StretchHow To Future-Proof Yourself

For Tomorrow’s Workplace

By Karie Willyerd & Barbara Mistick

Where will you be working 10 years from now? How about five years? Or next year? Who knows? Probably not you. There’s never been a time of more uncertainty and disruptive change in business and employment.

Things may seem okay right now but how can you be sure you have the relevant skills and experience to match the opportunities of a future that you can’t even predict?

The only way, say Karie Willyerd and Barbara Mistick, is to get yourself in shape mentally in the same way you would physically - by stretching yourself: stretching how you learn, your openness to new ideas, your network of contacts, your diversity of experience and the way you motivate yourself.

In a project they called Workforce 2020 Research, the pair - Willyerd calls herself a workplace futurist and Mistick is president of Wilson College in

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Pennsylvania - collaborated in a global study to discover what today’s executives and employees were thinking, wanting and worrying about the future.

The major discovery was a concern about the ability to prepare for and respond to 7 major changes taking place in the broader business environment:

1. Globalization in which large companies re-locate to emerging markets and jobs can be done almost anywhere.

2. A demographic shift led by tech-savvy millennials who continuously advance their skillsets, leaving others behind.

3. The explosion of data and the demand for people who can make sense of it.

4. Emerging technologies like driverless cars, 3-D printing and robots.

5. Climate change that creates issues such as water shortages, demand new thinking on how and where businesses can operate.

6. Redefined jobs, notably the shift to free-lancing and contract work, and the blurring be-tween work time and personal time.

7. Increasing complexity of rules and stan-dards such as government regulations, busi-ness structures and industrial processes.

The authors’ study, conducted with SuccessFactors (an SAP company) and Oxford Economics, identified three imperatives to meet these concerns: the need to look after your own development, the need to create and keep open as many options as possible, and the importance of constantly thinking about your future.

These three imperatives then break down into five practices, which are the meat of this book.

The approach provides guidance both for would-

be practitioners of these processes, and for leaders who want to encourage and motivate employees to adopt them.

Imperative One - It’s All On You“You are the only one who can drive your career development,” the authors advise. “Don’t rely on your boss or your organization to engage you.”

This look-after-your-own-interests approach requires application of the first two practices.

Practice #1: Learn On The FlyStudies tell us that what separates the best from the rest in employment terms is their willingness and ability to keep on learning - and not just in the classroom or other formal settings - but in every opportunity available to acquire knowledge and information.

The fact is, employers can’t be relied on to deliver sufficient training to keep you up to date, much

less prepared for the future.

“You must assume it’s on you to find your own way to get the development you need, especially while on the job,” state Willyerd and Mistick.

“Most of the real learning you receive in your professional life will be on the job, and not in a classroom. You must learn on the job, often ‘on the fly’ if you are to have any hope of keeping up.”

To do this, begin by adopting a growth mindset.

That is, you have to believe in your own capacity to learn and grow, shunning any self-suggestion that your potential is fixed or limited in some way by your background or genetic factors. Think: I can do this. I can learn more.

A second learning strategy is to mindfully observe what’s happening around you - focusing on the present and being intentionally aware of what’s going on. Learn by carefully watching.

In support of this, it’s also important to cultivate curiosity, to internally question everything you see and hear and to seek out information that helps you make sense of it. Keep asking yourself questions like; “How’s that task done and why’s it done that way?”

It’s also important to set aside time to reflect on what you’ve seen and learned.

This isn’t necessarily a passive process. Bob Cancalosi, director of GE Customer Leadership Education, has kept work journals for more than a decade, which he uses for reviewing his activities as a leader.

He makes notes on his day-to-day experiences, which he periodically reviews. Every 50 pages, he inserts a “stop and reflect” instruction to ensure he maintains the process.

What OrganizationsAnd Managers Can DoWhat, as a manager, might you be able to do to encourage this continuous learning process among your direct reports and other employees?

