HOW TO CREATE A COMPETITIVE COMPANY.
Although the workplace has been restructured, many people are still operating from an industrial-age mindset that is no longer based on reality. When one looks at our changing world through outdated assumptions, everything looks insane. Alice experienced similar perceptual distortions during her visit to wonderland. Opportunities pass undetected for people clinging to outdated attitudes, beliefs, and ways of doing things. In the extreme, sufferers become despondent because reality based managers, co workers, friends, family, and neighbors are no longer adhering to traditional boundaries, assumptions, and expectations. The following ABCs of employment presents a different way of looking at a changing world at work—a glimpse of the workplace as it is becoming.
A…Attitude:
In a fast paced world, you must constantly reinvent yourself and redefine working relationships on an ongoing basis. Think of yourself as owning your own Corporation and working under contract to a paying customer. As long as your employer (customer) has work, and pays adequately for your service, the partnership is viable. Customer relationships are not entitlements. They can end without warning from either party. You should routinely assess your employer/customer’s short and long term need for the work you do—also evaluate your employer’s ongoing capacity to pay. Your company, “ME INCORPORATED”, has only two strategies to choose from:
1. To provide services by negotiating a contract with a single organization. It is your responsibility to ensure the contract evolves to keep yourself “right priced” (in line with the competition).
2. Develop multiple markets for your service by negotiating shorter term contracts, perhaps with several employers. Go where you will get the best deal—moving as opportunities/problems present themselves.
B…Boundaries:
Paternal loyalty from organizations is no longer an option and should not be expected. Your employer’s intent may be honorable, but as IBM learned, companies cannot assure perpetual employment. It’s healthier to develop a reality-based partnership–a partnership that remains intact only when both parties are profiting. Employers and employees will continue to develop caring alliances, but everybody should realize that they are in a business relationship—not part of an extended family. In the emerging marketplace, you will probably have to accept personal responsibility for the performance and security of your own career, investments, health care, and a retirement plan. Do not assume there is an entitlement of permanent employment from any organization. It is self-defeating to hitch your wagon to a star that could burn out or change positions on you.
C…Collaboration:
Permanent teams are giving way to ad hoc groups that form and disband as required. “Transient teaming” is the watchword for how people will be organized for work. Intense competition for jobs and a quicker-paced economy demands new skills on your part.
To survive and prosper learn how to:
• start, maintain, and end a project.
• embrace new concepts, people, and ways of doing things.
• choose how and when to effectively confront others.
• take the initiative to resolve conflicts.
• trust others and earn their respect by having high integrity.
• not be afraid to ask for help.
• maintain your ”perceived value” in a competitive environment.
Leadership is everybody’s business
“Those choosing to lead in the post industrial age, must make a 180° shift from a mindset of knowing, to an attitude of not knowing…replacing their trust in knowledge and experience, with processes for finding out and taking action faster than the competition”.
Contact art@artmcneil.com Visit www.artmcneil.com