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Your #Career : Want To Nail Your 2016 Performance Review? Show You’re Versatile…Doubling Down on your Specialized Knowledge Might Not Pay Off Like it Used To.

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With only two months left in 2016, performance review season is officially upon us. As many of us know all too well, it can be an awkward experience. But one key to nailing your review this year may be a departure from conventional wisdom. Typically we’re told to make a strong case for how well we’ve performed in our particular roles—show you’ve mastered the job skills required of you and delivered great results, and now you’re ready to move on to bigger challenges.

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And it’s not that that’s bad advice. But as the workforce evolves, the value of a broad-based skill set may be rising. Your employer might not even be totally aware of the shift, but they’re more likely to need jacks-of-all-trades than they did even a year ago. Here’s a look at why, and how to play into that trend during your next review.

THE RISING VALUE OF VERSATILITY

“I guess you can look at me and say that I didn’t specialize in anything,” UX designer Amanda Yarmolich reflected recently. “But a lot of times, it ends up being more valuable to have somebody who can kind of pick up whatever you need.”

 

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Yarmolich isn’t alone in that sentiment. According to the 2017 salary guide published earlier this month in the design magazine HOW, employers will gladly pay top dollar, “but they expect value, which comes in the form of worker versatility.” And that may not just be a quirk of design-focused industries. Yarmolich works for the insurance marketplace eHealth. In her recent experience, “You just have to be ready to do whatever needs doing at the drop of a hat.”

How come? For one thing, the changing macroeconomic landscape is pushing more employers toward low-labor business models—in other words, to find ways of getting more value out of fewer people. That necessity may have first gripped recruiters amid the last financial crisis, but since the recovery since then has been so incremental, it’s seeped into many employers’ hiring mentalities.

As one staffing expert told Fast Company earlier this year, “We’re seeing more cross-pollination among industries than ever before,” which is not only expanding what counts as “transferrable skills,” it’s also requiring workers to be more comfortable tackling a greater range of tasks—including unfamiliar ones. That type of agility is becoming less of an added bonus and more of a basic prerequisite for many job openings in a widening variety of fields.

On the other hand, employers have always prized versatile workers. In his 1957 book The Problems of Design, famed industrial designer George Nelson observed that employers have long sought “general flexibility in relation to almost any situation. Translated into action, this means an ability to bring a high level of detached perception to any problem, and this has a very special kind of value to management.”

The difference now is the change from management preference to economic imperative. Corporate boards seem to understand this value, judging from the kinds of people they put in the corner office. The New York Times recently reported that the quickest path to CEO these days is a circuitous one—often via several functional areas—according to new research suggesting that a mix of skills may now count more than simply long experience in one specialty.

COMBINATORIAL CREATIVITY

These utility players are what coauthors Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin describe as “neo-generalists” in their new book The Neo-Generalist: Where You Go Is Who You Are. They use the term to describe knowledge workers who excel in “combinatorial creativity.” As Mikkelsen described it to me, “Neo-generalists are people who expand their craft by bringing in knowledge from disparate areas and creating new ideas and methods from those new combinations.”

Martin added that knowledge workers everywhere often feel their organization or industry is too siloed, but he believes it’s the type of worker that makes this true or untrue: “We are arguing that people who have a more neo-generalist mind-set make a difference because they deliberately step outside of those silos.”

Hiring managers may be wising up to this idea. Not only are versatile workers often more cost effective, they also bring silo-busting behaviors to companies that help organizations stay innovative over time. What may have started as a dollar-stretching measure often turns out to be a competitive advantage.

HOW TO BE THE NEO-GENERALIST YOUR BOSS IS LOOKING FOR

According to Martin, “Everybody has the potential to be a neo-generalist—absolutely everybody. But it’s a question of being willing to accept that learning is never done, that you’re never a finished article, always beta.”

 

FastCompany.com |  LISA BAIRD  | 10.31.16 5:00 AM

#Leadership : 7 Ways To Re-Think Performance Management…The Following 7 Topics are Fundamental when Re-Thinking any Performance Management Process & Culture.

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The concept of Performance Management sounds simple, but of course it isn’t. Humans have a lust for control and have developed quite a few mental concepts to ‘control’ performance management; processes, ratings, manuals, competency frameworks, forms, collective labor agreements, etc. While all these things once had a purpose, the sum of it is not fit for duty 16 years into the 20th century.

Free- Project Sticky Notes

People connecting and leaving each other valuable feedback to improve the way you work? That will drive performance.

The following seven topics are fundamental when re-thinking any performance management process and culture.

1. Workforce Alignment is fundamental

Aligning the employees to the right set of objectives remains the success factor. Showing employees thepurpose of the company and what is expected of him/her is the most important factor in performance management.

Without workforce alignment, any performance management process – annually or instantly – has no frame of reference and is entirely useless.

If your mission and strategy is sound and your workforce is connected and engaged, then all they need is real time meaningful feedback, peer coaching and mentoring.

Ask yourself: How is goal alignment incorporated in your new Performance Management process?