One approach is to define expected capabilities for specific jobs, with a clear description of what expertise in the field looks like. Then employees understand what they need to do to advance their careers.

You can help them do this by ensuring they have learning opportunities and by providing ample access to education and on-demand resources.

Practice #2: Be OpenBeing open is a catch-all phrase for everything that supports a willingness to change.

It means being happy to receive and deliver

feedback and adjusting behavior for better results.

It’s about being alert to opportunities and proactively advancing your own development rather than waiting for your employer to do so.

And it’s about accepting uncertainty, including allowing yourself to be open to options that you may initially have rejected or entertaining approaches that you find uncomfortable.

Stretch strategies you might adopt to encourage openness include:

• Acting as though you’re a lean start-up - a new business trying to make its way in a tough and competitive environment. Start by generating multiple ideas of where you want your career to go and be prepared to test your ideas, either by trying different jobs in a single organization or by switching from one employer to another.

• Developing drone abilities. You know how

camera-bearing drones can give you a bird’s-eye view of a scene and then zoom in for the detail? Try to adopt the same view when considering a job opportunity. How does it fit into the big picture of the organization and your potential career direction? Could it lead somewhere else? What specific experiences and expertise would it deliver?

• Opening up to the idea of switching career tracks - leaving behind a path you’ve already invested in and being ready to creatively disrupt yourself. Economist Joseph Schumpeter once argued that the only way organizations could survive in the long term was through continuous destruction of existing products and the creation of new ones. Could you totally reinvent yourself? “Disrupt or be disrupted,” the authors warn.

• Making time to test your assumptions.

Don’t go through life assuming you’re doing things right or that you know best. Find ways of questioning yourself and identifying your biases. Speak to newcomers for their views on your business activities or hang out online with others in the same industry. One good tip: always consider that anyone who disagrees with you is at least partially right!

• Most critically, the real test of your openness is your willingness to seek feedback, listen actively to what others say and to take appropriate action in response. Unfortunately, we all know that it’s not easy to get honest feedback. One suggestion to encourage genuine feedback is to use an approach that seems non-personal. For example, you might ask the feedback provider: “If you could imagine the perfect person doing the perfect job in the role I’m in, what do you think they might be doing differently than I am?”

What OrganizationsAnd Managers Can DoAs a manager, you can encourage openness to change and make it part of your corporate culture. A development culture is one in which managers regularly talk to employees about job assignments that can help them grow, and conduct regular talent assessments.

Such an organization would provide insights into organizational structure, the way it operates and the opportunities that it provides, and then offer direct coaching to progress-minded individuals.

The development-oriented organization also requires the solicitation and measurement of feedback throughout the organization.

Imperative Two - You Need Options“One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to preparing for tomorrow,” the authors stress, “which is why

you need options.”

Two key practices can help you and your employees create as many potential opportunities as possible include: building out your network, and doing all you can to gain new experiences.

Practice # 3: Build A Diverse NetworkNetworks - your connections with family, friends and business contacts - fall into two categories: those with close or strong ties, usually friends and relations but also business partners; and those with much looser connections, perhaps business colleagues, former acquaintances who have moved on, and alumni association members.

It’s your loose-tie network that has the best potential for helping you access new opportunities because they generally have a wider reach and greater diversity than your close contacts. Your close network may also have too many protective biases working on your behalf to limit risks -

they’re much more likely to say: Don’t do that!

In building your network, give preference to quality, not quantity. Big networks are difficult and time-consuming to manage so avoid the temptation to link up - especially online - with just anyone who requests a connection. According to the theory known as Dunbar’s Number (posited by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size and then extrapolated that to humans), humans can only meaningfully keep in contact with about 150 people.

You should adopt two network development strategies:

1. Building for depth. This involves building relationships with people you know who will value the skills and experience you have, and finding others who may be a couple of steps ahead of you in their careers. Invest slowly in

developing these relationships one at a time.

