Your assumptions define you – here is what we believe at Ibbaka Talent
Building a company means building teams. There is the internal team, the people that work on the project day in and day out, obsess about it, wake up at 2:00 AM to make a note or change a bit of code. But that is only one of the teams a start-up needs.
Great companies, and we are building Ibbaka Talent to be a great company, develop partnerships with their customers, their investors and the larger communities they live in. I find it helps to think about some of these relationships as teams and the company as a team of teams.
Am I extending the notion of teams too far? I don’t think so. Because how you think about people defines how you treat them, and we want to treat our investors and our users as team members. And all the people in the larger communities we work in as potential team members.
So how do you build a team? One place to start is with one’s assumptions about the world. At Ibbaka Talent, we believe the following five things:
More and more people will be entering the contingent workforce. Long-term permanent employment at one company is relevant to fewer and fewer people. Most of us will work at many companies over the course of our ever longer working lives. And we will frequently find ourselves working on several overlapping projects. We need to build solutions for the way people actually work today and give people control over their own careers.
Teams are critical to all sorts of work. There are some jobs that can be done alone, some jobs that are done as part of a rigid hierarchical process, but teams do more and more of the most critical work. People in the contingent economy will thrive when they can get on the right teams. And companies need to be able to blend internal and external people on teams if they are to build diversity, operate efficiently, and scale effectively.
Teams are more than the sum of their parts, more than just a collection of individuals. There are two aspects to this. It is generally combinations of skills that make a difference. There are skills that cross roles and bind the people together into an effective unit (this is one of the foundations of real collaboration). If you are technical think of how back-end and front-end developers work together. Or in music, look at how the conductor and first violinist collaborate. There is also ‘team chemistry.’ At Ibbaka Talent, we are testing the many different psychometric approaches to this, and we will be combing through our data to get a better understanding of the magic of an effective team – Moneyball for teams.
Great software provides value to the user. The failure of most talent management software is that it is designed to collect information for managers and not to create value for the users. That might have worked in an era of top-down management when most people had little experience of software other than e-mail and personal productivity tools. The current generation of human capital management and talent management software does not cut it with people who are used to using consumer software, from the many social platforms where they communicate and share data to easy-to-use personal accounting apps. Many people today meet using matchmaking platforms that are more sophisticated than anything used by HR. Team builders at companies and the people inside and outside their organizations that need to get on teams deserve better.
We can do a much better job of recording, validating and sharing information about skills than we do today. Our skills are important to us. We have earned them by many hours of application, usually on teams with other people. Corporate skills repositories use rigid competency models that are designed for managers, do not reflect how work is actually done, and that fail to evolve at the speed of work. Existing social networks often include skills claims, even socially validated claims, but the skills are generally removed from the context of the actual work. They don’t give the kind of information people need in order to select people for a team and they don’t provide a fair description of a person’s skills and how (and who) the skills have been won.
Do these beliefs resonate with you?
How would you use these to shape a platform for the new world of work?
What are you doing to take control over your own career? And what could other people learn from what you are doing?
