Many people may look askance at the new group of millennial entrepreneurs’ in the workplace today: Working in flip flops and shorts, shunning the usual 8-5 work hours for odd ones (with technology giving round the clock availability), and exchanging pensions for shares in a promising company.
But something else is happening: They are breaking through the glass cubicle of how business is done and creating something more organic, more agile, and more promising in the 21st century workplace. They are breaking down the corporate ladder; they are creating monkey bars for everyone to play on.
Entrepreneurs are leveraging their strengths and passions.
The new entrepreneurs are engaged in the workplace. They are feeling autonomy and flexibility that defies the old corporate gravitas.
Work has a real purpose, an immediate affect on the individual involved. Yeah, it’s still work. It’s still pushing through the challenges, but the fresh wave of Millennia’s are not prescribing to the stale and structured way of doing business.
And hopefully, this group of individuals who want to individualized their work, their purpose, will not fall into the old by-gone layers of business malaise that affects businesses and the people working for them.
Structure isn’t bad.
It is needed. But structure does not define an individual’s contributions. Or at least it shouldn’t. What if instead of defining a set job and set of responsibilities, companies created fluidity around the core building blocks of business and align it with a person’s strengths?
Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D. is known as the Father of Strengths-based Psychology and Creator of Strengths Finder®. Clifton worked with Gallup to develop a test to assess people’s top five strengths (talents). Tom Rath joined Clifton in 1998 and developed the first online assessment in 2001.
Strengths Finders goal: to start a global conversation about what is right with people.
Since 2000, Gallup has surveyed more than 10 million people on the topic of employee engagement.
The aim was to recognize that engagement in the workplace was, in part, an inside job: Will a person’s true characteristics/talents, when fully engaged, make this person a better, more productive employee?
Based on a 40-year study of human strengths, Rath and Gallup came up with 34 most common strengths (talents). Some of the strengths are recognizable such as communication, analytical, and strategy, but there are others such as ideation, WOO (winning others over), and developer that are new sounding, but not new to human development.
Roth proposes that when people are recognized and work from their individual strengths, they are happier, more engaged, and more productive in the workplace.
When someone is engaging natural talents and mastering their skills, he or she is creating consistently better work performance.
Create a job, a set of skills that are needed and defined, plug a person into it. Then when the person over time seems to decrease in engagement and productivity, bring in the performance review to tell him/her how their weakness is what needs work.
What if we created jobs, but allowed a monkey bar approach of climbing to different parts of the business structure because of the person’s natural strengths that when engaged and flexed result in innovation, new perspectives and ways of solving problems, thus creating happy employees that work as a team?
Build A Better Talent Management Structure: Monkey Bars
Walk into any workplace hub where entrepreneurs are building a business. What do you find? Everyone is involved in performing different tasks. Everyone is pitching in to accomplish the tasks. And though everyone wears many hats in the beginning, as a company grows it has to enforce more structure, more business layers to move forward.
It’s a natural sorting out process. Sam is really good at organizing details. Sally is superb at strategizing the inbound marketing campaign. Sam can sit for hours working on software code. Sally is great at meeting and influencing people.
What if a company created a monkey bar approach toward building the workforce? On a monkey bar there are several bars connected to each other, but several ways you can climb in and around it.
What if the foundation and structure being built in a growing company, recognized and allowed for assessments of a person’s talents and created talent management around this? Training and development for the person within different jobs/projects could be structured according to their mastery of certain talents.
The millennial entrepreneur has a chance to do something different: create jobs that utilize, develop, and leverage employee’s natural bandwidth of strengths in different ways within the company.
Imagine a group of employees that are rewarded for bringing their true strengths to the table and organically creating and recreating ways to leverage these strengths? Imagine an environment of innovation, news way of learning, as an employee’s strength is assigned to a project, a skill that suits the person?
Millennials’ want different and innovative. Let’s break out of the cubicles and climb the monkey bars!