2. Bridging for breadth. To widen the scope of your network, look for opportunities to link contacts up with each other and make new contacts by attending professional meetings and social events or becoming involved in community organizations. Remember the “degrees of separation” idea - through our connections and their connections with others, and so on, we are ultimately all connected.

You have to perform regular maintenance to keep your network in peak condition, constantly reviewing it, avoiding spending time on past contacts who are no longer relevant to your interests or activities, and looking for opportunities to “scratch the back” of others by providing them with assistance or information.

Within your network, you should identify and focus

on relationships with a small number of people - five is ideal - who can help you improve your skills and expertise. These are likely to be individuals you admire or people who can challenge you to grow beyond where you are now. The authors refer to this group as “Five to Thrive.”

What OrganizationsAnd Managers Can DoWhile developing your own network, encourage others in your organization to do the same.

For example, you might conduct speed networking events, similar to speed dating, in which participants move rapidly from one person to another in a single location and for a fixed time period. (This probably only works in larger organizations since it requires people who don’t really know each other to chat for a few minutes at a time.)

One organization the authors interviewed sat

executives at tables, while employees looking for mentors moved from one table to the next, discussing their interests and affinities.

Employees in the authors’ survey said that informal mentoring was one of the top ways in which they experienced professional development.

Organizations can also encourage network development by providing online tools for social collaboration - like intranets and message boards.

Practice #4: Be Greedy About ExperiencesThe more different activities and relationships you pursue, the more options you’ll have open to you when you’re trolling for new opportunities.

“The word ‘greedy’ is almost never used in a positive context. However, when it comes to experiences, the best way to future-proof yourself is to be voracious in seeking out as many

opportunities as you can,” the authors write.

So, there’s true value, for instance, in being one of the first to volunteer for new assignments and in experimenting with doing your job in different ways.

Look for opportunities to go global. A job or assignment abroad can broaden your experience. If that opportunity doesn’t come your way, you can gain insights into other cultures by including people from various cultures in your network or volunteering to host international students.

Other ways to encounter new experiences include:

• Identifying a specific need in your organization and solving the problem. “As long as organizations have needs, they will always be searching for people passionate about solving problems,” the authors note. “If you can help identify or provide better, faster, and smarter ways to solve problems,

you are bound to gain many valuable experiences and probably some champions for your efforts.”

• Stretching yourself by taking on a job where you don’t have the relevant expertise. This might mean moving sideways or to a different organization.

• Similarly, volunteer or seek work experience in other parts of your business or with outside organizations. Volunteering can be an extremely satisfying experience, giving insights into areas you wouldn’t normally encounter, and introducing you to potential new networking contacts.

• Investing time in your own ongoing education. Never stop learning. Today, there are many more ways of doing this informally or remotely - in addition to the classroom - such as TED talks and online learning programs.

What OrganizationsAnd Managers Can DoOrganizations can provide new experiences for employees by providing volunteering opportunities, offering sabbaticals or putting in place a formal job rotation program.

Management can also ensure all employees gain some customer-facing experience.

For instance, the Canadian telecom company TELUS runs a program called “Closer to the Customer” (C2C), giving employees a short experience away from their regular jobs by shadowing colleagues in customer-facing roles.

Imperative Three - You Have DreamsToday, work is no longer necessarily a “place,” like it used to be. It’s a “thing.” And increasingly, you’re likely to bounce from one type of job to another, as some types of work become obsolete and new

opportunities open up.

Inevitably, this might result in setbacks and demand changes in career paths as you test different opportunities and develop various personal visions of success. The key is to use your experiences and networks as a springboard to progress - or “bounce forward” as the authors call this process.

Practice #5: Bounce Forward“We all have dreams, and we’ve all had setbacks on the way to those dreams; what we need are the right motivational strategies to bounce forward and make them a reality,” say Willyerd and Mistick.

