The need to continue to learn and evolve in your career has never been greater. In this episode I offer three practical suggestions to help you stay relevant as you navigate a world of accelerating technological change driven by AI, as well as changes driven by culture and challenging economic factors.
My client was feeling uneasy as we reviewed some confidential all-employee comments that had been collected after a recent town hall event. Most of the comments were unwaveringly positive, focusing on the crisp strategic focus and improving execution that had become noticeable since my client took the reigns of this large firm.
At a first meeting with a new client my impression was of a woman at the top of her game – a fast moving executive who had sailed past peers to achieve the top role because of her technical expertise, strong drive and impressive ability to rally people around her and get things done. As she told her story, brimming with confidence and pride, she caught herself and asked, “I’m not some kind of narcissist, am I? I just think that I’m really good at my job.”
First the good news – Boards, CEOs and executive teams are taking employee engagement more seriously than ever. This can only be a good thing, particularly for people like me who grew up in a world where “human resources” were viewed as variable costs – to be added or deleted as required (I recall a senior manager at a large international company describe his employees as lemons – he said that his job was to squeeze and squeeze the lemons until there was no more juice, and then to throw them away!).
A CEO of a large, successful company decided that he wanted to start working on leadership development. As a first step in the process he asked all of his senior executives – approximately 30 people in total – to complete one of the more popular assessment tools – one of the many that categorize people’s behavioral patterns into various colors.
In his widely quoted 2012 Wired article, Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs, Kevin Kelly explains why he believes that 70% of current jobs will no longer exist in future decades – including professional gigs such as law or medicine that were immune from previous upheavals in the labour market. If you don’t find this notion a little terrifying, I suspect that you are not being completely honest with yourself.
