International 2/5 (1997): 245-253.
Bridges, W. “The end of the job.” , Fortune September 1994: 50-57.
Chawla, S. and Renesch, J. (ed). Learning Organisations: Developing Cultures for Tomorrow’s Workplace. Portland: Productivity Press, 1995.
Katz, D. “The motivational basis of organisational behavior.” Behavioral Science 9 (1964): 131-46.
Pritchett, P and Pound, P,. High-Velocity Culture Change. Dallas: Pritchett & Associates, 1993.
Simonsen, P. Promoting a Development Culture in Your Organisation. California: Davies-Black, 1997.