 

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2. Feedback is magic

Feedback is essential for people to connect and learn from each other. The better people can exchange feedback, the stronger their network and its outcomes in terms of collaboration and cooperation. This feedback needs to be constructive and authentic to become meaningful and instrumental in animating teams and corporate culture.

And it needs to be real-time! Why? Well if there is one thing our multitasking social media world is messing with, it’s our ability to remember. If I make mistakes helping out a client, then immediate feedback is needed. Not 11 months later in my performance review. You have to make hay when the sun shines! This has nothing to do with generations Y (Millennials) or Z (iGeneration). It’s the world turning faster.

Ask yourself: How have you integrated real time, continuous, open feedback in Performance Management?

3. Space for mistakes is crucial

Everybody knows that people learn from mistakes. That’s how children grow up and how we evolve as a species. But how many performance management processes allow employees to make mistakes? They are often constructed to do the opposite. Employees covering up mistakes, because their sole focus of the performance management meeting is to get a salary increase. And managers are breaking their minds on how they should apply the mandatory forced rankings. Both are not helping to create an environment for healthy mistakes.

Ask yourself: How do you allow people to make errors and learn?

4. From judging to mentoring

Too many performance conversations are one way traffic where the manager is ‘judging’ the employee. Stop managing. Start leading. Don’t tell employees what to do. Involve them, explain things to them and demonstrate how it’s done. Not annually, but constantly and empathically.

Coaching and mentoring programs are often separated from the performance management process. While rethinking the performance management process it’s worth to rethink a tighter integration between them. Coaching and mentoring are the real-time components that drive the effectiveness and productivity of teams. A crucial component of performance.
Ask yourself: How are protégé, coach and mentor relationships incorporated in your new performance process?

5. Time to rethink performance vs compensation

This might be the biggest paradigm shift for organizations, their work councils and the trade unions. Let’s rethink the way that performance and compensation are connected. Yes, money can stimulate performance, but it remains an extrinsic motivation. It’s theintrinsic motivation that deserves more attention, because that is what really motivatesus in a deeper and sustainable way.

And if it’s the intrinsic motivation we need, then we can ask ourselves to what extend we can decouple the compensation from the performance ‘cycle’, without losing a performance culture.

Why not decouple remuneration from tenure and yearly performance cycles and move towards compensation based on certain gigs, projects and/or roles that are performed by the employee? Trusting people to do their job and only act if they don’t. And then coach them to better performances and keep on giving them other challenging gigs. Preferably even connected to customer satisfaction ratings.

The biggest naysayers are usually work councils and trade unions, responsible for complex collective labor agreements, that have the lion’s share in HR’s attention span. The focus should be on creating an open, authentic and constructive feedback culture. Only such a culture will enable the company to progress and that will be the most significant contribution to employee happiness and engagement, which ultimately drives revenue. A disrupted bankrupt company pays no compensation at all.

Ask yourself: How is customer satisfaction connected to compensation?

6. Time to rethink the purpose of ratings

If you don’t pay based on performance ratings, do you then still need them? Well… ratings have a purpose on its own. Ratings can drive performance, but also the opposite.

There are studies that show big benefits of using ratings in a competitive way, utilizing the competitive nature of people and driving performance in that way. Other studies show reverse results; using ratings in the wrong way can also demotivate people.

It ultimately comes down to thinking carefully about what you like to rate and why. And in which way to create transparency in those ratings. If you measure rating, you better do it right, otherwise it will backfire on your ultimate goal: increasing performance.

Ask yourself: How are performance ratings contributing to a performance culture?

7. Performance of contractors needs to be managed too

Teams deliver results, not individuals. This aspect is often addressed with a team target that is rarely motivating the individuals of a team to step up their game. What’s really needed is a collaboration platform where the entire team can monitor its own performance. Where they can instantly give feedback to each other to steer the team in the right direction.

The rise of the freelancer is adding a layer of complexity. This group of contractors is growing exponentially (globally), but are often excluded from performance management, because presenting contractors with a yearly performance form is like asking Kanye West to spend a year in a silent monastery.

Presenting a yearly form is not the goal . Improving performance is the goal. If you want to manage the performance of the entire team, then flex workers are part of it and the ability to share instant feedback should go beyond employees on the payroll.

The ‘simple’ compensation model of freelancers is an blueprint of how we can deal with compensating performance as discussed earlier (point 5). Free lancers have a job for which they get paid. They receive feedback and gain experience to improve their skill set, which they use to take on other gigs, for which they get paid a different compensation.

Ask yourself: How is your new performance model supporting team output including contractors?

Where to go from here?

A new performance management ‘system’ can only be applied in a new paradigm. I do not believe that you can have a hierarchical management structure/culture and then move to team based feedback. This would be a step back from traditional performance rating as most of us have today.

There is no way around it: to be successful you have to animate the culture, management style and attitude that propels performance management to the next level.

This story originally appeared on the SAP Business Trends community.

Forbes.com | June 29, 2016 | By Patrick Willer, Workforce Innovation Consultant, SAP