most organizations are good at building the “brick house” through regular full-time employment. That has its value, but you must also know how to assemble temporary structures suited to a particular need at a particular time.
The employees who live in the brick house can see the need to prepare for a future with multiple temporary work structures. Just turn to LinkedIn and see the jobs people have these days. For example, Graham Donald's profile shows he is VP, Insight & Brand Strategy for Day Communications. But wait – he's also listed as president of his own company, the Brainstorm Strategy Group. How can someone be a VP in a leading communications firm and at the same time president of his own business? Donald's case is not that unusual anymore. Alan Burt, the chief technology officer (CTO) of Ricoh Australia, is simultaneously the CTO of PlanDo, a career management software company. The old tidy boxes are breaking down. Like an electron, people can be in more than one place at once.
What we see from Donald and Burt is that people are adapting to a world where regular full-time employment, what we used to call “permanent employment” is not particularly permanent. They have learned to build their individual brand, often while also working as regular full-time employees. A former free agent like Donald has learned it would be risky to jettison the value he built up in his own company, so he keeps it going part-time – a deal made possible by an employer who is enlightened enough to see that if you want the best people you need to be flexible in the deal you offer.
As layoffs, downsizing, and rightsizing have become frequent management tools, it's only natural that workers would value arrangements that make their movement between jobs easy. Workers may prefer leaving on their own than being pushed out by their employer. Regular employees now live in a world that bears many similarities to a free agent's life beyond employment. Employment and union trends analyzed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and presented by the Economist validate the shifts we have discussed. Figure 1.1 shows that the proportion of workers protected by union membership has steadily declined by half over the past two decades, while the proportion of temporary workers has doubled.
Figure 1.1 The Casual Look: United States, Percentage of Employed
Source: The Economist, 2015; Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As leaders, we worry about attracting and retaining employees. As parents, we groom our children, so they can get good jobs. Yet, there are many ways to get work done without having employees, and many ways of being a worker without having a regular full-time job.
Even when work is done by employees, not free agents, the work need not be done by your employees or in your place of business. Some leaders see the work occurring in an organization with a more permeable boundary, where work – and people – move inside and outside more freely.
In our book Transformative HR: How Great Companies Use Evidence-Based Change for Sustainable Advantage (John Wiley & Sons, 2011) we described how Khazanah Nasional, the investment arm of the Malaysian government, recognized that companies did not have sufficiently varied developmental opportunities for leaders. Khazanah Nasional's executives came up with a bold idea: Why not convince the companies in their portfolio of investments to share leaders with one another, with Khazanah acting as the matchmaker? For example, the power company Tenaga Nasional could send a leader with strong operating capabilities to work for several years at Malaysia Airlines in order to acquire skills in turning around a troubled business. And a leader with significant experience in negotiating international energy agreements could move from the national oil company Petronas, to Telekom Malaysia, where she could acquire the skills associated with operating an integrated telecommunications network. The companies embraced the concept. Employees got valuable development experience, the companies got top talent, and Khazanah helped further the nation's ambition of becoming an advanced economy by building a deeper pool of leaders.
At first the idea of loaning out leaders seems bizarre and unworkable, but Khazanah proves it is entirely doable.
Soccer fans will recognize the model: soccer teams have well-established systems for loaning players to other teams where they will have a better chance to develop their skills. A key to these arrangements is a governance structure and agreed rules for making the loans so that the advantages outweigh the costs for each team. For example, in the Premier League, players on loan are not permitted to play against the team loaning them. Loanees are, however, allowed to play against their “owning” clubs in cup competitions, unless they have played for their owning club in the cup during that particular season.
If we can break down the idea that the organizational boundary is an impermeable barrier, it opens up a world of opportunities. Why doesn't Pottery Barn borrow a couple of product designers from Banana Republic to develop next year's products and next year loan their own designers to Banana Republic? Why doesn't American Express swap employees with Geico Insurance to build capabilities related to enhancing cyber security?
Of course, lending your talent carries new risks. Does it matter if one of your best leaders, or best players, is outside the organization giving their heart and soul for another team? Will you reap the benefit when they return? And if you had not created this development opportunity might you have lost them anyway?
Again, it depends, and the difference between success and failure lies in the ability of leaders to make good choices, to lead through the work in a way that optimizes the inherent ambiguity that this kind of talent sharing creates. Leaders must navigate practical issues such as whose benefit plan a loaned employee is on and whether, in a soccer match, we allow the loaned player to play against their original team. What a brave new world, that has such options in it.
The engineering and electronics giant Siemens makes hearing aids.5 Among the end users are kids. How do you make hearing aids attractive to kids? How do you get their classmates to think hearing aids are cool, not weird? For all its immense depth of technical expertise and its world-class employees, these questions were far out of Siemens' comfort zone. Siemens is a great company, but its history, strategy, and culture had never encountered the challenge of marketing technology to kids. The question, “Which of our regular full-time employees can take on this assignment,” undoubtedly turned up many remarkable workers, but none with deep expertise in this area.
So, the leaders at Siemens reframed the question to ask, “Who in the world really gets kids?” The answer was not hard to find – it was Disney. Rather than trying to build the capability among its own employees to figure out how to market to kids, Siemens took advantage of an alliance with Disney. Disney employees were assigned to the project of marketing the Siemens hearing aid. Their solution: Don't sell the hearing aid. Disney experts packaged the product in a colorful case with a Mickey Mouse stuffed toy and a comic book with a compelling and inspiring story about kids with hearing aids. Disney saw the hearing aid more like a toy than a medical technology.
Children don't buy the wind or gas turbines that are closer to the core of Siemens' business, yet children's hearing aids are a valuable application of Siemens' core capability, an opportunity too valuable to lose. If Siemens tried solving this problem by hiring employees to package and promote hearing aids to children, it would take a long time to hire them, the best of them probably wouldn't consider Siemens an employer of choice, and the new employees wouldn't easily fit into Siemens' core business once they finished work on the hearing aid project. Why build a permanent structure based on employment when Siemens can get the work done faster, with higher quality and less cost, by “borrowing” Disney's employees through an alliance?
Siemens leaders led through the work, by realizing
