What Not Where

Recently I was watching an episode of the TV show "Lie to Me" and I had an epiphany about the future of work: work will be defined by what, not where.

The lead character of "Like to Me" (Dr. Cal Lightman, played by Tim Roth) has a skill that is much in demand*: he can detect the truth by analyzing a person's face, body, voice and speech. The show centers on how Lightman and his team use that skill to solve different problems. Often the problems are crimes, but the fictional team also use the skill to solve hostage negotiation stand-offs, disaster rescue operation bottle-necks, mysterious romantic entanglements and business negotiations gone wrong. In the show Lightman has built an entire business around this one skill, and it looks like the business is thriving. It also looks like the limits of the opportunities afforded by application of the skill exists only in the writer's imagination. Apparently being able to tell when someone is lying is much in demand.

One evening I was turning the show over in my mind, thinking about how cool it would be to have that particular skill (my kids would beg to differ), and then it struck me: "Lie to Me" is a dramatic revelation of one of my central problems working in a big company. That problem is that a "job" is a concept focused on groupin a bunch of problems that really don't have much in common, but that somehow define what value you can provide to the organization. In other words, the modern concept of a job places a premium on "where" you work (i.e. finance), and devalues "what" you do (i.e. tell if someone is lying).

In most companies you are labeled by what group you work in, not by what you do. Your brand is about your domain, not your skill. HR is a great example. A good HR function has people who are good at quantitative reasoning (comp), effective social interaction (employee relations), and systems thinking (workforce planning). Anyone of these skills can be applied in almost any domain, including operations, finance, engineering and manufacturing. But if you work in HR you are "an HR person." Which means that it doesn't matter whether you are good at math, or great at systems analysis or a great negotiator. What matters is that what someone thinks about HR, and what they think about HR (or finance, or engineering, etc.) is what defines your opportunity to apply your skill to the greatest advantage for the company.

Let us take the fictional Dr. Lightman as an example. If he came to work for a big company he would likely go into sales, because he would make the most money sitting across from the table with prospective buyers, quickly determining whether the prospect was going to really sign the deal and what the optimum price point would be. But since Lightman would be sitting in sales, he probably wouldn't be asked by business development to help figure out whether a critical partner was secretly looking at a competitor's deal. And he certainly would never be asked to talk to an engineer who was leaving the company in order to best figure out how to retain that person.

Of course selling is very important. But it may not be as important as keeping a key partner in place, or saving the organization's top talent. The company would be far the poorer for it's inability to internally source a valued skill for a problem that would get the best return for the shareholder. But it wouldn't matter, because Lightman would be thought of as a "sales person", even though his skill of "truth teller" is so much bigger and more important. In other words, no matter how valuable his skill, he would be reduced to being identified with a domain. He would be a "where", not a "what."

The problem with the "where" orientation to determining a person's potential value to a company are many. But among them are:

Lack of Engagement - People usually enjoy application of particular skills more than the preservation of a particular domain. This is easy to prove. Go talk to anyone within your company and ask them "What do you really enjoy doing?" The answer will not be "engineering" or "human resources." It will be instead "solving complex problems" or "helping people find a better job." Engineering and HR are domains. Problem solving and job placement are skills.

Poor Performance - When work is oriented around domains it means that problem sets are artificially aggregated based on a belief in the commonality of the work. For instance, HR work is about people, finance work is about money, etc. But this means that a person who is in finance has to do a lot of work that has nothing to do with money, including negotiating what chart of accounts to accrue something to, how to apply certain financial regulations in certain circumstances and making presentations about financial data. None of those is a "money / math" skill, but because they are aggregated under the header of finance, a person in finance can be expected to do any one of those things.

Expensive - The "where" orientation causes companies to compensate individuals regardless of what value they provide. For instance, the head of finance usually gets paid a lot. But what do they really do as the head of finance? It may be that they are only good at financial forecasting and that they have progressed up the career ladder by finding themselves in situations where forecasting saved the day and brought rewards and recognition to this individual. But the reality is that financial forecasting as a skill is not really worth that much. Supply probably roughly meets demand. So you are paying the head of finance much more than you need to based on their title in their function, not based on the skill they posses. The hierarchy of the function artificially inflates the compensation range relative to the value of the applied skill.

But the trouble with "where" just starts there. Like many ironies of the present business system, big companies spend more on talent than small companies but get less out of it. There are many reasons for this, but one of the most significant factors is that as a company gets bigger it places less of a premium on what a person can do and more of a premium on their job type, title and location. By comparison, a start-up must make the best use of its investment dollar, and will constantly look for the best person to solve a problem or innovate their way to a solution, regardless of their title or specific domain. For example, in a start-up the head of engineering may get to do the big marketing presentations because it turns out they are better with certain audiences than the CMO. That would never happen inside a large company. The "what" (presentation skills) would be far less important than the "where" (engineering vs. marketing).

Think about it: don't you have a skill or competency that you really enjoy, that makes a difference, that can be applied across many different domains or specialties and that has value for a company? Most people do. You may not know how to think about it in that way, but trust me, it is far more likely that you have one of these skills than that you are expert in a domain. It is far more likely that you like what more than where.

If you are willing to take a moment and put on your "what" hat, I would love to hear comments about how you think your job would change.

Comments

[John]

HR will have to show their salt during these critical times.

[Ted Cocheu]

The only answer unfortunately, Jeff, is to escape from HR hell. It is a futile struggle to redefine it and, thereby, yourself. I know well from being there and having done that...