Chris and I spent an hour on Tom Ashbrook’s NPR show “OnPoint” yesterday, discussing the New Employer-Employee Compact. Smart host, smart callers from around the country, a fine conversation overall.
We also were in conversation recently with our editor Justin Fox for the HBR Ideacast about the themes of the article. 20 minutes; hits the high level themes.
Suppose you categorize your existing skills and knowledge into three buckets: low, medium, and high. There are things you have no expertise in or knowledge of (low), there are things you know a little bit (medium), and there are things you are already quite good at or knowledgeable of (high).
If you want to invest in yourself, where should you focus your time? At the low end, medium end, or high end of your existing abilities and knowledge?
Let’s consider the impact of improving yourself in each scenario.
Going from Illiterate to Literate: You do not know how to surf, but then you become an elementary surfer after 20 hours of effort. You know nothing about Islam, but then you become literate with the basic names and facts. You’re totally lost when you hear the word “Twitter,” but then you have a basic understanding of Twitter’s role in the social media ecosystem.
When your understanding of X goes from nothing to something — when your understanding crosses a minimal threshold — that knowledge or skill area becomes associative. Humans are creative by being able to see the associations between what we know and between the memories we hold. When you know a topic just well enough, you can come up with metaphors related to the idea. (And metaphors are the best transportation for ideas). For example, I’m not at all an expert in Italian politics, but I know enough about the country’s past and present political situation to know that volatility is the norm, and so I can credibly refer to Italy when discussing another topic I know a little, which is volatility and risk more generally.
It can be transformative to go from knowing nothing and to knowing a little. Sure, it’s hard to get started. As Josh Kaufman notes in his forthcoming book The First 20 Hours, you feel foolish or lost in the early hours of any new pursuit. But it’s critical to undertake. For me in this category, I’m considering investing in my knowledge of corporate finance, basic European history, and certain kinds of dancing, to offer just three examples.
Going from Literate to Good: It’s safer and easier to get slightly better at something you’re already good at. For example, I’m a decent chess player. I could spend a bunch of time and become slightly better, but it would take a long time to get to great. I’m already good enough that I can connect my knowledge of chess to other parts of my life; I use chess as a metaphor for other things. So short term improvement isn’t as exciting.
Going from Good to Great: Getting better at things you’re already good at is a popular business idea thanks to thinkers like Marcus Buckingham who preach the importance of building on “strengths.” But it’s an unintuitive idea for many people. In school, you’re told to focus on shoring up weaknesses. Parents and teachers pay special attention to the C’s and B’s on the report card, not A’s. This attitude sticks. So if you can switch to the strengths religion in adulthood, you’re ahead of many. Building on natural or existing strengths puts you on the fast track to craftsmanship. Craftsmanship that involves rare and valuable skills is the stuff of remarkable careers. For me, example existing strengths or deep knowledge areas include communication, online media, Spanish, networks. I’m excited by the prospect of going from 95% proficient to 99% proficient in a few key areas.
Bottom Line: It’s valuable to be world class or an expert in something the market desires. It’s valuable to be informed just enough in something to see the connections across disparate fields or experiences. But it’s not especially valuable to be pretty good but not great at something, or reasonably familiar but not a domain expert in a knowledge area. Thus: invest in yourself at the low end and the high end of your existing skill set and knowledge base.
Jennifer Senior wrote a great piece in New York magazine a couple months ago titled “Why You Truly Never Leave High School.” It’s about the formative and lasting nature of the American high school experience. Excerpts below.
Our brain is primed to remember what happens during adolescence:
But for most of us adults, the adolescent years occupy a privileged place in our memories, which to some degree is even quantifiable: Give a grown adult a series of random prompts and cues, and odds are he or she will recall a disproportionate number of memories from adolescence. This phenomenon even has a name—the “reminiscence bump”—and it’s been found over and over in large population samples, with most studies suggesting that memories from the ages of 15 to 25 are most vividly retained.
On the adhesiveness of our self-image from those days:
Our self-image from those years, in other words, is especially adhesive. So, too, are our preferences. “There’s no reason why, at the age of 60, I should still be listening to the Allman Brothers,” Steinberg says. “Yet no matter how old you are, the music you listen to for the rest of your life is probably what you listened to when you were an adolescent.” Only extremely recent advances in neuroscience have begun to help explain why.
