How to Reinvent Yourself——Thansfer and Develop your talents

At last Lecture, We studied an interesting topic — Conviction on Identity. During the lecture.

Mr. Hazeer told us a couple of stories about individual reinvention. He showed us the picture of two Indian movie stares when they were young and same age, compared with next picture of same two persons after decades. It really blow my mind — one of them were still looks young and became more attractive, another has aged thoroughly, just looks like an ordinary old man instead of a movie star. This story told us how important the reinvention is.

The next couple of examples were about some contemporary famous cricketers. After retire, some of them tried to become politician, businessman, and coach or play another sport. After decades, though some of them became mediocre, some of them became new heroes, including Imran Khan —the current prime minister of Pakistan, and the fastest man on the planet—Usain Bolt. This story told us how important choosing a right way that you really have talent is.

Mr. Hazeer told us, In general, person's career will start going downhill when they are around 40 years old, but someone who is able to go on next peak through reinvention. This is just my age.

The Pursuit of Happyness(2006)—one of my favorite movie, is about reinvention also. This movie is based on American entrepreneur Chris Gardner's autobiography, his journey from a homeless dad to millionaire stockbroker. He published his autobiography of same name on May 23, 2006. There are two of his advices for people contemplating a midlife reinvention:

Chris Gardner

Ø  Go with what you love, but stay grounded. "Probably the hardest question I get asked is 'How do I choose between passion and practicality?'" Gardner says. "I can't answer that. I had to do both. I was passionate about pursuing a career in financial services. But I was also passionate about feeding my child."

Ø  Play to your strengths. "Your skills, talents and expertise are transferable" to other types of jobs and industries, he says.

For employee, if you can find a way to do both of passion and practicality as same as Gardner, just tightly catch it without any hesitate. If you do not love your present job but can’t transfer to another that you love because of the practicality, you have to transfer and develop you skills, talents and expertise, playing to your strengths. You might be able to revolutionize your present job even your organization. This is another reinvention as well.

For employer, you must try to create a work environment which be loved by your employees, and try your best to provide opportunities and missions to practice them, identify their talent and passion, support your employees to reinvent by themselves to be not only they want to be, but to be what you want also.

A Fantastic Spiral Learning Style from Mr. Kolb in 1984

During last lecture of HR, we learned a very interesting theory—Kolb's learning cycle (1984), it is a fantastic spiral learning style.

Kolb’s learning theory has revealed four distinct learning styles , which are based on a four-stage learning cycle./ training cycle . Kolb’s model is elegant, since it offers both a way to understand individual people’s different learning styles, and also an explanation of a cycle of experiential learning that applies to us all.

Kolb includes this ‘cycle of learning‘ as a central principle his experiential learning theory, typically expressed as four-stage cycle of learning, in which ‘immediate or concrete experiences’ provide a basis for ‘observations and reflections’. These ‘observations and reflections’ are represented in ‘abstract concepts’ that produce new implications for action which can be ‘actively tested’ in turn creating new experiences.

Kolb says that ideally this process represents a learning cycle where the learner ‘touches all the bases’, ie., a cycle of experiencing, reflecting, thinking, and acting. Immediate or concrete experiences lead to observations and reflections. These reflections are then assimilated (absorbed and translated) into abstract concepts with implications for action, which the person can actively test and experiment with, which in turn enable the creation of experiences.

 learning styleKolb’s model works on two levels – a four-stage cycle:

1. Concrete Experience – (CE)

2. Reflective Observation – (RO)

3. Abstract Conceptualization – (AC)

4. Active Experimentation – (AE)

And a four-type definition of learning style, which represents the combination of two preferred styles:

1. Diverging (CE/RO)

2. Assimilating (AC/RO)

3. Converging (AC/AE)

4. Accommodating (CE/AE)

Ideally, activities and material should be developed in ways that draw on abilities from each stage of the experiential learning cycle and take the students through the whole process in sequence.

Builds Talent: Create A Learning Organisation Base on The Job

I figure all of the organizations no matter what types and sizes should be interested in creating an engaging environment for their employees so as to be able to build talent of organisation.

The goal of a international learning organization is to create alignment between many different areas of an organization in regards to learning. This ensures that the organization addresses the learning needs of employees and can achieve business objectives by building knowledge, transferring knowledge and applying knowledge throughout the organization.

Employees should be provided with opportunities to use their newly acquired skills on the job. If they are not provided with opportunities to grow in the organization by using the knowledge that they have recently acquired, they will not be engaged in the organization and may look elsewhere for opportunities to grow professionally. Support by managers for ‘on the job’ learning transfer is a key to creating a learning organization that both benefits employees and helps achieve business goals.

Motivating employees to take ownership of their learning. Sometimes employees are resistant to change or to learning new skills. This may happen more frequently with more experienced employees, but it can apply to employees of all experience levels and to members of all generational cohorts. A learning organization is not just about pushing learning from the human resource team  or from senior leaders downwards through the organization. There needs to be a bottom-up requests as well. This allows an organization to find out what employees are interested in learning and what their gaps are so they can create opportunities for employees to learn the skills they need to be successful.

“Carrots & Sticks” Aren’t The Only Key To Talent Motivation

Talent Motivation, one of the most important responsibility of HR managers, is a difficult question for ever. The most common method is of course "Carrots and Sticks". However, Dan Pink in his TED talk said, it may not always be effective.