If you suffer a career failure or other setback, look for a way of pushing past it and finding a silver lining. For instance, after being rejected as an employee by both Twitter and Facebook, young Brian Acton decided to do his own thing, co-founding the immensely successful social

messaging network WhatsApp.

Recall too the advice in Practice #1 to adopt a growth mindset. According to psychology professor Carol Dweck (author of Mindset: The New Psychology Of Success) people hold one of two different views on their abilities: fixed or growth.

People with a fixed mindset adopt a fatalistic view that they’re helpless to influence the outcome of events, whereas those with a growth mindset believe their abilities can grow through hard work and education.

“People with a growth mindset are confronted by failure the same as anyone, but those failures only encourage them to seek advice or try a different strategy - to overcome and move forward,” the authors write.

Whenever you encounter an obstacle or experience a setback in your career plans, you

should invoke three personal qualities to engineer your bounce forward:

1. Grit. This is defined as a “never-yielding commitment to self-discipline.” Fostering grit is about developing endurance, a determination to do whatever it takes over time to get where you want to be. Stay the course, even as new challenges confront you.

2. Resilience. Grit and resilience seem simi-lar but resilience is more about constantly im-provising and seeking solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems. It’s about learning to survive against the odds. Holocaust sur-vivors were resilient by developing an inner psychological “shield” that helped them han-dle abuse, and even a sense of humor as a way of countering the extreme adversity they faced.

3. Motivation. This is the “intrinsic desire to

be better at what you do.” Quite simply, it’s a personal commitment to improve yourself, re-gardless of short-term rewards, even mone-tary ones.

You can see this combination of grit, resilience and motivation in the career of Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma.

He failed his college entrance exams three times, was turned down by the police academy and out of 24 applicants he was the only one who failed to get a job at KFC.

When he decided to launch his own online retail business, he couldn’t get banks to work with him so he started his own payments system. And when people told him his ideas were stupid, he ignored them and persevered to create the Chinese online retailing giant Alibaba.

Ma is now the richest man in China.

What OrganizationsAnd Managers Can DoAlthough it’s widely known that financial rewards aren’t the sole or even the biggest employee motivator, this reality is often overlooked by employers.

You can improve employee attitudes, determination and commitments by connecting them to your purpose, showing how their role fits into the organization and even creating shared goals that provide a sense of belonging.

Charting The Path ForwardIn the closing section of the book, Willyerd and Mistick paint a quick picture of how they see the future of work.

We’re entering the era, they say, of the flexible workforce, dominated by freelancers and contractors. Organizations will become

increasingly virtual - operating principally online.

At the same time, talent shortages will emerge, as will armies of robots or automated systems potentially competing for our jobs and disrupting career tracks.

In this environment, the Top 10 capabilities for tomorrow will be:

1. Functional excellence - having a set of honed skills in a specific discipline.

2. Emotional intelligence - the capacity to em-pathize and see things from others’ perspec-tives.

3. Personal advocacy - promoting yourself in a persuasive way.

4. Cross-cultural dexterity - the ability to work in a diverse environment.

5. Geek acumen - keeping up to date with emerging technologies.

6. Virtual collaboration - being able to work with others in scattered locations.

7. Entrepreneurial spirit - knowing how to build customer relationships and get things done.

8. Creative problem-solving - being able to come up with innovative solutions, thinking outside of the box.

9. Leadership - the ability to inspire oth-ers while operating transparently in a feed-back-driven culture.

10. “Stretchpertise” - a notion that brings us full circle back to the purpose of this book.

ConclusionReprising the five practices, Stretchpertise involves the ability to:

• learn on the fly

• be open

• create an effective network

• engage in a variety of experiences

• bounce forward using grit, resilience and motivation.

One final thing, the authors warn: You are never finished.

“The future beckons,” they write. “Will you be one of the disengaged or will you stretch to new capabilities, extending your sell-by date?

The fulfillment of dreams doesn’t happen by luck. Stretch to become your best self - the person who you know you can be.”