It turns out that just before adolescence, the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that governs our ability to reason, grasp abstractions, control impulses, and self-reflect—undergoes a huge flurry of activity, giving young adults the intellectual capacity to form an identity, to develop the notion of a self. Any cultural stimuli we are exposed to during puberty can, therefore, make more of an impression, because we’re now perceiving them discerningly and metacognitively as things to sweep into our self-concepts or reject (I am the kind of person who likes the Allman Brothers). “During times when your identity is in transition,” says Steinberg, “it’s possible you store memories better than you do in times of stability.”
An adolescent subculture is a new phenomenon; teens don’t spend much time with adults anymore:
Until the Great Depression, the majority of American adolescents didn’t even graduate from high school. Once kids hit their teen years, they did a variety of things: farmed, helped run the home, earned a regular wage. Before the banning of child labor, they worked in factories and textile mills and mines. All were different roads to adulthood; many were undesirable, if not outright Dickensian. But these disparate paths did arguably have one virtue in common: They placed adolescent children alongside adults. They were not sequestered as they matured. Now teens live in a biosphere of their own. In their recent book Escaping the Endless Adolescence, psychologists Joseph and Claudia Worrell Allen note that teenagers today spend just 16 hours per week interacting with adults and 60 with their cohort. One century ago, it was almost exactly the reverse.
Something happens when children spend so much time apart from adult company. They start to generate a culture with independent values and priorities.
Guilt can be useful, whereas shame is not:
The academic interest in shame and other emotions of self-consciousness (guilt, embarrassment) is relatively recent. It’s part of a broader effort on the part of psychologists to think systematically about resilience—which emotions serve us well in the long run, which ones hobble and shrink us. Those who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about guilt, for example, have come to the surprising conclusion that it’s pretty useful and adaptive, because it tends to center on a specific event (I cannot believe I did that) and is therefore narrowly focused enough to be constructive (I will apologize, and I will not do that again).
Shame, on the other hand, is a much more global, crippling sensation. Those who feel it aren’t energized by it but isolated. They feel unworthy of acceptance and fellowship; they labor under the impression that their awfulness is something to hide. “And this incredibly painful feeling that you’re not lovable or worthy of belonging?” asks Brown. “You’re navigating that feeling every day in high school.”
We’re all in high school, all the time:
Today, we also live in an age when our reputation is at the mercy of people we barely know, just as it was back in high school, for the simple reason that we lead much more public, interconnected lives. The prospect of sudden humiliation once again trails us, now in the form of unflattering photographs of ourselves or unwanted gossip, virally reproduced. The whole world has become a box of interacting strangers.
I’m delighted to share our new article in this month’s Harvard Business Review titled: Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact. Here’s the all-on-one-page web version, here’s the social-enabled web version, here it is in PDF form with the graphical layout from the print magazine.
In the time since The Start-Up of You was published, Reid and I have been asked about the book’s implications on managers at larger organizations. How should great leaders recruit, train, and retain entrepreneurial people into their company — the kind of proactive people who read Start-Up of You to mange their career?
That’s the question we sought to address in the article, first by describing the new compact that now defines the overall relationship between employer and employee, and then by enumerating the compact’s three key features. We think it’s a critical perspective for CEOs, senior managers, and HR execs everywhere when developing a 21st century talent strategy.
If you’re a manager, check out the article and let me know what you think. There’ll be much more to come on this theme.
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Sign up for a special live webcast on June 6th, 2013 for an event happening on the LinkedIn campus featuring Reid, our HBR editor Justin Fox, and a few senior HR execs, discussing the themes of the article. We’d love to have you.
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On a personal note, it was a special pleasure to team up with my longtime partner-in-crime, Chris Yeh, who co-authored the article with Reid and me. (Photo credit: Fredrik Broden)
This is a really touching 20 minute video about how Zach Sobiech, a 17 year old diagnosed with bone cancer, chose to spend his final months. Inspirational.
It reminded me of the Enjoy Every Sandwich book trailer.