The Leader fulfilment responsibility
Gustavo Mattos Santos
C-Level & operational executive | Procurement & Quality, Organization culture | LinkedIn Top Voice
There is not a surprise for many leaders that the beginning of the year starts with same routines. First executive meetings, plans to achieve a good year, business perspectives and people performance reviews.?
Talking with a CEO we took the subject on Simon Sinek’s podcast around Generation Z, which I recommend everyone to hear. It gives you perspectives on generations. https://simonsinek.com/podcast/episodes/gen-z-in-the-workplace-with-jonah-and-david-stillman/?
During Simon's talk with David (Gen X.) and Jonah (Gen Z) Stillman, one topic that caught my attention was the avoidance of conflict. Gen Z. has tools for search new opportunities that previous generations didn’t have. It’s easy to quite to talk about a salary raise for example. Crazy isn’t it. It drives any organisation search for talent even worse.?
Talent was one of the biggest challenges for CEOs last year and will remain on top of the agenda these years, and years to come.?
The shortage of skilled experience workers, together with the increasing of the skills gap driven by innovation and technology will make the search for the right people more difficult. The aging aspect of population and lack of development are also creating the pressure on the skills gap. Think on legacy softwares you have, where the technology is only known by old employees that left or are about the retire.?
From the society we are seeing increases pressure on sustainability, diversity & inclusion and better work conditions, aka for example the 4-days workweek. Hybrid work still and will remain a long unanswered discussion since the search for one-fits-all will not survive on the new generations.?
But why still difficult to find talent?
Well one of the discussions is that the fact, that we search for a copy of us. When we write a job description, we are writing how I will do, if I perform this job, in most of the cases. The process to define a job description normally follow those steps:
?That sounds ok. But take the amount of bias involved in this process. I give you some examples: A women interview tends to last at least 45 minutes than the same interview of a men. The aging bias: “you are too old or young for the position”. And many more.
Then we look at candidates CV and we see a timeline and past experiences. There is no warranty that the past experiences works in your company. It will be new people with different ways to think and act. It will be different processes, software’s, systems and ways of work. It will be different leadership styles and at last but not the least, a different culture.
Do you know any company that looks like each other in all those aspects? I don't believe it exists.?
The timeline CV looks like:
and so on...
This timeline just shows marks in the candidate life. It doesn’t show the building blocks of knowledge. ?
Think if we change the way we see peoples experience from the timeline approach to a building block. From the knowledge that is solid on and the blocks that are missing. Let me create a drawing below so you understand.
The building blocks are blocks of knowledge acquired in life. We all advance in life learning new things and that stays with us forever.?
Knowledge is facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. When we learn to ride a bycicle we don’t forget it. It is there.
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Off course some of the knowledge not used will be forgotten. And if you look that, an specific knowledge was created at some point in life, it will be easy to revamp it.
Let me challenge you. Can you create a job description based on the knowledge/impact block view?
Start describing what impact do you expect, then thinking what knowledge area you believe will be necessary, but don’t publish it. If you publish, you will limit the number of people that will take the challenge. That is why is difficult today to find people. We are putting so many restrictions on the requirements that automatic eliminates someone passionate for the impact.
Let’s create a Block job advertisement for a Sustainability function, for example.
“The ideal candidate has to show eagerness to fullfill those challenges:”
The focus remains on the future, not in the past anymore.
Now that you know what you want to achieve, let people tell you how and why they can do that. Without a filter.
And if the candidates shift their curriculum to a block view and list the impacts they want to create in their life's, the match to your challenges are easier. The rest, is to hire for a character, not by skills.
If I list my block fulfilment challenges, things that I want to accomplish in life to get a feeling of fulfilment, I will say:
Would you hire someone with those aims in life?
At the end, doesn’t matter what a candidate did in the past. That is gone. Look more what the candidate believes he can do in the future and how passionate they are for their cause. And if the candidates cause are aligned with the impact you want to have in your organisation, Bingo, you have a match.
As a gift, make those two questions when interviewing your candidates:
Trust me. You will find candidates easily that will love to work for you, will stay and help you to growth together.
As the title of this article says, your duty as a leader is to secure you fulfil every peoples life that cross your way.
Good luck. Give a try.