In "The Puzzle of Motivation"(D. Pink,2009), Dan Pink explores what motivates people and how company leaders can apply this research to their own organizations. He goes on to explain what social scientists know, but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think.

1, “There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.”

In business, when you need to meet a specific sales goal or want employees to help brainstorm a new product, it's natural or even expected to offer a financial incentive as motivation. But Pink reveals that social psychologists have proven incentive-based rewards not only fail to inspire, but can also dull thinking and block creativity. "This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored," We need to find a new way to motivate employees—one based on intrinsic factors rather than extrinsic ones.

2, “The new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose.”

Scientists who have been studying motivation have found these three elements are key to intrinsically motivate people. People want autonomy over their lives. They want to master their craft. And they want to be involved with something greater than themselves. If we can find a way to incorporate these three things into the company culture, you will be much more successful at motivating people to be creative and thoughtful.

3, “Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better."

In today's "always-on" world of work, employers often struggle to find the best way to engage their employees. But maybe the solution comes down to rethinking the way we manage people. Providing employees with autonomy can inspire more personal investment in the work. Dan Pink offers Google as an example: Every engineer at Google gets to spend 20 percent of their time working on anything they want. The result? About half of Google's new products in a year are "birthed" during that 20 percent time—including things like Gmail and Google News. But actually I did prove this example yet.

Dan Pink wanted to tell us, "carrots and sticks" doesn't get people to perform at peak efficiency in creative tasks. Instead, the more important elements  in 21 century are 'autonomy, mastery, and purpose'. This is a reliable experimental finding, it has important implications for business and society at large.

However, it does not mean we should eschew “carrots and sticks” all together.

If people hadn't made "carrots and sticks" contingent on our behaviors when we were younger, we would never have developed into autonomous, mastery-driven, purposeful adults.

Therefore, if you are a boss, have a business that runs on creative energy, don't tell your employees "Do something on time and I will give you an extra cash reward", pay your employees well, this is basic, and tell them "Get something done on time and I don't care where you do it." Working from home (or Coffee Been, or Tea Leaf) is still a reward; it is just a different kind of reward. Of course, If they couldn’t do it on time, definitely there must be a bigger stick waiting for.

Reference

Daniel Pink (2009) The puzzle of motivation [online]. TED Global. Available at: <https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation> [Accessed on July 2009].

Talent Acquisition: Candidate Selection & Job Analysis

In general, an organization can acquire talents through external recruitment or internal development. Recruitment may was a easy way, but HR managers would find more and more difficult to get suitable talents with reasonable salary. Another issue is the new talents are difficult to integrate into organization because of different culture, management system and working habit. Therefore, all of organizations in the world are placing great emphasis on internal talents acquisition.

There are two ways to get the talents from inside of the organization: Candidate selection and job analysis.

The analysis of the internal talent mechanism to a famous Chinese international enterprise will be an example. This successful case has entered the MBA program of Harvard University, which has been widely studied and used for reference by many enterprises in the global world.

Haier Group, One of the most famous Chinese household electrical appliance manufacturer, entered Fortune Global 500 list in 2018, ranking 499th. Founded in 1984, it at one time was on the verge of bankruptcy. Now, it has become a famous brand of global household appliances. Its products have been exported to more than 160 countries and regions in the world.

Haier's success is closely related to an excellent employment mechanism. Haier believes that everyone is a talent, the key is to bring out the best quality and potential of each person.

Haier Group's employment mechanism comes down to two major theories: “The talents development theory of ball on the slope" and “Racing horses instead identification".

1, The talents development theory of ball on the slope

Haier figures everyone is like a ball on a slope. If the market competitive is more fierce and the enterprise is bigger, the Angle of the slope will become more sharp.

Haier find that staff's inertia is the resistance of talent development. Improving their own quality, overcome the inertia and constantly forward to the goal, which is the only way for developing their own, otherwise they will slide and be eliminated. The impetus of stopping talent slide down from the slope is employee's quality. This quality comes from every bit of cultivation, from the strict management forcing out.

Therefore, Haier implemented a comprehensive cleaning and control of every day, every person and every thing, in order to control the problem in the smallest scope, solve in the shortest time, reduce the loss to the lowest degree. This is Haier's “OEC" (Overall Every Control and Clear) Management System. This kind of management mode has been recognized and used for reference by many enterprises.

2. "horse racing does not judge horse"

Haier chooses and uses talent in the competition, push talent to his position which belong to him to race, let him in the actual work to play the greatest potential, so that everyone can be in their proper position to make better use of their strengths.

Haier divides employees as probationary employees, qualified employees and excellent employees, this three types of employees are transformed dynamically. Through careful and scientific racing rules and strict work performance assessment, all employees can be promoted, demoted, won or eliminated in the dynamic competition. Probationary staff who work hard can be turned into qualified staff or even excellent staff; Those who do not work hard will be transferred from excellent employees to qualified employees or probationary employees. More strictly, each evaluation time must be proportional to determine the probationary staff.

In this way, everyone has a sense of crisis. "Horse racing” in here, following the "survival of the fittest" iron rule. Anyone, can not be satisfied with the results of the existing. Whoever does not try to make progress will be eliminated by the harsh competition.

In fact, this is a kind of embodiment and guarantee of the theory of slope sphere talent development as well.