The genius guide to future-proofing your career

Every human being makes the job different

Even if you're working in a restaurant, serving hamburgers in a very repeatable kind of a fashion

your style, your way of talking to them, your way of presenting the food is unique to you

and you make it what you've learned is the way to do it the best

There's a very dated, limited view of management going back to the industrial age where we have a job

And you as a human are the replaceable part. And the job is the part that remains

And we will swap people in and out of that job to the way that job is defined

And I swear to God, my life was all about that kind of a career for the first 20 years of my life

We had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books written in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s

based on this job-centric model of management. But I know from the research that I've done in the companies I've worked with

the more you get away from this idea that I have this box around me and I have to work inside the box

the higher performing company you're going to have. My name is Josh Burson

I'm a researcher and an industry yst and consultant in human resources

I've been doing this for close to 30 years. I have written several books, the most recent book, Being Irresistible

The Seven Secrets of the World's Most Enduring Employee-Focused Organizations. The idea of a job goes back to very old industrial companies where we had management and labor

and the labor did the work Going back to the early days of Frederick Taylor they would take apart the manufacturing of steel or other things break them into component parts because the industrial engineers had mathematically proven we could optimize the whole by specializing a person in each part

And the old model of this still exists in every single company, every HR practice, every

pay practice and recruiting where we have a job. And the job has a title

It has a level. It has a pay band. It has required capabilities and certifications and maybe educational credentials

Then it has responsibilities. This job architecture, job-centric work creates lots and lots of problems

The typical behavior in a job-centric company is, well, that's not my job, so I'm not sure

if I should do it or not because it's actually somebody else's job. It gets in the way of paying somebody who's young, but very, very highly capable because

they're lower in the hierarchy than someone who has a higher level job

The director job has a different pay than the individual job, even though the individual

may be adding more value than the director, but there's no way to pay them. It gets in the way of

moving people around. Oftentimes, companies will try to move people from this business to this

business when this is shrinking and this is growing. And people say, well, I'm not going to

take that job unless it's a promotion. I don't feel qualified to do that job. I wasn't trained

to do that job. There's lots of fear and uncertainty and reward systems that create

brittle fragility in the company when we spend too much time thinking about what our job is

In reality, of course, as you know, every human being is different. Every individual

even in the same job is different. And so we need to kind of relax that job-centric

structure in every possible way in HR in particular to allow these more agile organizations to flourish Now that not easy Let me just you know warn you all the HR software all the pay models

all of the career and progression models, all the nine box grids based on this job centric model of

management. I'm not saying we still don't have job titles and levels. That stuff's probably going

to be around forever, but we have to operate beyond that in the work that we do and not let

that get in the way of solving the problems and addressing the opportunities that we have in our

companies. The simplest, most powerful way to reinforce work, not jobs, is to ask people to

do something different. Ask people to work on a developmental assignment. Give them a special

project. Give them a rotation. Ask them what they're interested in doing outside of the work

they're doing now and then let them do that. So they are not forced to do the same thing over and

over and over again. They still might have the responsibility of their primary job, but all of a

sudden you'll realize that this new sense of energy and learning has come into this individual when

they get to do something new. And the more you do that, the faster it goes around and there's more

agility in the organization. For example, in our company, we have close to 50 people. Everybody does

everything. Everybody talks to customers. Everybody works on research. People come together and work

on our conference because we need them to do different things. And so they end up having very

rich, rewarding developmental careers because we have the ability and sort of the DNA of asking

people to do things outside of their primary responsibility. That's a lot easier than it

sounds, but that's really what it comes down to. Every human being from the day you're born

is learning. And so when you go to work and you're doing the same thing

over and over again and you not learning you get this sense of stasis that I not going anywhere and maybe I just retire in this job and maybe that be the end of that That not good for the company and that

not good for the individual. So we have to find ways in the company to reward growth without

waiting for that promotion. I remember several times in my career where I would go to my boss

and say, I'm this level. What is it going to take for me to get the next level? And I remember one

time my boss said to me, you just need to wait. It takes at least two years. I remember thinking

to myself, that's ridiculous. Why does it take two years? And he would say, because that's the

way we do it around here. I was never very good at politics, but I've had an incredibly enriching

successful, fulfilling career in many, many ways and grown in so many ways. The fact that I'm even

here doing this video for you is because my career was based on personal, professional

growth all the time. And I was lucky enough to have companies that allowed me to do that

or I left the company, went to another one at times to get the development and growth that I needed

The one thing I would say that I've learned over the 25, 30 years that I've been doing this

spending a lot of time in HR, is a massive respect for the culture and organizational dynamics of

high-performing companies. And if you as a leader or as an individual or as an HR person

can think systemically about the people issues that are creating the business issues

that you're dealing with, you will always be a high performer because every business problem

is at its core a people problem. And I've learned that again and again and again

And so that is the secret that I would like to share with those of you that are listening

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