10th November 2006

Guest column: Self-discovery the Socrates way

By Amin Rajan

Customers want more for less; so do employers. They want a smaller but highly skilled workforce acting as a shock absorber in a changing environment.
Despite the end of the jobs-for-life culture, most jobs still remain secure, so long as security is based on individual performance, not corporate paternalism. Old style security is out; new style employability measured by personal effectiveness is in; at least in the private sectors in most countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Under this new deal, employers undertake to provide the necessary learning opportunities, so long as employees take the initiative in acquiring five sets of generic skills that underpin effectiveness: technical skills that are special to a job; risk management skills that identify and mitigate potential risks; IT skills that exploit technology to gain business advantage; business acumen that converts goals into actions and results; and behavioural traits that create and deliver high performance cultures.

The range of skills and their level of proficiency, of course, depend upon the nature of occupation in question. In around 10 per cent of jobs, technical skills predominate. Elsewhere, multi-skilling is the norm. Blending a range of specialisms, it also overlays them with behavioural, business and risk management skills demanded by today’s unforgiving market place.

Not surprisingly, therefore, there have been three marked shifts in the approaches to skills development. The first relates to the balance in the use of various avenues of learning. The traditional formal learning administered in a structured classroom environment is being heavily complemented – when not replaced – by experiential learning, personal coaching and networking with peers.

In turn, this shift has produced four generic but readily recognisable means for creating amore skilled workforce. Typically: classroom learning targets technical skills or codified knowledge; mentored learning provides an independent sounding board; distance learning provides a stable platform for accessing new ideas; experiential learning relies on learning-by-trying.

Companies as diverse as RusAl in Russia and Proctor & Gamble in the US blend these different methods of learning as a part of a horses-for-courses strategy to meet the varying needs of their employees. They recognise that business acumen and behavioural attributes – like judgement, decisiveness, communication – cannot be taught in a classroom setting alone.

The second, and the more innovative, shift relates to the adoption of new ways of working through virtual teams that promote incremental improvements in products and processes via regular brainstorming. Embracing peers with a common sense of purpose, such teams work like communities where people have a need to know what others know. In the process, they typically achieve three things: learn by bouncing ideas around; enhance corporate memory, as ideas breed new ideas via increased interactions; and “fail forward” by creating a momentum with the learning derived from previous failures, as exemplified by Pfizer, who stumbled on Viagra while trying to invent a drug for a heart condition.

At BP and Shell, for example, virtual teams have saved billions in operating costs by finding creative solutions to unforeseen problems encountered when exploring new frontiers. As a spin off, they have also speeded up time to develop oil fields. The teams are pushed to the limits of their thinking in the belief that the person who invents the first wheel is a lucky fool but it’s the rest of the team that thought to put it with another three. Although virtual teams rely heavily on technology as a facilitator of communication, great care is taken to avoid a sense of isolation by ensuring that members meet face to face occasionally to forge personal relationships.

The third shift relates to action learning. It enjoins key individuals to participate in projects that are outcome driven. Businesses as diverse as Citigroup and Metronet Rail have engaged their high potential managers to work on strategic assignments that stretch their abilities to fresh limits.

For example, Citigroup’s initiative on enhancing workforce diversity has a number of networks. Those who head these can hone their skills in two steps.

First, they are familiarised in the art of leadership without authority in complex organisations: in other words, how to lead people over whom they have no advantage of rank, status or power. Second, they are taken out of their comfort zones to run networks that engage people in all grades, including their own bosses. The aim is to enable a cadre of volunteers to deliver strategic goals while improving three of the core skills of leadership: influencing, improvising, and listening.

In Toyota, such initiatives extend the span of leadership influence to include stakeholders in the supply chain and business partners, as they evolve.

In sum, these well established shifts seek to unlock people’s potential by helping them to learn how to learn, rather than spoon feed them. The earliest exponent of this art of self-discovery was Socrates. But, over time, his philosophy was overtaken by the old behaviourist view that people are little more than empty vessels into which everything must be poured.

This view, in turn, is now discredited, renewing the belief that we are more like acorns, with all the potential to be a magnificent oak tree, given motivation, encouragement and opportunity. “I taught them all I knew technically, yet they can feel things that I can’t even imagine,” observed Mike Spracklen, coach to Olympic winners Andrew Holmes and Sir Stephen Redgrave. This sentiment is fully exemplified by the evolving approaches to learning.

Amin Rajan is chief executive of Create, a research consultancy
*Tomorrow's Products for Tomorrow's Clients", available at amin.rajan@create-research.co.uk
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006