Lending Market Exchange

By Magdalena Pawlowicz - Several roles: Making people excel, partner, innovator, do-er, listener, at Several: GL Consulting, www.trendsales.fi, Social Viper, collaborating with Ethos tech on their enterprise collaboration platform

September 20, 2010 at 11:42am

Leadership

retooling of mindset

Change

talent management

Knowledge Management

Market place

Moonshots

Increase trust, reduce fear

Retool management for an open and borderless world

Summary

The aging population in the Nordics/Western part of the world and the possibility for early retirement will cause competency gaps and will lead to loss of knowledge in Enterprises. Creation of strategic competency market exchange in which companies share competencies amongst each other for longer or shorter period of times, even with competitors, are necessary. The competency market place would include people (competencies) who work, who are retired and would like to do part-time work and people out of job. It would mean that companies do no longer own the human resource, but exchange to the benefit of all.

Description

Barrier: Retool management for an open and borderless world (unable to delete the trust and fear moonshot)

Today companies tend to believe that they 'own' the competencies or employees, as they have trained them, invested in them etc

In future with scarce human resources, and where the supply demand of human resources hierarchy will be turned upside down, companies need to collaborate to invest and develop skills of employees not only for own demand but also for others, even for competitors.

Market Place for competencies sharing/lending/borrowing will be created and competencies will be used by those that have a need. The market place includes both people who are working in companies, who are retired and want to work part time or people who are out of job. If an employee is working in a company he would be lend out for e.g. a project for 3 mths in one company, and 1 month in the next one. An employee with certain competencies will have several employers and will be paid by different sources.

Such market places could also include retired employees who would be available for e.g. 10 hours per month and would be shared amongst companies for the purpose of making the tacit knowledge explicit.

This would support not only an open and border-less enter[prise world but would also support a shared societal goal. I do not think it would collide with the rules of sound competition as the competitive advantage of a company lies in the execution. So companies would still compete based on their uniqueness e.g. culture, processes, systems, people even if they would share specialist and critical competencies.

Illustration

The idea would have a direct impact on talent management, collaborative technology and retool the mindset of leaders about what is competition. Power would lie in the sharing value, as companies which would share would also be creating networks and relations with companies with whom they share resources. Employees would be stimulated by new experiences and get new ideas which could lead to innovations. Learning and investment into the human being would be distributed across many enterprises, making the knowledge of the staff even richer. This would lead to new and powerful communities.

New reward and incentive models would be developed and people would be rewarded because of their work and merit and not because of a role or political relation. This would be a new approach to mobilizing and coordinating human efforts in a time with an increasing aging population.

Root Causes

The barrier exists as leadership in companies believe that they invest money, time and resources to train an employee and therefore they own the knowledge and the skills of the employee.

The perception would need to be stretched to think more in terms of sharing rather than keeping for oneself. The ROI would be the different experience/ideas that the employee would bring back to a company as he or she will be exposed to issues and opportunities not see in one and the same entity, if he or she has worked there for 25 years.

Solution

Leaders will be forced to change their perception as critical staff sign up to the market place.

Credits

Magdalena Pawlowicz

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May 10, 2012 at 10:41am

Ben Biddle

In a way, this builds off what Dan Pink described in Free Agent Nation and even further back when Richard Florida talked about The Rise of the Creative Class. Top quality talent are less loyal to a single employer and actively seek out new challenge and opportunities. Social technologies are now also enabling greater mobility and more open organizations. There are even cases of market places for professional free lancers emerging such as eLance.

Of course, the need for a core of internal employees isn't going to disappear, but the potential is for a much more expansive form of organization, one in which strategic partners share talent. Imagine if employees could take a year to work at a partner company, as an academic might teach at another university. This is a really compelling idea. Actually promoting stickiness with your best and brightest by giving them the freedom to go pursue other interests and opportunities, then return refreshed and with new perspectives.